In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
  • 01011@monero.town
    English
    2·
    1 day ago

    I think clearnet is done for. Maybe something like i2p could be worth investing time into.

  • Hossenfeffer@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Back in the days of the wild frontier things were chaotic, anarchic, violent, and unconstrained.

    Then came the churches, then came the schools
    Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
    Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
    And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

    And now we’re all fenced in, regulated, allowed to wander only in approved lanes… oh, wait, sorry, we’re talking about the internet, not real life!

    • wavebeam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I really hate to argue in favor of all those scary things, but with those things in the old west came education and improvements to quality of life; better protections for the vulnerable and cures and prevention of disease.

      Same could be said of the internet if we follow the analogy.

      • Hossenfeffer@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Kind of my point. We gained ecommerce, streaming services, platforms such as this one, online gaming, mapping services, and others - at the cost of the freedoms for which people are nostalgic. And now we have ads, personalization, tracking, and inevitable enshitification.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Go back to site directories.

    Curate your news feed.

    Stop using a single corporate search engine.

    Participate in online social communities, not in social media.

  • anticurrent@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Corporations and commercial interests taking over the internet is inevitable. the only free corners left are the darknets with tor/i2p. but because the normies can’t bother use that isn’t falshy and trendy, there might not be any other chance to replace this decrepit boring dystopia.

  • yes_this_time@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    3 days ago

    Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:

    Caretakers of digital archives.

    Caretakers of relevant open source projects.

    Could I get a free domain with my library card?

    Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?

    Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)

    • Ithral@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I’m very much onboard with this. Idk if I’d say it’s the libraries job though, I think it should be at the city level for community instances.

      • yes_this_time@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        The library is appealing to me because:

        Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.

        Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.

        Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.

        For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn’t want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn’t want them worrying about liability.

        Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn’t exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it’s bizarre.

    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      The fediverse is just a barnacle on the larger Internet at this point. It has to become more - we need to make our own web

    • BCX@dormi.zoneEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Ehhhh, the OG internet connected better because all nodes were well connected. The Fediverse is a series of single servers that can’t even sync all data across themselves. It’s cute, but it’s post-it notes on strings atm

    • michael@lemmy.chrisco.meEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Yep we have different lemmy/mastodon/etc… instances talking with one another. Anyone can set up something like activityhub. Its a fun place in my opinion!

  • sundray@lemmus.orgEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Free hosting, for everyone, without ads.

    Ut-oh.

    (But seriously, while it wasn’t free, having an account with an ISP used to come with 10 MB of personal webspace without ads or anything. That’s something you never really see these days.)

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Alternately, what’d be really neat would be an easy way to mostly completely do a webpage setup for someone using the free hosting options that do exist.

      Like, a tool that makes handling deploying something to Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or whomever else offers basically free web hosting that isn’t nerdy to the point that you need a 6,000 word document to explain the steps you’d have to take to get a webpage from a HTML editor to being actually hosted.

      Or, IDK, maybe going back for ye old domain.com/~username/ web hosting could be an interesting project to take on, since I’m sure handling file uploads like that should be trivial (lots and loooots of ways to do that.). Just have to not end up going Straight To Jail offering hosting for people, I suppose.