this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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That's gonna result in a massive amount of dead links. The internet really is dying...
I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.
I’m 100% down to go back to Wild West.
The feeling and freedom of playing runescape on the early 2000s unfiltered internet was something I’ve missed. Maybe it’s coming back.
100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.
While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.
I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.
I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.
Yet TikTok is still vastly more popular then lemmy or reddit.
So what?
There's a place for that. Back in the old IRC days there was a place for AOL. Let TikTok and Reddit keep the idiots.
Yeah those were good times posting trolls on a site made by some dude who was a carpenter running the site in his spare time. Site had only one rule: don't be an asshole, which would only get enforced when that one dude got home from work.
Though I'm not sure that's all that feasible now, too many idiots on the internet Poe's law and all that. We can't be all that wild anymore because there's idiots that take this shit too seriously now.
But I think the Fediverse is an interesting middle ground. I can foresee racist whack jobs setting up some instances resulting in a weird broken web of sites that are sometimes federated, sometimes not. Maybe we can organize troll raids on the bad guy sites and shit like that.
It could be wild times, but I think it'll be a different kind of wild than before.
the answer to that is somewhat larger moderation teams, like 6-8 people in their spare time, ideally not in the same timezone. hundreds of thousands, if not millions of said teams have self-organized in the past couple of years with all the corpo platforms going full "user-generated content" on moderation as well, in an effort to scale their empires, and now they're questioning just how necessary those corpos are.
It's definitely going to be different. Probably a mix between the old and the new. But I think the real benefit is it offers space for everybody. The people who want to be wild can do so, and those who don't need to have nothing to do with them.
I mean, I went from Facebook to Reddit to Lemmy.
Seems like a good trajectory.
Next step is heading back to old "General Talk" sections of random message boards like it's 2003. Is the Massassi Temple Forum (Jedi Knight game) still around?
Forums were some of the best way to get info before everything had its own subreddit and its own discord. It's cool to be able to chat directly with creators and that ilk, but I do miss the community on like the Jedi knight forums, SWG forums, gameFAQs boards, and even those sketchy Zelda timeline sites.
It's not.
The problem is, you won't get the sort of compatibility you enjoy now any more. So many different applications, phone keyboards etc support gfycat and that's where all the content is.
They won't support dozens of disparate led popular services spread across the internet.
Those services are also likely to be less reliable, less well moderated for offensive/illegal content and such, and more likely to randomly disappear.
Like why Reddit was such a success, I want stability. I want one, reliable, centralised place I can go for everything.
Another concern I have, considering Lemmy specifically, is hacking of their infrastructure. Is my Lemmy account data as secure as my Reddit account? No. The software isn't as secure, and the security teams are non existent, it's just a guy (a wonderful guy!) hosting this as a hobby.
And even if one server does get a proper tech security team, that's just one server.
There's also the question of WHO is hosting a Lemmy instance being used, are they trustworthy? Are they being independently audited? Have they been found in compliance with GDPR? Are they secretly selling our data? Could be, who knows.
For all the awful things that come with a big company like Reddit, there's more scrutiny, accountability, etc.
I don't mean to diss Lemmy, I'm really really hopeful for it. I just have a lot of early concerns, things they'll have to solve before I can really see it being the trustworthy, solid cornerstone of the internet I'd like it to be.
I don't think it's wrong to keep questions like these in mind, it's great for information security and your privacy!
I'm with ya - no hate and no ill will to the hosts of any of these instances, but a cautious or informed user is a safe user. And safe users tend to mean user longevity on a platform! So it's kind of cyclical, the "safety> accountability> user" relationship.
Given that Reddit is going to sell your data to anyone willing to pay, is reddit really all that secure?
Russia, China, the NSA, or whoever else you're worried about can just set up some fake business claiming to be a marketing company and simply buy access to all of your data on reddit's servers.
Nothing you post on the internet is ever really private.
Sorry for the extra posts! Kept getting a post error on mobile.
Search engines will just have to get better at scrubbing their databases. Most of this stuff is ephemeral so it's usually a deep search that leads to these old threads...and future dead links. Distributed services isn't bad, it's just different. Pre-web it was archie, gopher, veronica, usenet, etc. Now all those things - or their equivalent data - run on top of the web. It's just an evolution.
I say we all go back to browsing the web via Lynx and chatting it up on IRC. Who's with me?
Reject modernity, return to bbs
I miss IRC…
Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.
It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.
The tech knowledge was its own gatekeeping and filter. I also miss slapping people with a wet trout... Actually, it's mostly the trout nostalgia for me...
LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large troutThree or four huge companies sounds terrible
I still remember the Photobucket apocalypse back in the day. One day to the next seemed like internet only had "broken link" images.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
A long time.
