How to make the internet small again(raptitude.com)
raptitude.com
How to make the internet small again
https://www.raptitude.com/2022/02/how-to-make-the-internet-small-again/
59 comments
Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important.
I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible.
Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...
I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible.
Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...
> Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact.
Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
Uh, tons of things went viral. Memes existed online long before "social media", going back to the 80s. Plenty of things had societal impact.
I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy?
More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.
I'm guessing you weren't online in the CompuServe era? Never been on Usenet for anything other than modern-day piracy?
More modern pre-social media example, YTMND was 2001.
> nothing went viral
Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.
Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.
To me the internet felt bigger in the early 2000s than today. I went to more individual web sites than I do now, though they had less on them, and there was more diversity in how individual sites looked than today.
I agree with you. Instead of being four sites incessantly reposting from the other three, it was an adventure to type in random dictionary words and append .com just to see what lay on the other end. Perhaps even .net if you felt adventurous.
These days, doing that gives the impression that the only options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle school.
These days, doing that gives the impression that the only options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle school.
I think you're misinterpreting the title, which admittedly is misleading.
It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time".
Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.
It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life during the day and then at night one would have "computer time".
Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.
I bought an iBook G4 1.33ghz single-core with 512mb of RAM and 40gb spinning disk to use as my daily driver. It's perfect for reading Wikipedia and other text-based sites and I just found a really good Bible program specifically made for OSX 10.4. I feel very focused as I don't get side-tracked by YouTube because I can't run it! I almost never program outside of work unless I have an idea for something so I put my more powerful Macbook in the closet!
It has definitely brought adventure back to the internet for me instead of the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass every day recommending stuff that I NEED to watch.
It has definitely brought adventure back to the internet for me instead of the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass every day recommending stuff that I NEED to watch.
How do you get a modern browser on Tiger these days? As far as I know TenFourFox is no longer maintained and nobody forked it either.
I found a version of TenFourFox that has the moniker "7450" which you can find in their historical releases https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/. I wasn't expecting it to work and then it just did.
That's surprising! I'm a big fan of Tiger and that era of Apple hardware (I have another project in mind to cram a TB of storage into an iPod Mini) though it's a wonder that TenFourFox went on as long as it did really. Maintaining something as complex as a modern web browser for long-obsolete hardware sounds like a gargantuan task, I'd love to be involved in keeping it going but I think it'd be above my ability to meaningfully contribute to.
Gemini space has been my most interesting discovery in 2022. It seems
to have the potential to deliver what most people say they want from a
progressive "small internet" ie. not a nostalgic "old internet".
I was reluctant to get involved with Gemini initially - it seemed like Gopher had already existed and could benefit from a revival, rather than someone creating something new (after all, Gopher+ actually offers some good possibilities for doing more modern things, and TLS support is now ubiquitous in gopher even if not officially in the spec)
Upon reading some more about Gemini though - especially solderpunk's "ponderings" phlog entries (https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=zaibatsu.circumlunar....) that I grew to appreicate where gemini came from - a considered criticism of where gopher has not aged well. Gemini has grown to address some of those short comings and that is actually quite nice, and the main driving force for it came from an active user of gopher already so that seemed nice.
What I do find a bit annoying is gemini-the-protocol vs gemini-the-philosophy. E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few people lost their shit about it. Nothing was wrong with the favicon thing - it was totally legit use of the gemini protocol but people were angry about just the concept of a client making requests that they felt did not fit their view of what gemini "means", with various threats about blocking all users/IPs that made requests for a favicon etc.
I find this viewpoint from "small internet" proponents fairly sad and annoying. If the protocol allows it, who are they to say what is right or proper and what is not? It makes me want to write a gemini client that supports styling and some sort of "GeminiObjectModel" and javascript support purely out of principle/trolling-lolz :-)
Upon reading some more about Gemini though - especially solderpunk's "ponderings" phlog entries (https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=zaibatsu.circumlunar....) that I grew to appreicate where gemini came from - a considered criticism of where gopher has not aged well. Gemini has grown to address some of those short comings and that is actually quite nice, and the main driving force for it came from an active user of gopher already so that seemed nice.
