We need to rewild the internet

More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.

Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet.

If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.

The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.

There's lots of these projects already, such as https://neocities.org/browse

And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse

Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff.

They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.

There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.

It is surprisingly easy to set up a phpBB forum or some such thing, on a tiny VM tucked into some obscure pool, set up a nameserver for it, invite a couple of your friends, and start your own community, completely disengaged from any major corporate shenanigans.

Big things can happen with such a virtual machine.

Even better, you could a mailman server, and get yourself a proper mailing-list of like-minded subscribers - for any subject under the sun - chatting away on a regular basis.

Fact is, all it takes to set up a decent social network is to do some social engineering. Even real, meat-space activities can be completely divulged of their toxic mainstream membership in the info-spectacle industrial complex, and replaced with a couple smart services, on a tightly bound VM, somewhere functional.

Big things happen because of the people, not the technology involved...

The old internet is not coming back.

1. The old internet had certain entry barrier, which in turn allowed higher-quality content. We cannot tell all people below certain IQ to just stop using the internet so that websites wouldn't cater to them in the pursue of maximizing their userbase.

2. The internet's main purpose was entertainment, which allowed huge experimentation and creativity. Nowadays we mainly use the internet as a tool to complete daily tasks, which means it should be boring and reliable. Imagine going to a subway station only to learn that on that particular day only people in green trousers are allowed.

3. Big tech appeared because big tech allows to do things more efficiently, which is something we do want.

4. The internet was new, therefore interesting.

5. Most of our lives were offline, therefore spending time online was inherently fun because it was something different. Games! Music! Chat rooms! Pedophiles! Nowadays we mostly live online - we work online, we socialize online, we date online, we consume media online, we do all the boring life responsibilities online. It's the offline life that actually allows certain forms of escapism.

Internet was fun, but now it's dead, time to move on and stop molesting a spasming corpse.

It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place.

I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR.

On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not for everyone.

Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable income to have a computer, usually with some form of college education and some technical knowledge.

Then the masses came, and social media thrived.

I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find.

I have less than 3k of personal websites.

Data are in the repository.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.

This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.

Frankly, I'd much rather tend to my real-life garden than any digital metaphor for one. I find it so much more gratifying!

There aren't any operating systems capable of withstanding the internet for a year without updates and/or active management. Until this becomes possible, and widespread, the idea of self-hosting is going to remain niche.

Furthermore, because no browser is totally secure, users are going to avoid non-popular links, perpetuating the walled gardens they already use.

I fear our monoculture of operating systems has to be addressed first, before any of the rest can really take hold.

It's a nice essay but like so many in this space, it's really missing a key force that encourages consolidation, fights diversification, and pushes companies to centralize as much as they can into as few services as possible:

Users.

Users demonstrate, by their behavior, again and again, that they want simple, they want turnkey, they want inter-operation, and they want stability. And the big corps generally succeed in providing those things. Web 1.0 and most of Web 2.0 was none of those things.

The easiest way to engineer those goals is to consolidate. Consolidated software developed under one roof can use incentive of money to induce engineers to figure out the "grimy" problems to make pieces of the tooling work with each other (such as GMail interoperating with Docs, or Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself). And the centralized dev houses force consolidation; for all the jokes (justifiable) about Google having too many chat options, how does it compare to the world outside their garden? How many people actually go through the hassle to get XMPP inter-operating, since Google dropping support for it didn't mean it actually went away? Not enough. A consolidated dev house doesn't have to have multiple competing social network platforms or image hosts, etc... They can maintain one, maybe float the occasional experiment, and users don't have to worry too much about change.

Users actually hate many kinds of change because they build their lives atop the predictability of systems they don't control and they get angry when those systems are altered without their consent. And to head off the argument "But the FAANGs change shit all the time..." They sure do. Now compare that rate of churn to the rate of churn of how one stands up a web server, or how many non-FAANG online services have come up, run out of money, and evaporated.

