I was thinking recently that the thing I miss the most from the old internet is the personal feel it had, before it was ruined by big corporations.
Most people had a personal homepage of some type (complete with under construction gifs, naturally).
You'd think that 20 years on it would be trivially easy for someone to create their own place online, but the average person is likely to either start a Wordpress blog of some kind, with plugins, or just use social media. And social media is more or less a walled garden now.
Want to read someone's Twitter. Create an account. Want to view their Facebook page? Create an account. Want to look at their Instagram pics? Create an account. Oh, and if you try to do any of this incognito then expect a LOT of captchas.
What's wrong with a wordpress blog? It doesn't seem any less personal just because they're not running a server. That's just technical trivia. They can be at least as personal since they don't have to also be a technologist.
Wordpress doesn't require you to log in. It's just a web page.
Blogs are blogs. There are more of them than ever, far more than you can ever read.
A possibility to consider: they're no longer all made up of people who are capable of running a web server, and therefore not all directly connecting to your own personal technological interests. I suppose there's nothing wrong with missing the days when everybody was a lot like you, but I consider the Internet a lot more interesting for having everybody on it.
I've always thought of there being a big gap between what people on the internet think is easy, common and logical, as opposed to 99% of the planet that wasn't on the internet at the time
`Most people had a personal homepage of some type` Most people absolutely did not have a homepage
Could it be that the "good internet" is just not a place for non-technical people?
Certainly when I consider what the good internet was circa 1995, it was not friendly unless you were technical.
And today, when the geeks have had enough, they launched all these fediverse products. I love this. It reminds me of the old days of the internet. I don't even visit any of the legacy enshittified sites any longer.
But this isn't something the rest of my family will do. For them, it's not a better experience like it is for me.
And when you have places like Kagi doing their small web search, looking for the good old days where people hosted their own sites (like I do), what they are doing is catering to us geeks. Non-geeks have just as much time and inclination to do that work as I have to replace my own roof.
I don't know if there's a solution other than we have our good stuff over here, and they can have that stuff over there.
No. Non-technical people don't deserve a worse experience simply because they have interests besides computers and programming languages. And being "technical" isn't a signifier for being friendly, civil, intelligent or even sane - the archetype of the "cat-piss man" exists for a good reason. And the web circa 1995 was post AOL and post Eternal September. You didn't exactly need a degree from MIT to use it. It wasn't that deep.
And besides, technical people are the reason the internet is the way it is. The same people who shat in everyone's punchbowl are now complaining about the taste.
“But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.”
Is the suggestion here an organized boycott of enshittified platforms? Support for government anti-monopoly efforts? I think both of those are unlikely to gain enough traction or have much impact, for all of the reasons outlined in the article.
One would think the answer would be competing against the bad platforms by offering alternatives with the quality of service the incumbents are denying to their users. If Google is shit, simply building a better, non-shitty Google should be enough. If it isn't, that's evidence that Google isn't actually shit for most people.
That or everyone retreats to small web alternatives like Gemini[0] which are purposely designed to be anti-growth and anti-capitalist, and gatekeeps the hell out of everything.
Most people had a personal homepage of some type (complete with under construction gifs, naturally).
You'd think that 20 years on it would be trivially easy for someone to create their own place online, but the average person is likely to either start a Wordpress blog of some kind, with plugins, or just use social media. And social media is more or less a walled garden now.
Want to read someone's Twitter. Create an account. Want to view their Facebook page? Create an account. Want to look at their Instagram pics? Create an account. Oh, and if you try to do any of this incognito then expect a LOT of captchas.