What I do find a bit annoying is gemini-the-protocol vs gemini-the-philosophy. E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few people lost their shit about it. Nothing was wrong with the favicon thing - it was totally legit use of the gemini protocol but people were angry about just the concept of a client making requests that they felt did not fit their view of what gemini "means", with various threats about blocking all users/IPs that made requests for a favicon etc.
I find this viewpoint from "small internet" proponents fairly sad and annoying. If the protocol allows it, who are they to say what is right or proper and what is not? It makes me want to write a gemini client that supports styling and some sort of "GeminiObjectModel" and javascript support purely out of principle/trolling-lolz :-)
> E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few people lost their shit about it.
Here's the whole story: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I wish the ML archive linked down there weren't dead, sigh.
Here's the whole story: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I wish the ML archive linked down there weren't dead, sigh.
It is on archive.org - https://web.archive.org/web/20210513001351/lists.orbitalfox....
Yes, that message is, but the rest of the thread isn't.
Gemini itself is quite silly though - the "tech" is just the modern equivalent of a hairshirt. You could easily have similarly lightweight sites on a modern HTTP(S)+HTML5 platform. It'd be nice if there was a social norm that all 'Gemini sites' must always be provided as both, without the user having to fiddle with proxy sites, "alternative clients" or whatever.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. What's needed is a HTML-Lite specification that can be used to drive the 'small' web. No need for bespoke clients - totally accessible. It would also allow older machines to access it as well.
HTML5 could easily be that specification. Clients could be set to ignore not just JavaScript but even CSS automatically (this can easily be done in current Firefox!), and a separate social mechanism could be used to certify sites as "working properly" when doing this. This would be a meaningful way to make "Gemini-equivalent" near mainstream, in a way that Gemini itself will likely never be.
I don't disagree that this is one approach, but I don't think we can wholly rely on end users to do this. If small site owners start using this defined 'lite' specification with some sort of visual cue (bring back those little GIFs! 'Proudly built as "WebLite"') we may be able to start a grass roots movement.
Yes, "works properly when ignoring CSS" could just be used as a convenient objective standard for "lite", that obviates the need for an incompatible spec altogether.
Thanks for linking to this. It looks like something I've been looking for if I understand it properly. It would be neat to have a barebones OS running on a tiny computer that you could access a simplified internet.
I'm hoping I could find a community interested in.. I don't want to say exactly "low tech" computing but I guess the idea is pretty close. Cheap microcontrollers today are incredibly powerful.
Alpine Linux, sacc and cgnml as Gopher/Gemini clients. CWM+Urxvt as the only X interface, because Gemini uses Unicode and the framebuffer support is not that complete. Alpine should be installed with a diskless/RAM mode, so there are no FS changes commited unless you do an "lbu commit -d".
Once you set up sacc, cgnml, and nsxiv for pictures, (and maybe moc for music) there's nothing much more to save.
On hw basis, maybe an RPI B+ with a tiny display. Done.
Once you set up sacc, cgnml, and nsxiv for pictures, (and maybe moc for music) there's nothing much more to save.
On hw basis, maybe an RPI B+ with a tiny display. Done.
Thank you! I'll have to Google some of these terms though.
The Low-Tech-Magazine proposes a speed limit to the internet: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-r...
High speed wipes out distances and dramatically increases pressure. Both in real (topology!) and cyber.
High speed wipes out distances and dramatically increases pressure. Both in real (topology!) and cyber.
That's what we have at most places in Germany an it works pretty good. (provided you have access at all) /s
Worse is the unpredictability ... my family in a 150-souls-village in the middle of nowhere got FTTH a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, I am happy to get 6 MBit/s in central Berlin.
That's pretty easy to understand though: that 150 soul village is in the middle of a much less dense area than the heart of Berlin, so a line that would pretty much always be saturated in Berlin will have plenty of capacity left in that small village.
For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the cheapest and best connectivity of any European country. Which really isn't what you'd expect.
For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the cheapest and best connectivity of any European country. Which really isn't what you'd expect.