Inter-operation, at first glance, is the thing the walled gardens fight against. But ironically, by consolidating to one solution and letting just about everyone on the internet use it, they create an "interior inter-operation" to rival the inter-operation you can get with diverse solutions. Consider how much of Twitter you see doing a Twitter search vs. a Mastodon search, or how easy it is to find your coworkers on LinkedIn vs. finding (and using, successfully, through their spam filters) their email addresses. The single-service, one-API, few-clients model consolidates multiple things that users don't want multiple of... chat clients, search corpuses, histories, administration stories, username / password combinations, privacy policies. And this all carries consequences (get locked out for legitimate or illegitimate reasons and you're now locked out of a very big garden), but they're consequences that hit the few; for the near totality, "it just works."

Regarding stability: Google has been around a quarter of a century at this point. Facebook about two decades. They may not last forever, but users understandably are more likely to stick with them than to try new things. Every new thing is more likely to be a pets-dot-com than the next Amazon, and who has time to build familiarity with someone's bespoke solution just to get that inevitable "We never hoped to have to send this message..." turndown email?

And this all culminates in the lack of proliferation of browsers, because the browser enables all these features and, at the end of the day, no user (rounding for error) wants to run two or more browsers and no web developer (rounding for error) wants to accomodate the undocumented implementation quirks of two or more browsers (quirks that always exist no matter how spec-compliant they are... If they didn't exist, they'd be the same browser). So there's the occasional cry of "Why aren't there dozens of browsers" without anyone really answering who wants that?

Nothing about a "rewilded" net is impossible, but users don't want to do it and don't really want to use it. Not nearly enough to make it into something as big as the consolidated service providers. It's a nice hobby for people who really care about how the machinery works to dabble in (I, too, run a Mastodon node...), but I don't see anything pushing people out of their Facebooks, their Amazons, or their Googles, in the near future.

Not if the alternative is for regular users to have to do more work than they do today.

Bring back user-curated indexes.

Start by bringing back Stumble. It was a very good discovery service, with plenty of variety.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stu...

I wanted Tim Berners-Lee's "Solid" project to be at least a partial foundation for this, but it doesn't seem to be getting traction.

Some way to "self-host" or "own my own data" isn't very possible in a world of complex system administration and cloud providers, GDPR/Privacy, etc.

Maybe solving this problem (via FOSS, hopefully) and giving people their own internet-in-a-kit could be a good way to go?

Are there active projects like this? Is it even feasible?

I think internet was way awesome before digital advertising era. There should be areas of internet which should try to replicate the early internet i.e text-only design, bring back forums and no advertising revenue.

Truth is with LLM and chat as main interface, it's going to be harder and harder for niche sites to be surfaced.

No, we don't. The issue was never and will never be the content, it is with the curation and mobility deeply and systemically taken over by social media and smart phone makers. If Google displays spam and AI generated nonsense, and almost everyone relies on it (including those who use "alternative front-ends"), then how do you expect anyone to find a healthy internet? Even if the "extractive and fragile monoculture" made up 0.001% of the internet, it doesn't matter if people can never reach the 99.999%.

... So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. ...

This is a general principle of optimization, which maximises efficiency at the expense of redundancy and anti-fragility. Unfortunately, the ability to withstand an unexpected catastrophe does not appear on a balance sheet until the catastrophe strikes.

I'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet ecologies thriving the way they did in the past.

If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore.

There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

>"...a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late."

This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious. Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs. Uniformity is brittleness.

This is a great article, but it's missing the elephant in the room: copyright.

There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to own the internet: the internet is content. Anyone who can claim to "own" content has the right to monopolize it. We didn't simply allow corporations to build walls of garden around us: we enshrined those walls as a legal right!

This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them ownership of entire species. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too bad: you don't have the right to copy Apple's species. Want to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free range bees.

Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write all the contracts?

We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our peers) will need seeds.

The Internet is not Detroit, but like Detroit it expanded very very fast and was very very innovative and open. Then it consolidated, which is ongoing. Things settled… for a while. The early days of Detroit saw hundreds of little innovative experimental companies that over time became the big three. The rest is history. Detroit is the victim of its own invention.

Luckily my analogy isn’t a very good one, the Internet is nothing like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.

I like:

1. The Neocities random page: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random

2. The Neocities recently updated page: https://neocities.org/activity

3. Status Cafe: https://status.cafe/

4. The MidnightPub: https://midnight.pub/

No matter what you do, 90/00s internet is never coming back

They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested.

ex) Megaupload

Bring back the 90s blog culture. I’m over everything else.

