Who is "us"?
The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There's more content on the internet than ever before. It's a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world.
That's what's happening to the internet. It's no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it.
And the promise of the internet was never to be just that.
It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it's warts). That's what you're seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line.
The attitude of "this isn't what it was meant to be" presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.
It isn't shifting towards an oligopoly unless you count things like Wikipedia as a monopoly. Which it isn't, Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
There was a project similar to Wikipedia, but for semantic data. It lasted for a little while before being swallowed up by Google and shut down[1]. Granted there are some alternatives, but after investing some time working with freebase data, I should be allowed to hold a grudge.
Google played a key role in muzzling more widespread usage of RSS[2], along with Twitter and Facebook discontinuing support for it. Similarly, jabber[3], XMPP[4].
These days it's risky to even host your own mail server, since most people you correspond with are likely to use one particular email service that may arbitrarily block messages from lesser-known mail services[5].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/WEn...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3013890/reader-may-have-died-to-...
[3] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2006/use-twitter-by-instant... (couldn't easily find press of the discontinuation of this service)
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769
[5] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_i...
Why not shake them down for those sweet donations?
Im saddened by the death of rss too, but i think its a lot to blame that soley on google. If the rss ecosystem was so weak, that shutting down a single rss client killed it, it couldn't have been long for this world anyways.
Google made it impossible for existing solutions or upstarts to compete with their free tools, then slowly killed off marketing it and supporting it. The final straw was when they killed their reader.
Google killed RSS and they are actively killing other vital parts of the Internet in favor of their tech (forcing the use of their AMP tech for the best spots on their search engine results is anti competitive, Their web browser Chrome has saturated the market and is also making decisions which will undermine the Internets open protocols, but literally hiding the protocol in URLs, hiding the path in URLs, thus forcing people to search more).
Google is not alone in using it's capital as a destructive force on open protocols and standards. Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are the same way.
wikipedia has their own drama. it has contributors who shape the content into what they want the world to see instead of staying objective on certain topics. often articles on simple topics are so complex because they are written by enthusiasts and aren't trying to inform beginners or curious.
we need better!
You're being disingenuous and needlessly insulting.
We wanted to bring the freedom and egalitarianism of the early internet to everyone. Instead we got the jaded, corporate internet, but at least it's available to everyone. The GP is obviously mourning the quality, not the exclusivity.
There's certainly many problems with something this gargantuan, but I get very skeptical when people nostalgize and eulogize "the good old days" of anything.
I'll add, I say this with empathy to your feelings. I regularly feel a very strong nostalgia for those late nights of discovery on the Internet. But I do recognize that Internet involved a fraction of a fraction of the people using it today who are discovering and creating and sharing all kinds of stuff with greater ease than ever before.
Unfortunately, getting to their creations is ultimately harder: eg. searches for anything will now throw you at some lame stuff on pinterest, which will attempt to lure you into signing up just to find out if they have what you are looking for.
Basically, ability to really "browse" that humongous web is now gone. And most of those creations never reach their intended audience.
Could you explain how you got to that conclusion?
It would be impossible for non-tech-savvy people to share things on the internet if there were no omni-present surveillance, manipulation, and centralization, because ... ?
harder to use as publishing platform by who? don't you mean businesses & corporations?
people have always been fine. myspace anyone? geocities? irc? icq? aol? msn? yahoo? the list goes on... also the remarkable thing is that people just move to newer and better back then.
"It's bad that X has happened!"
"But Y has happened, too, and that is good!"
Yeah, so what? Unless Y happening is predicated on X happening, that is just completely irrelevant to the discussion?
Your tiny cool self-regulating community, will either die, be eaten by Facebook or become Facebook.
Granted, I'm holding out hope that someone surprises us with a technical solution. I just don't have high hopes there.
The fact that data caps ever gained traction doesn't reflect well on the old timers ability to explain and protect the true value of their creations for the wider public.
Which is weird because they were obviously able to do that with cryptographic algorithms which are way more esoteric.
It's like teaching a generation of craftspeople to build all the intricate parts of a piano but never noticing nor caring that for some reason they're all selling pianos that have a single key.
Ignore everyone's ring. If you aren't hosting a part of the internet you want. Why would you expect others to?
Domains registrars?
.org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.
Changing the domain of a site is very effective at killing a site, and a business or organisation, because all existing links to it break, emails to it break.
And if you give up the domain, it will usually get squatted quickly, so the links and emails carry on working - they just go to the squatter's site instead.
There is no way to update the majority of links to your site, if it's been around for a while. You can search for links and ask other site operaters to update, but it just doesn't happen much, and it's also extremely expensive to do when measured in time to write to thousands of site operators individually.
And when you have to change the name at the same time (because your name is squatted on other TLDs), you're effectively deleting the name recognition, literature, old podcasts, matching name you already have on Twitter, etc.
If you had a good name for a long time, chances are you will struggle to find another one like it, and even if you do, most people will think the new name is something else.
On top of that, your email is probably linked to your .org, and people aren't going to stop sending to that for years, no matter how much you tell people to via other channels. You can't know everywhere your email address and main web address are being kept by someone to use later.
And wherever there is a long-standing email domain, there are probably thousands of internet accounts that have that email as their primary or backup/recovery, which you will need to keep if you don't want to start losing access to other accounts. Updating those is very difficult unless you have been extremely diligent at keeping a database of every account you ever created. In practice, even very diligent organisations who attempt to do this don't succeed because accounts tend to be created bydifferent people.
Perhaps in extreme startup land where people start a new business from scratch every couple of years, and pay a lot in SaaS costs so hiked domain fees may sseem relatively cheap, this might not seem to matter.
But many .orgs have been around for decades, and are low budget but very well esablished.
Any many other .orgs are individuals, with email and thousands of online accounts linked to their domain.
There is no "just" to a domain name change.
Changing that would be a proper PITA, and I'd hate to have to do it just because ICANN sold out in such a transparently corrupt way.
> .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.
What about all the broken MX records?
If you feel like you got a bone yo pick with a current state of internet, post about a technology that addresses the problem so that people can become aware of it. And save the virtue signaling for reddit/facebook.
Earlier today I was trying to Google a website I found on my PC a while back. (Backing up its disk atm, and don't use Chrome sync.)
Clicked on an unrelated link, and was already in the process of reaching for the Back button when I realized I was looking at a cert failure (wrong domain in certificate). Heh. Idly curious I hit Continue... And was presented with my first
> Content Denied
> Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of copyright.
> 1800 086 346 for information.
https://i.imgur.com/fwXRlTN.png
After recovering from the shock - this sort of thing only happens in 3rd world repressive countries, right??? - I went back and tried the domain referenced in the cert.
Haha I've probably lit a billion lists up like Christmas trees now... I got this: https://i.imgur.com/w37jfFt.png
Here's the cert error, for reference: https://i.imgur.com/dZmEcnd.png
I’ve never heard of anyone get arrested for low level piracy here, so I wouldn’t be all that concerned with requests that hit the piracy filters.
I'm done with it. I don't want to partake anymore, I don't want to fight it anymore, I don't want to care anymore.
Let the Google's and Facebook's have the old Internet. I'm done with it.
The dream is over. The magic is gone for me. The old Internet is gone. Let them have the rest.
Maybe then, and only then we will rise up like a Phoenix, with a solution that cannot be stolen out from under us.