I'm not sure if I prefer a slow ftth deployment or the spaghetti cabling of hell from Bucharest streets. There must be a way to do it correctly...
Last I lived there (2015) it was very well organized and more reliable than most other infrastructure in Romania.
the lines rarely are the issue but the copper-cable length from home to the DSLAM:
Less cable-meters mean less reachable households per DSLAM. And the DSLAM costs - both hardware and maintenance. Regardless if 2 or 20 customers connect. So the carrier wants to conect as many as possible and so they have to suffer cable length.
Less cable-meters mean less reachable households per DSLAM. And the DSLAM costs - both hardware and maintenance. Regardless if 2 or 20 customers connect. So the carrier wants to conect as many as possible and so they have to suffer cable length.
Gemini and Gopher/Usenet/IRC would perfectly work under "dataless" phone connections where the speed is capped to 128k. I tried it and it worked as fast as a fiber connection.
Ascii makes copper fiber!
Or the way round: website obesitiy crisis[1] makes fiber copper!
[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Or the way round: website obesitiy crisis[1] makes fiber copper!
[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Although he hasn't written up his report yet on his blog, he notes on Twitter: "For now I'll say it was three of the most enjoyable days I've had in a long time, and that I'm never going back to using the internet every day".
(https://twitter.com/DavidDCain/status/1491156943440064512)
(https://twitter.com/DavidDCain/status/1491156943440064512)
Lent is coming up, which, culturally, is a good time to do weird things. I tend to disconnect from the internet for those 40 days, though the past two years have been a bit less-disconnecty than I prefer, with Covid and all (especially 2020, with all the shutdowns and such working their way through). I just use it minimally, for work, and basic communications with some people, but quit forums and most other things for that period.
It's quite healthy, and I absolutely encourage it for anyone interested in the space to better understand their online usage and such.
It's quite healthy, and I absolutely encourage it for anyone interested in the space to better understand their online usage and such.
By including a time cost to every link on a page that legitimate creators are willing to pay but cripples content farms.
A simple cryptographic signature that takes, say, 1 hour on commodity hardware to calculate. Good bye SEO spam.
A simple cryptographic signature that takes, say, 1 hour on commodity hardware to calculate. Good bye SEO spam.
Hello cryptographic signature computing botnet...
Surely a botnet that is forced to waste time computing signatures before submitting spam is better than one that can just submit spam right away? You can't absolutely secure anything, just make it more expensive.
The internet is never going to be 'small' again. You can choose to deny the changing reality of the modern internet and stick your head in the sand, but it's going to be apps and centralization from here on out. Maybe DeFi will have some impact on moving the modern internet in a different direction, but indulging in nostalgia for the 'good old days' of Gopher and NNTP mean you're not contributing to the betterment of the current internet.
I'm part of a small-moderate sized open source community.
We communicate via IRC/Signal, code via Git, and share knowledge via blogs, Mastodon, and talks.
It feels small and nice.
The fact that the rest of the Internet has grown into a different direction doesn't change that.
The pie is now bigger and largely corporate driven, and I'm okay not being part of that.
Is that so bad?
We communicate via IRC/Signal, code via Git, and share knowledge via blogs, Mastodon, and talks.
It feels small and nice.
The fact that the rest of the Internet has grown into a different direction doesn't change that.
The pie is now bigger and largely corporate driven, and I'm okay not being part of that.
Is that so bad?
If “the current internet” is centralisation and company control, then I don't want to contribute to the betterment of it. So this sounds like a win-win.
So he is basically going to get bored and binge watch shows on Netflix for 3 days.
The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.
Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the problems will go away.
No one is doomscrolling arXiv.
The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.
Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the problems will go away.
No one is doomscrolling arXiv.
> The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.
I find the opposite, actually. I use my blog to offload projects from my brain, knowing that if there was anything weird about whatever project I'm doing, I would have documented it in the writeup. So it's a public presence, but also an external storage for projects. I frequently use it for my own reference later, and at least some other people read it too.
I find the opposite, actually. I use my blog to offload projects from my brain, knowing that if there was anything weird about whatever project I'm doing, I would have documented it in the writeup. So it's a public presence, but also an external storage for projects. I frequently use it for my own reference later, and at least some other people read it too.
