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As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.
If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.
I see a lot of potential for it to push people back to the small web too. Lots of people becoming interested in personal blogs lately, decentralized social media, the whole indie web movement, etc.
Just started mine! In plain html/txt. Just for fun. Eventually get rss up and running.
Hell yeah! I’ve been blogging for a couple years but I just use Micro.blog. I’d like to switch to something completely self hosted one of these days though.
nice! I took a look at all the options…
and decided that its all too much. wordpress get hacked daily. writefreely wouldn’t install. And some of the other centralized services kinda suck. So im back to old: nginx with a director filled with txt files haha.
Ill publish as time goes on and by interest. Ill take a look at micro.blog too. But im thinking I might create a neocities at some point just for the fun of it.
Neocities isn’t a bad option tbh. I haven’t used it in a minute but if you’re thinking about neocities I really really liked bearblog.dev too!
You got links? Ive been working on something that fits right into this, too. It’s time, y’all.
Definitely. The conditions that created this version of the web have been gone for some time now. We’ve gone from connections that were temporarily and required hours to download a few minutes of postage stamp sized video. To always on connections capable of streaming multiple HD streams faster than real time in both directions.
For my part I’m also looking in to purchasing and trying to set up a small Adhoc mesh Halow network and running a few services on it for myself and any others in the neighborhood that are interested. A small, free (after the hardware) anarchist wireless network. 16mbps can do a lot with simple services, etc.Plus, if a number of people in the area decided to adopt and contribute more nodes to the mesh, you could go faster still.
That sounds like a fantastic way to go. You might also look at meshtastic.
It’s a much different use case, being for text messaging and stuff like that only. But, while it may be low bandwidth, it’s still incredibly interesting.
https://reticulum.network/ is also pretty good for small info packets. Does a LOT more than meshtastic…but its VERY difficult to set up. Or at least it was for me.
Its a pipe dream but having small internet without a major ISP would be fantastic. But it will never happen as it is. Friends are thinking of creating a meshnet though just for fun.
Yes, the bandwidth would be the damper there. It’s great for transmitting just a little bit of data, long distances. But for any sort of bigger data we transmit regularly on phones and desktop. It becomes unfeasible, even low resolution images.It definitely has a range benefit, though that’s for sure.I think fellow Missourian Jeff Geerling had a video out a while back where he talked about using it to contact people below his flight on the way to open sauce.
How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>,<a href=""></a>, and<h1></h1>anymore, for example.<blink>Welcome to my web page under construction</blink>That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you’re correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
That depends on how you define the web
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)
This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!
Gopher was not the original protocol of the web but an alternative to HTTP/hypertext. It didn’t get the same traction, however, and has practically been dead for decades.
Why Gofer when Gemini?
I sympathize, but Gopher is designed against hypertext (inline links in text). It is impossible to have e.g. Wikipedia transmitted over Gopher.
Impossible? gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1
on mobile rn, how well does that do inline links?
It doesn’t at all. It’s just text content. They could have put all the links at the end as a menu I guess, but it doesnt even have that.
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Fuck yes.
I still think the web took a wrong turn when NCSA Mosaic first stated supporting inline images.
Gemini space baby! What’s old is new again.
I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.
Long ago, when I first got on the Internet, the big social media forum was Usenet. It was a distributed network of instances where users would have an account on a particular instance, where they could subscribe to “newsgroups” dedicated to particular topics. Their instance would broadcast their posts to a newsgroup to all the other instances that were following that newsgroup, so everyone could interact even if they were on different instances.
Then the World Wide Web grew, and centralized sites like Digg and Reddit appeared that handled the same sort of social media. Usenet faded. It’s still around, I suppose, though these days last I checked it’s largely a mechanism for distributing pirated files.
Someday those centralized sites might also fade. Who knows, maybe a decentralized system like Usenet might grow again to replace it?
The wheel turns.
So Usenet was the first fedi site? Reassuring that the concept predates the current paradigm and still has legs, however niche it is atm.
I mean, sort of? It was decentralized because that was just the nature of the early net, rather than a conscious choice to avoid governments and corporations censoring you. They simply didn’t have anything like the net we have today.
That’s fair. I forgot briefly that fediverse has that political side lol but meant more the technology of “broadcasting” and inter-site communications. Seems a better comparison than email at least.
Yeah, Usenet was structured that way more for practical reasons than political ones. Local users were truly local, as in you usually connected to a server that was geographically close to you. Often it was on the same university campus you were on. The long-distance connections between servers didn’t have the bandwidth for everyone to just be freely hopping around browsing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, at least not at first, so mirroring the content was a better approach. It also made things much more reliable, the servers didn’t need 100% uptime.
Usenet was a lot more “trusting” in its structure. The newsgroups didn’t have moderators per se, and they weren’t hosted by specific instances; they were more just a “tag” you could add to a post to let people filter which subjects they were interested in seeing. There was a globally agreed upon list of newsgroups and a distributed system for creating new ones, but it was all pretty informal. Wouldn’t work well in the current Internet, it’d get spammed to death in seconds. But on the surface level it really felt a lot like the modern Fediverse does, with subject-specific groups and threaded discussions and such.
Userboards, newsgroups, irc chat
That’s why almost no ISP is offering it anymore. No one made money from it, so dump it, maybe try to squeeze some cash out of those hwo really want it but better just drop it.
No, it was every service replicating all posts in groups it served.
Like FTP mirrors of FOSS software, there are plenty of mirrors of Debian, for example. Except far bigger traffic.
I get what the video is saying, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. We moved on from many of those services because we found better ways to do things, or at least ways that we liked more. And when we move on from the services we use now, it’ll be because we once again found something we liked better.
The internet has died several times, but each time it came back in some new way that had adapted to the new ideas and ways we came up with on how to interact with each other. I’m sure when it dies next, we’ll replace it with something that better fits our changing wants and needs.
And hopefully, when that time comes, it’s something much more decentralized and resilient against governments and corporations meddling and censoring us.
…and YouTube is one of the major reasons. The web’s not a fucking TV and if you’re using it as a TV you’ll get stupid even faster than from watching actual TV.
im ded guys
*This comment will eventually become accurate.