My first thought was my NSFW reddit account... If they didn't already kill it with 3rd party apps, I'd be bummed...
Gfycat banned nsfw a while back. Now if redgifs shuts down...
Its about to look like a giant graveyard
It's almost like a system that rewards short-term gains and maximizing profit for the few at the top at the expense of everything else is neither sustainable nor beneficial for the long-term health of the broader environment or community. 🤔
Naa, that can't be it! Greedy algorithm find the optimal solution, after all!
Ahh I'm sure that's not a big problem. Let's keep growing and growing everything! /s
We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.
Before reddit, imgur, etc got big, the Internet was FULL of dead links. Image links in particular. Small image hosts cleared their storage after a while because, y'know, kinda expensive to host a bunch of content for free.
But you know what? We ran everything. And discovery was hella different. Personal websites, bulletin boards... Clicking links from one place to end up at another, and then you find another link to another website... It was something different entirely. Of course, Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit all were originally just websites where you could share what you'd discovered and other people could comment on it, but reddit ended up becoming THE place to hang out, and then nobody bothered going to all these small websites anymore.
I see the fediverse as being something in-between. The content doesn't all belong to a massive corporation, but it's also still MORE centralized than the Internet of old. We all hang out in a shared, federated space, rather than having a bunch of different spaces. Communities aren't as insular, which is both good and bad - and I guess everyone has different preferences anyway. But while on a big network like the fediverse or reddit, you tend to feel like part of a very big community (unless you subscribe exclusively to tiny communities/subs), on the forums of old, you'd have a small community and most people were fairly active participants, so it really felt like a close-knit community if you know what I mean.
But the net is also different from back then. For one way more people use it and what is expected of it has changed. People expect to stream 1080p/4K video for free and that is not cheap.
I hope that IPFS (or something like it) may end up improving that dichotomy
I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?
Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.
I think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the "make product, get users, ???, Profit".
I think the beauty of decentralization is that in many ways monetization doesn't have to be necessary. Or it can be necessary on a much smaller scale. A big company like Twitter or Reddit or Facebook needs to make money on a massive scale. A small company, like somebody running a big Lemmy instance, doesn't need to answer to investors who expect a 10x return. They just have to cover their costs and maybe make a buck. So we go back to the old days like when we had independent forums, half of them were just free as a labor of love, the other half had a banner ad or two and maybe some way to support the site by donating. I think we were better off that way.
Sure but is anyone going to do a labor of love that costs $1000 or more a month. The scale of the net today vs back then isn't even comparable. So many more users now there is a reason ads are everywhere and companies are closing or selling to the big guys. This is expensive.
I think that number is way too high.
The developers of Lemmy are doing it for free- unlike those of Reddit etc.
That means you just need the server resources to host the instance.
Now if you're hosting hundreds of thousands of users, then sure it may get expensive. But the whole point is you have a few thousand here, a few thousand there, and thus the load gets greatly distributed.
Instead of 50 servers costing $1000+/mo, you have 500 servers costing $100/mo (or whatever).
And the $1000/mo server can collect enough in donations or simple ad banners to cover their costs.
What you're missing isn't costs, it's profits. The little guys, and the big guys, all want to make a lot of money. They don't want to cover their costs, they want to cover the mortgage on the beach house. Little companies often don't make enough profit to do that, so they sell to the big guys who will slash costs and service and go profit-focused.
But start to run things with the goal of providing the service rather than the goal of making money and things change drastically. For most of its life, Reddit was ran with the goal of providing the service, which is why it grew so fast. Then a few years ago it shifted to the goal of making money and that's when things went downhill- because they didn't have a clue how to actually monetize the service so they pushed the 'typical buttons' (aka sell out the users) and of course the users are now pissed off.
But get rid of software dev costs, and look at just the hosting cost, and the number is MUCH lower.
There's also the fact that we don't need to host 52MM users. There aren't going to be 52MM users on Lemmy anytime soon.
I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.
I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:
That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.
As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?
I'm a bit surprised they lasted this long to he honest. How did they make money? Ads?
They make money by selling information about you.
Not a lot of information to sell from a single GET request when an image is embedded on a third party website or app.
Edit: come to think of it, maybe you're right, and this is in response to 3rd party cookies being phased out pretty much everywhere.
And when they combine traffic from you with traffic from others they can infer more info.
Is this how a recession feels?
If this feels like struggling to feed yourself and your children, scraping to try to pay rent before you're evicted, desperate to find any job available and scared because you have no options and nowhere to turn, then yes, it feels like a recession.
Honestly didn't expect it to be THIS kind of recession
An internet/social media recession, we're truly living in the 21st century.