I've managed to largely unplug myself from the unrewarding miasma of Facebook by doing this. This has inspired me to go further.
Before the internet I use to joke that if humans had slightly better memory and slightly more intellect we would sit on the sofa and stare at the wall all day.
There use to be a guy on youtube who decided to document his dreams as they were getting surprisingly weird. He would fly out of his body towards the sun where many kinds of creatures lived. They had invited him, had incredibly long life spans and vastly superior intellect. When he brought up their intelligence they laughed and said there were many species with much greater intellect than theirs, above them many layers with more and more intelligent species. Each would feel dumb by comparison with the layer above. "We are undeveloped enough to show an interest in humans." Those above look at you like you look at ants. They then took him to an artifact or learning device left behind by truly sophisticated life forms. It looked like a book to him because humans think of books as containers of knowledge. He was allowed to look at the book from far far away and told not to get closer. His mind raged with thoughts and visions. What happens if I get closer? Then the book absorbs you. You will acquire so much information you wont be able to recall what little you knew before today. You would no longer exist. Only a few of the sun dwellers got close enough to touch it but it took hundreds of years to let the information sink in.
There use to be a guy on youtube who decided to document his dreams as they were getting surprisingly weird. He would fly out of his body towards the sun where many kinds of creatures lived. They had invited him, had incredibly long life spans and vastly superior intellect. When he brought up their intelligence they laughed and said there were many species with much greater intellect than theirs, above them many layers with more and more intelligent species. Each would feel dumb by comparison with the layer above. "We are undeveloped enough to show an interest in humans." Those above look at you like you look at ants. They then took him to an artifact or learning device left behind by truly sophisticated life forms. It looked like a book to him because humans think of books as containers of knowledge. He was allowed to look at the book from far far away and told not to get closer. His mind raged with thoughts and visions. What happens if I get closer? Then the book absorbs you. You will acquire so much information you wont be able to recall what little you knew before today. You would no longer exist. Only a few of the sun dwellers got close enough to touch it but it took hundreds of years to let the information sink in.
I've had a nagging idea to knock together a small app (using a WebView, MacOS) that takes you to, for example, Hacker News and that's it.
No URL text field where you can type in a different address — perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused.
I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching that app in the morning, leaving aside the standard browser. I'm not sure if a diet of only HN is smart or right or would make me happier.
Just a thought I've had.
No URL text field where you can type in a different address — perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused.
I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching that app in the morning, leaving aside the standard browser. I'm not sure if a diet of only HN is smart or right or would make me happier.
Just a thought I've had.
This would also be good for something like https://search.marginalia.nu/ where the results you'll get are mostly text-based.
Great search engine but it makes it depressingly clear how many text content sites are just forgotten “last updated: 2005” zombie sites still humming along only because nobody remembered to take them offline.
Though, through it I found that Neocities has a great “indie web” community. Good for them.
Though, through it I found that Neocities has a great “indie web” community. Good for them.
Part of what the author ignores here, is the always-on expectation of you by other users. If they send you a WhatsApp message, and you don't reply within minutes, or your 'last seen' timestamp is hours/days ago... they'll panic, convinced that you've falling down a ravine or something.
For those thinking of trying this experiment, I would recommend briefing your whole social circle beforehand.
For those thinking of trying this experiment, I would recommend briefing your whole social circle beforehand.
I've unintentionally run this experiment my entire adult life. I'm an unreliable responder and people who message me already know that. Still, I've filtered out (intentionally or otherwise) people who expect prompt responses to low-criticality chats.
I just spent 8 years off the Internet and I can't say my attention span improved considerably. Marginally, but not considerably.
Why? His?
Gopher, Gemini and Usenet fetching news with the spooling method. Done.
Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainly, actually), but I find this interesting. What attracted me to the internet as a kid in the early 2000s was just how huge it was even then.
Sure, you had to go looking for stuff rather than having it shovelled in front of you en masse, but there was such an enormous world of weird little creations that had nowhere else to exist. Stuff to see and people to speak to that I simply never would be able to otherwise.