People who think this is possible are naive. It's not just the internet that has become a monoculture, it's the entire planet. Thanks to the internet.

Reminds me of mmm.page

"The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late."

I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity

Wild is good as long as it's not wild as in battlefield. It's not like you get diverse opinions; no matter what you post, you get warring factions, vulgar insults, and sometimes, death threats.

And bots.

I posted earlier today:

Anil Dash argues [1] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities.

    And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities — the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech. There’s been a huge uptick in interest in Darius’ work as networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation discovers the joys of an internet that’s as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that’s being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. It’s going to make a lot of new things possible.

I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly, technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often just liberates cash from their pockets.

Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later.

No need for this crap: [2]

    Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by prying open these heretofore-closed markets.

Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles surrounded by serfs.

Sit at 24HourHomepage.com for a minute or two

Would agree.

While I don't disagree with the general sentiment the old Internet (late 90s to first half of the 00s) was very different topologically from the Internet of today.

Colleges especially were lousy with IP addresses. They'd assign a routable IP to every computer on their campus, including the ResNets. They also handed out shared disk space on servers because that was new and novel. If you knew the right people you could even get a vanity subdomain on the school's domain.

A significant amount of "wild" Internet content was found on those servers that lived on college campuses. Another significant source of "wild" content was ISP-provided web space. Most ISPs offered a few tens of megabytes of web hosting easily accessed via FTP. A lot of HTML authoring software of the era could publish directly to an FTP account. While the likes of GeoCities and AngelFire get a lot of the nostalgia today, they were far from the only source of garish web pages filled with questionable content.

In the early 00s colleges stopped giving out routable IPs to everything with a NIC and started cracking down on closet servers and web space. Besides the network security angle the MPAA and RIAA were on a tear suing colleges for "hosting" pirated content. ISPs also dropped their shared hosting around the same time. By 2010 all the major free web hosting services had shut down or enshittified to uselessness.

Without those places a lot of "wild" content just died out. People did move to hosted blogs like LiveJournal, Wordpress, or Tumblr but even those weren't the same type of "wild" sites that came before. The "wild" content has been further hurt by Google's algorithms' insistence that only content published in the past ten seconds is worthwhile and even then its only worthwhile if its SEOed to death and has Google Ads running on it.

For the most part people just moved to social media. There's zero need for administration, bandwidth is a non-issue, and publishing is pushing "Post". The downside is its social media and discoverability or even availability outside the platform is challenging or non-existent.

For non-technical people it's extremely difficult to set up a "wild" site on the Internet anymore. Even for the technically inclined it's a thankless pain in the ass to administer and keep up. If you do set something up it becomes a constant battle against spammers and script kiddies. Even just something going viral can get your account suspended or rack up huge egress fees on a cloud provider.

I love the idea of re-wilding the Internet we shouldn't pretend the Internet of today is the same as the Internet of the last century.

Edit: I a word.

Smartphones enabled internet addiction to reach the masses. Previously it only engaged those who had the patience and wits to maintain a PC and sit down at a desk to read and write on the internet. As long as the professional and volunteer skills to invest in a "wild" project are transferrable to that of a centralized platform, creators will gravitate to the side that has more users and can pay them more and consumers will gravitate toward the one that is easier to access and worth the according cost of entry (oftentimes free).

This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.

Before we can rewild the Internet, we need to stop employers from firing people over Internet posts.

That starts in the USA with enforcing the 1st Amendment. If you work for the Government or if your employer accepts Government money in any form, then you can not censor your employees in their private lives.

I can post the most repugnant thing you have ever read, and the 1st Amendment says you can not even discuss it with me at work. That's the way freedom works.

The enshittification of the Internet starts and ends in HR.

All of the same sorts of people are willing and able today (myself included) to host our own content on quirky little sites. But the difference is that before, we were it - there was nobody else hosting anything much. There wasn't anything else.

Now everybody, and every company is online. We're simply drowned in an overwhelming sea of mundane banality. And, frankly - normal, ordinary, every-body stuff. Reading the news. Doing some banking.

It's not that we're not here - it's just that everybody else is here too. The internet is now the place that nobody goes to because it's too crowded.

"Whatever we do, the internet isn't returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or each organization running its own mail server, rather than operating off G-Suite."

It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.