this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It's when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It's not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There's no integrating the masses to a 'better' network. I think to some extent you're going to get what the big names have now because it's the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws... and so on. It's no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what's happening.
What is an “uncontrolled log”?
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can't log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
It's become much more complicated.
You're not wrong, but I don't think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
Sometimes all it takes is a single disgruntled user reporting you to whatever overseeing organization, to have to deal with this stuff.
well said.
You're posting in the solution right now :)
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they've been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
That's what pisses me off about Bluesky. Mastodon already exists, and is not for profit. We don't need another "decentralized" platform that intentionally doesn't talk to the Fediverse and is trying to create its own version. Yet my fear is Bluesky will end up being mainstream and those for-profit CEOs will continue running the internet into the ground. I hope people end up realizing Mastodon already exists, and is a better version of what Bluesky wants to be.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.