To me it's more a sociological problem than technological. Also networks have changed.. somehow the decentralization idea is spreading fast. For ideological, technical, cost .. or other reasons. Some people start neighborhood wireless networks etc.

It also seems to me that internet has somehow became a middle man and is not providing human deep enough interactions, especially outside chat-like website (basically any exchange, business)..

I could envision a whatsapp like system with quality control for producers and transparent transaction/tracking/accounting management offered by the network so people spend less time on side-loads and just focus into helping each others and doing what they need to.

People could certainly run hand-curated indexes and search engines seeded by such. I think marginalia.nu search behaves somewhat like that.

I'm really interested in the idea of decentralized search where everyone has the power to choose for themselves who to trust.

> How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.

> Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.

I wish there was some middle ground. Think of all the useful Youtube videos showing how to play an instrument, do woodworking projects, fix cars... there is a vast amount of knowledge there. Maybe YT should be nationalized :-)

Youtubes early success was due to being a free video hosting platform, the monetization just led to the rise of 10:04 long videos. In any case most larger creators will put sponsorships in band like the good ol days. I’m hoping decentralized alternatives can take over like Peertube or Odysee, but I do also appreciate the more traditional business model of Vimeo.

> People could certainly run hand-curated indexes

Do you think there's a lot of good content out there left to index?

I've had no problem finding sites to index with my search engine. Like it's tiny compared to Google today, but it's about the same size they were when they first started out. Leads me to think there's probably as much, or more now as there ever was. There's just more noise to go with it.

Yep! There's a massive amount of useful content on the web. A lot of it is just a pain to find right now, because the quality of search is bad and the amount of garbage is a thousandfold greater.

It's true that walled gardens have been eating up useful information and that is a real shame, but make no mistake: there's still a ridiculous amount of good stuff on the open web. They're not playing the SEO optimization game so they get buried.

That actually has made me feel a lot more positive than I would have imagined.

I have sort of got stuck in this bubble of reddit and not much else and... the way people behave has really sapped my desire to contribute anything to the world. I'm looking around me at the opinions a lot of people are expressing and I think... no, these people don't deserve nice things. It seems sometimes like the whole world is full of venal, bitter and divisive people that do nothing but snap bitterly at the heels of anyone that makes something of themselves or strays too far from safe consensus.

Federation is the only reasonable solution at this time but the technical overhead of federated search is high enough that most people won't use it so it won't benefit from network effects like Google did in the beginning. There might be a combination of blockchain juju that could make federation viable but all the thought leaders in that ecosystem are too high on their own supply to realize they could use blockchains for anything other than gambling.

You could check out https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It's a new internet protocol (NOT www) designed to be minimalist and interesting to hobbyists.

> How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

The same way they did in the web 1.0 days - somebody would maintain the server themselves, or pay to have it maintained.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072085

There’s no better solution - you either have ads or a paywall, which will result in few users.

If there were a better solution we’d all already be using it. Certainly you can rely on savvy people to produce free stuff, but the total amount of content will be drastically lower and therefore fewer consumers.

The best thing is to just use bookmarks and your favorite sites’ own search.

There’s just too much trash on the net