Much of the old web is still there. A lot of old sites have gone dark, but there are still some that remain, and some have persisted for surprisingly long.
Usenet and IRC still exist! As public and distributed services, like the Fediverse and the World Wide Web itself, one node can go down but others remain. Things that don't remain? AOL IM; Yahoo Messenger; MSN Messenger; Google Talk (in its original form).
When everyone chased after social media, many people declared the old web dead. They were wrong. When mobile platforms hit it big, a lot of people thought the days of the desktop PC were gone. They were wrong too. The demise of Google Reader was an attempt to kill off RSS, but a lot of sites still have feeds. And a lot of blogs still exist, even if it's getting harder to find them due to Google Search's ongoing decay.
Corporations have big PR budgets, and a lot of tech reporters are uncritical about what they hype. Witness the attempts to get cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now LLMs, to take. But we do not have to buy what they're selling.
We don't need a new internet. The old one survives, for now at least. But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.
There’s no need for a new internet. Every garbage service has a somewhat viable alternative.
You have peertube instead of youtube Kagi, duckduckgo, marginalia, etc instead of Google search Lemmy instead of reddit Mastodon, polycentric instead of twitter Gitea instead of github Bandcamp instead of spotify There are probably more things but you get the idea. The problem is not the internet itself but that you have to have many people go to objectively less polished or paid services to protect their personal data. I don’t know how that would happen since honestly, the privacy shit doesn’t affect people’s everyday lives, but using different services does affect their lives.
I think it is possible under the right circumstance. For example let’s say internet disappeared tomorrow. I think what would likely happen is local areas would start to connect.
It would start would smaller groups and slowly integrate more and more until you had the internet back.
I remember watching some sort of video, maybe it was a Vice bit, I don’t remember. They were in Cuba at this massive apartment building complex. Let’s say like 1,000 people lived there.
They didn’t have regular access to internet - they need to purchase credits from state store to use the internet. But many people have computers and want to play multi-player games even though they couldn’t afford the internet credits.
So what they do? Create a localized network between the entire complex so every person could connect, share files, share games, play games, etc. You have a mini-internet between all members of a community.
That’s all the internet is - networks connected to networks and done at the global scale. So is it possible to create another? Absolutely. Although you need some sort of incentive to do it, otherwise nobody will bother. The Cubans had an incentive, but I’m hard pressed to find a reason one would want to in the US these days. You never know, though.
It’s wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.
Convincing “regular people” to move is the hard part.
The internet is the result of networks connecting to other networks. If you aim to replace that, then how? Making new networks just expands the internet, making new interconnections just makes it more meshed.
You would have to make networks not connected to the internet but interconnected with each other. That’s expensive and all the economic network effects are against you. You probably won’t have many users connected and not many services either.
But let’s say you did it, what exactly is the benefit of a second internet? Would you be banning some networks from connecting to your mesh? What if one network in your internet connects to the normal Internet anyway? What sort of technologies and services would there be, just the normal ones, then what changes?
Honestly I don’t see the point. A concentration of economic power and influence over web technologies is the issue. The internet works fine, and we make it work every day (my specific corner being research networks in Switzerland). You need to change the producer and consumer behaviour of people and companies using the internet, not the internet itself.
I think what’s more realistic to happen is that internet will be split into two and after certain websites and services become unuseable to people who care about privacy and such, then new alternatives will just emerge along the more popular ones. Kinda like Lemmy.
Try Firefox or Brave with Ublock origin and SkipRedirect and use Brave browser or maybe 4get.ca. On Android use Brave or Mull (hardened Firefox). Be sure to not use AMP links so as not to support Googles attempt to centralize the web.
The internet hasn't changed and is still the same Internet from the 90s. We're all still using TCP/IP to communicate. A networked device using this protocol from 1993 would have no issue connecting to a network from 2023 (media conversion and bridging of the physical layer might be needed, but the point remains).
The problem is that everyone decided to congregate around the same four websites and the same web browser. You can, you know, stop using them anytime and seek alternatives RIGHT NOW that still exist. You're here already, so that's a start.
I’m convinced that any “new” internet protocol will eventually fall victim to capitalistic human greed in the exact same way. Human greed is what causes the world to be what it is now and that greed still exists in a strong percentage of people today (if given the opportunity to exploit it)
It wouldn’t fall to greed, bit to laziness and convince. Why would anyone use a protocoll that limits the user instead of the one that let’s you talk with anyone you want.
TCP has been amended in backwards incompatible ways multiple times since 1993. See e.g. RFCs 5681, 2675, and 7323 as examples.
Plus, speaking TCP/IP isn’t enough to let you to use the web, which is what most people think of when you say “Internet”. That 1993 device is going to have trouble speaking HTTP/1.1 (or 1.0 if you’re brave) to load even the most basic websites and no, writing the requests by hand doesn’t count.
I can see how some people can get trapped in a bubble of Google and FB. I hope they can realize that Google, FB, Reddit, and Twitter are not “the internet”.
I stopped using FB when the timeline became useless (it was hard to filter to a specific friend or family member), and also that I no longer wanted to see updates from people I didn’t even want to hear from. I have since switched to smaller and more personally curated social media platforms like a group chat or a discord server.
Sure google is a common homepage for a lot of people, but there are other alternatives that work well. TBH, a few years ago, I wanted to switch to DuckDuckGo, but their search results were lacking compared to google, but fast forward to now, DDG gives more accurate and useful results than Google’s ad driven and AI driven “search results”.
I’ve enjoyed my “internet experience” much better after switching from Reddit to Lemmy. Just the fact that it’s not driven by profit, and policy changes are not a the whim of a monolithic corporation, makes the experience much better. I generally don’t see people trying to grift on lemmy. I really appreciate the useful and well thought out comments/posts on lemmy compared to other platforms.
Also, Mastodon is so much more enjoyable to use than Twitter (deadnaming it, I don’t care).
As someone familiar with the OSI model, this thread is a bit confusing since the Internet to me is really the infrastructure on top of which all of your fancy sites and apps are built. When you say “the Internet”, I’m thinking about TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc.
That said, I’m pretty sure most people here are just taking about websites at L7, although there are arguments for change at the other layers.
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