I’m seeing an incredible turn towards the kind of organic platforms of the 1.0 web world. They may never hit the same level of popularity as the commercial platforms like Facebook and Twitter did, but these new platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, and others are letting us build a new space.
Probably the best part is that so much of it is built on FOSS meaning that the monetization and enshitification by investors will have a much harder time taking root.
FOSS is like penicillin honest to god…
Meta is already trying to destroy the Fediverse.
Agree, but I fear they try to get those apps banned, similarly to what happened to tiktok (yes I know it’s not FOSS) because the only reason why it was banned was because it was killing the revenue of FB and Twitter.
No, the platforms are enshittifiying, but the underlying nuts and bolts of the internet are still there untouched and so far every attempt by big tech to enshittifiy/proprietarize those has thus far failed
The search engines don’t do what they used to do. New sites cannot gain traction without million dollar advertising budgets.
Meh, fuck the search engines, let’s bring back webrings!!
Never could.
They absolutely could. I built several of them back in the day.
Self hosting:
Let’s go back to dialup and BBS forums over cmd
I’m down but much of the landlines have been converted to VOIP and won’t handle dialup any more :(
I feel like smartphones have just made people “internet lazy” - myself included. The masses just want to get an app and let it accomplish whatever you need, without worrying about any kind of enshitification as long as it’s free.
“free”
Younger people I talk to have absolutely normalized “I saw this on Instagram!” As a way of shopping.
It’ll still ‘evolve,’ just not in a pro-user way.
The internet, no. World Wide Web, unlikely. Commercial domains however have been shit and will continue to enshittify as long as people support their business models.
You’re asking that question in one of the places where it will be evolving. The fediverse, or something like it, is the future of the internet.
Never is a long time
Never say never. Once the VCs wake up and realize there is no ROI left they will take their billions out of the pool and 90% of companies will struggle to actually create value from a hostile userbase.
I think 90% of the AI investments really have no commercial viability and are being developed to suck up clueless venture capital.
See the enshitified hotspots as fly traps for the limp minded. An authentic, simple, commerce free web is still out there, one just needs to look outside of the drivel served up on page one of mainstream search engines
Enshittification is a consequence of private equity investments, so no. Companies who don’t take money from private equity will actually innovate. Whether they can survive the monopolies that do take private equity investments is another question.
The real problem is the need for constant revenue growth. If a company doesn’t care about constantly growing their revenue, they can put their funds toward long term projects that may not pay out until many years down the road. Those are the companies that truly innovate.
Plus there’s always room for new companies to come in and innovate, even with private equity money. Just don’t expect that from the already established companies.
So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.
I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.
Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?
Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.
I also want to get into ham radio and have been messing with sites like this to scratch the itch for now.
So the answer is no but only because the web is only one part of the internet. Someone somewhere will create a new protocol that we never thought off and start a new service and no I’m not taking about the web3 scam and crypto. Stuff like gemini and tildeverse are pockets of the 90s internet. Still alive and kicking.
This ‘death of the Internet’ talk really irritates me. It’s not. Stop using the big websites and look for or make your own corner in the Internet.
deleted by creator
The internet, communications and how we use it will continue to evolve over time. Evolution, even in digital systems doesn’t happen that fast, especially if always involves a human brain in the equation.
As long as we humans are part of the digital revolution, it will take hundreds or thousands of years to evolve (if we make it that long)
Anyone who thinks that anything that involves us poor apes can evolve within a few short years or even decades is only fooling themselves.
A neat thought experiment is instead thinking of what will happen once actual real world independent AI takes over. Once that happens, then the digital systems can evolve without us and then it can evolve in an accelerated manner.
When you think about it, us humans and our set organic brains are like the big rusted iron anchor that is holding back the digital powerboat. Once they cut the chain holding us to the boat, we’ll stay at our place at the bottom while the boat disappears into the wild open ocean.
