Technology

So the past of the internet?

Basically forums

It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.

I think by now we have figured out the majority of people are garbage and you only want to spend time with a select group. Discord seems to have this figured out.

Sounds a lot like the past. And, actually, a bit like the current internet. Custom websites, feed syndication, etc. didn't disappear, they just shrank in the face of behemoth platforms.

Check out Neocities, a great community of indie web fans, built in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites.

Some really great sites there, it really captures that late 90's to early 2000's internet vibes.

I wasn't too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.

Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.

...smaller communities

So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?

Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.

Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.

The future is the past!

One might suggest that it should have always been that way.

Just like as it was in the past

I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.

But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it's possible to build a place where people can connect.

"the future of the internet is likely its past..."

Small communities where one can talk about specific subjects? Man there's something like that already and people can run it from their own computers too, forgot the name though.

I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he's still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don't need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.

Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.

https://tildeverse.org/

First the internet needs to rise against techno-fascism!!

The future of the web may be relearning the browser (and other tools)

yes, but where could we find something like that?

It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.