Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
100% + you can already see it on the fringes. The need for a server to stream content evaporates w/advancement in client-side compute. Why plex or jellyfin when you can do it all in the rendering layer?
Our interconnected network layers function because of open standards, with layers decoupling complexity up & down (sep of concerns) as well as left & right (standards that facilitate novel capabilities).