Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
@molly0xfff ISPs however have slowly, gradually minimized what people get when they get an internet account.. shell accounts are gone, usenet is gone, in most cases a little bit of storage for your own website/webblog is gone, self-hosting at home is still a privacy nightmare, and hosting your own weblog via a community cloud like Tor or i2P isn't common yet.. yes we should do as you suggest but how we get there is the question
@molly0xfff but ... the problem is those spaces were populated with likeminded people because , well , there was nothing else there. What if we build a better mousetrap and the world does not beat a path to our doors? https://smallformfactor.net/forum/ is a practically unique space still with devout followers and yet posts dwindled to so little by now. The halls of the venerable SPCR forum https://silentpcreview.com/forums/ echoes with emptiness too. I do not know how could we rebuild.
@molly0xfff thanks for calling it a “web” & not “Internet” ! I love the gardening analogy ! Myself, I’ve lamented this loss in 2012 & dreamed of a better future networks : decentralized, meshed, participatory, altruistic, “free”… utopian. here’s a link to that old article, still hosted on my (rented) place on the web: https://becha.home.xs4all.nl/hackers-philosophers-utopian-network-dec-2012-becha.pdf
@molly0xfff Excellent article, thank you for writing it, Molly.
Although I do wish I didn’t feel like we didn’t exist while reading it.
This is the Small Web—what Laura & I have been specifically working to realise for the past six years at least (if not closer to a decade if you count our work on the problem before settling on one possible solution):
@ollicle The two are not mutually exclusive. With today’s web standards Google and Facebook and every other surveillance capitalist out there is helping build a global corporate panopticon. Entirely standards compliant (it helps that they’re the ones writing the standards).
Web standards are great but they do not imply any ethical framework to what is produced.
So I’m more interested in how we learn from the past to go forward differently and create a fairer and kinder world.
@molly0xfff I love the hopefulness. Our species had a period of explosive population growth. As growth declines and we exit growth mode into what's next, optimism and creativity like this will be called for even as we learn what it's like to have fewer and fewer people with the skills and will to build, maintain, produce, and grow the stuff that we have taken for granted from the times when there was always more, more, more, and more people to make it and use it. Best of luck
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