The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences
The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences
As brands look to hold onto the internet of the past, the term “community” will become a loaded word.
So the past of the internet?
The original web 3 was supposed to be a return to form of web 1, with the good stuff of web 2 and decentralized. Then cryptobros hijacked it
Yes and, We're taking it back.
https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/how-to-get-started-in-the-fediverse/
There's more than just lemmy
Everything old is new again.
Basically forums
Maybe we’ll use newsgroups for actually talking to people again
Arr, those be the high seas now
The thing is that many people, myself included assumed most were dead and cannibalised by Reddit and Facebook groups. Turns out those specialised places have been running continuously on their own pace. Yeah, threads can still span hundreds of pages but in the end going through them makes you an expert on things overnight ;)
Oh my God, the Something Awful forums are still up: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.
God I hate discord.
And mailing lists!
Yes, but this time deep web forums that are unsearchable/unindexed so that information is lost forever! (Discord, telegram, matrix)actually that might actually be a return to web 1 forums before search engines were giant and all forum seach engines sucked ass 😂
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.
Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.
They're getting so shit people will have no choice. They're already leaving one alienated group at a time
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.
Some majorities are bigger than others.
It depends on the discord. I joined a discord where the most narcissistic people were there and they singled me out for whatever reason because I wasn't just simply going with their thinking. There was another member that thought like me but their own narcissi tendencies made up a conspiracy theory that somehow that was my alt. I didn't even know the guy irl. It's a shame as I was interested in the subject matter of the discord but I guess if enough village idiots own a discord, the smart villager is seen as the idiot.
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.
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 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) -
Putin's #1 Digital Fan Club
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中华人民解放互联网 (People's Liberated Internet)
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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.
Unless something's changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.
You think the current US would stop at Canada and Mexico?
They wouldn't.
EU would have to defend Greenland from the USA (and given the already huge amount of US miliary presense, they would probably fail). South America would be a warzone between US and resistance forces funded by EU, but since they also have to fund the defence against Russia, they don't have the fund to fight two fronts, so they focus more on the EU-Russia front. UK will have to also defend itself from the US military that can launch an attack from Greenland at any moment (good luck, they left the EU lmfao). Russia and China relationship doesn't do so well and they fight over Mongolia and the "Middle East" (for lack of a better term). Australia joins China as a Special Administrative region because USA gone fascist, and EU is already fighting two fronts, so they eventually got absorbed in China's sphere of influence. Japan is now a warzone between Vanguardist "Socialist" China, and Fascist USA.
And Taiwan is... wait what's a "Taiwan"? Oh that boring island that has totally always been under PLA control and totally never had any de facto autonomy under the name ROC, like ever, that Taiwan? Long live CCP! (/s 😉)
(Actually, maybe I should write a story about all this... 👀)
Panama, Greenland, after that might as well take the rest of Central America, move all the people out to the Galapagos Islands and build an all inclusive ocean to ocean resort complex.
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.
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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.
now they're heading to lemmy to do the same thing
meh, lemmy is pretty stagnant from what I have seen, plus you can create your own instance and mostly defederate from a lot of stuff.
Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
...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.
But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
The future is the past!
One might suggest that it should have always been that way.
Just like as it was in the past
You've found the leading light of destiny burning in the ashes of your memory.
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.
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.
A small friend group is best suited for chat programs (discord et al.) But if you want to expand the group a mastodon server is a good idea
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
"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.
The good old days of phpmybb
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.
Maybe the idea behind those smaller communities is that they’d be focused on things like fishing and kite surfing. Social media that are even remotely popular have become football stadiums where people constantly need to pledge allegiance to their teams and that’s just really boring now.
the world is now gripped in the great struggle between democracy and fascist disassembly with the worlds only superpower squarely onside with a criminal fascist government of russia with no regard for human life even of it's own citizens, with Billions of real lives on the line all around the world, a great many of us will be fighting over tinned beans and rainwater in the next years, there is nothing boring about being able to prepare yourself to keep your family and loved ones as protected as you can, with forewarning, and kite surfing ain't gonna do that. fishing will become more and more useful though, that's a good one.
That's fine, but don't mistake being jacked in for action.
Compartmentalize the people, conquer their minds. Machiavelli's divide and conquer.
Heck how about Twitter
We need at least ONE (hopefully not more though heh) person on there when Pres Musk announces WWIII so they can screenshot for us :(
Guess that’s why there’s XCancel.com & a couple others mirroring - they’re soldiers, must be costing them a bit of actual $ to create enough accounts to still scrape & mirror so many tweets from the site
Bluesky with a few US politics blocklists is a decent experience.
I'm finding it just like Twitter used to be (which is what I heard it was, and expected before I signed up), minus the overt Nazis, and able to weed out the AntiSemites easily enough with an actual "fuck off into the shadow realm i can't see you you can't see me" block function, as apposed to what Mbin/Lemmy offer which is simply masking
Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.
Depends on how you measure things. If you pie-chart the internet by bandwidth used, most of it is currently used for TV 2.0 (streaming video, mostly by subscription.)
I really don't consider streaming services to be the "real" internet. It's video on demand, and not a communication, socialization and creation space like the rest of the net.
First the internet needs to rise against techno-fascism!!
Links like that feel like the time I first had access to the Internet. Kinda weird but very very interesting. Thank you.
Full disclosure: I've been part of that cluster of communities for a couple years now. Best advice i have to give to anyone is to take their time. The speed of conversation often slows way WAY down.
It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.
It can be commoditised but it’s hard to gain mindshare against monopolies like Facebook. It doesn’t really cost that much to run a small board / forum / chatgroup.
yes, but where could we find something like that?
The future of the web may be relearning the browser (and other tools)
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
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!
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.
so lemmy.
And preferably a bit harder to use to keep the script kiddies out.
Most small group forums have manual user validation with very specific questions.
I’ve seen stuff like “what is on the the 5th page of the user guide for this product” along with language/culture specific questions you can’t just easily google on forums that are focused on a specific area
And that's how it started. are we approaching a big crunch of sorts?
First infinity didn't go great. Not sure I want to see more.
Does the Networking Effect suddenly no longer apply to internet applications? Seems like we're just seeing people gradually migrate from older and less functional applications like Twitter and Facebook over to newer and more functional applications like BlueSky and RedNote.
the title is the description of reddit/lemmy/etc
"Silos" that echo.
Divide and conquer I guess
Heck no.
So a field of circle jerks
Oh how the mighty have fallen
If me and other linux nerds being happy in our little mastodon instances about some random feature being added that no real life person cares about is a circle jerk then im all in for it