...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.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
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.
It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
I think it's always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
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The future of internet is you have to ask your government for permission before you can visit foreign websites.
There is no longer "Internet"
It will be suceeded by:
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Freedom Net (where "Antifa" is Banned, and you need a swastica armband to get access)
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Euronet (where UK just left, again)
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United Kingdom of Great Britain ~~and Northern Ireland~~ (they noped out of the UK, and re-re-joined the EU)
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Putin's #1 Digital Fan Club
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中华人民解放互联网 (People's Liberated Internet)
-
And that's it, Canada and Mexico got Invaded by the US; while UK, EU, Russia, China all fought over the remaining of the world
(okay maybe my worldbuilding is ridiculous, but the world is collapsing and I want to write a story about my predictions of the future mm'kay? 😉)
I think the future of the internet is darknets for example Veilid.
The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you're in one they're useless to you.
First rule of darknet membership: don't talk about the darknet.
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Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it's missing all of the global South.
Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.
One might suggest that it should have always been that way.
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.
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it's THE place I interact with friends since I've long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It'd be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
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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.
US servers though... better self-host or use another non-US VPS.
Definitely depends on the site because I've seen some impressive modern looking sites in the past, but a lot of sites I find on there definitely encapsulate that vibe in a great way.
"the future of the internet is likely its past..."
The future is the past!
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.
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Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
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.
The good old days of phpmybb
We should be able to bootstrap activityPub to GeoCities websites. WordPress integration is taking a long time.
That's backwards, activitypub is higher level than websites. And you can literally make a website already and embed an activitypub stream
Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.
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yes, but where could we find something like that?
It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.
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"Silos" that echo.
the title is the description of reddit/lemmy/etc
Curated experiences are the reason we're in the shit right now.
But yeah, maybe boutique curated exepriences will somehow be qualitatively different, and not just finer market segmentation.
I think they meant human-curated.
I'd say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing's sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.
That's how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I'll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I'm not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.
But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I'm certain they're out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.
Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!
Smaller communities don't get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don't cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
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Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
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