The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
Was thinking about this the other day. And while the big players absolutely suck, I think we also share some of the blame by congregating in a small handful of sites and giving them the power that they have. Back in the early wild west days, it was more common to have a personal website and not just use Facebook. We ran our own forums or used usenet servers and IRC or other self-hosted chats and not Reddit or Discord. The only things that weren’t usually small or locally hosted were sites for images and video; and that’s still kinda hard today.
I was thinking about this today. The reason why everything sucks is partly enshittification, but also everything has been gamified. “Get this stupid award for liking…?” Why? I just want to mingle, chud.
Good read, good share. Thanks uniflashmob
Hopefully the rest of the boring internet will let me read text in the lower half of my screen.
You wouldn’t have that problem if you read the option for that
There’s a respective button for it there
This was a great read. Thank you.
The interesting thing is the fediverse and the tildeverse are extensions of that older internet.
Tildeverse?
Tildeverse.org its a group of servers that are community run that are like shell accounts like you would have back in the day. They are modern OSs but you have an account and you share time on that system like you did with a mainframe.
They have IRC, websites, .plan files for updates via finger, mailing and news servers.
Just did a quick dive on it. It looks, and this is just from a quick search, to be similar to fediverse but likely older than our instances here, and has a basing from old school public access Unix systems. Kinda neat might dive deeper to get better understanding.
You got it. SDF and others were doing this for decades. During the pandemic, someone was bored and put a Linux VPS online and asked random people if they wanted shell accounts. Surprisingly, it sparked some really nice small communities of people looking to learn or do little art projects or whatever.
The main difference from the fediverse is a complete apothy for growth. No one is under any illusion large numbers of people are going to want a shell account, and no one wants to sysadmin that anyway. Its also expected that individual tildes will have a finite lifespan, unlike something bigger like SDF with their formal organisation.
Yeah its a great community over there.
I always knew these as Pubnixes which I think is just an older word for Tildeverse
I wonder what that is too. Perhaps that’s ‘today I learned’ but I’m not sure on that.
A tilde is this ~ thingy, but that’s the best I got
The tilde is a shortcut for home in most shells.
In the “old days”, when you got a shell account somewhere, they usually had Apache set up so that anything you put in your home directory at ~/public_html would get served up at http://their.domain.tld/~username
That was my website at my university for many years.
What’s a shell?
You may know it by command prompt or terminal. The shell is what’s actually executing the commands you type in there. Bash is the most commonly used one for most Linux systems, zsh is the default for Mac in recent years, but there’s others like fish, etc.
The shell you use also determines the syntax so if you use one, scripts meant for another might not work.
I just really enjoyed this essay and wanted to share it. Cheers, nerds.
thank you. reading this article/discovering his other work genuinely might be the best thing I’ve seen all year
its hella annoying to read this paragraph pop up shite. tried ironfox reading mode but also failed.
there is some irony in writing about the old internet in an overstylised unreadable format.
Literally right at the top there is a bit button that says “prefer plain text?” And links to https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii
The statement that the new commercial veneer is dying needs to be backed up: YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Reddit still drive traffic, despite the slop, and because of the commercialization. Meta and Facebook are doing fine.
I like what he says about the underlying protocols, but it is missing a bit of nuance: Google has been instrumental in the evolution of HTTP; SMTP became a very different game when Google (via Gmail) pushed authentication; DRM made it into browsers thanks to Google and media companies.
Commercial companies may be benefiting from open protocols, but they are also pushing them in new directions. The stack the author remembers still exists, but it has been changed by that commercial “veneer”.
XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.
I am on the same side of the issue as this author and I should be reading this and agreeing. But I disagree with nearly every statement, god this is such a bad essay. I think it does a terrible job of making its case.
The cherry on top for me is the author making a fucking RSS reader… I swear people in this space do not understand why its dying. They keep doing the same things over and over again instead of trying to actually fill the gaps. The solutions back then were solutions for the time, we can take them and improve them.
To be fair, it’s an interesting approach at RSS reader. It’s not like the rest.
It dynamically ranges the flow of content based on the source type and urgency. Breaking news are on top, but only for a few hours. Long reads stay for longer. After a while, old content disappears as to not overwhelm the user. It also applies different settings to news outlets and personal pages. So, this is one of the most advanced takes on RSS I’ve ever seen.
But alas, only available for iOS.
Ok, that’s the first thing I bookmarked. Whatever that bookmarks functionality is.
