📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet
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@tg one thing that's a little different between 2006 and 2026 is if you try to host something yourself a lot more people and god knows what else are constantly attempting to break in and knock your site over. i tried running a phpbb forum a while back and eventually it got hacked and overrun with spam and it was so bad my hosting provider called me on the telephone to work out what to do about it. i've been afraid to host anything more complicated than a static serve site ever since

@aeva @tg To be fair... it was always like this. The only thing that's changed is the spammers have a lot more compute power now. But even when I was a young guy on gaming forums, an unmoderated forum would succumb to "enhancing pills" spam in less than a week. And they still do.
Self-hosting is still fun and valid. The internet is just noisier, because there are a lot more people on it.
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@tg I am really glad, that there is the ascii view. I pretty much hate this animation.
@virkon42 of course, and i know!
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@tg you forgot the BBS systems. Some of them are still there and quite active.
@botolo86 oh, i didn't forget, they just didn't make it into this one
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@n_dimension bring it back!
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@tg ok wow this page is a javascript crime. worse than normal text would be for no reason
@hsza for some reason - and that is because the web is free and i can do what i want. there's an ascii version
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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg@indieweb.social The legal environment around the net changed though. Gone are the days where you can set up an independent community by renting a cheap VPS, standing up phpBB and calling it a day- now you have to worry about getting legally wrecked from copyright (Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market), CASM (FOSTA-SESTA), and ID (Online Safety Act) law.
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@hsza for some reason - and that is because the web is free and i can do what i want. there's an ascii version
@tg well yes of course but it’s logical to want your essays to be easy to read (so people read them), this is not quite that
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@tg well yes of course but it’s logical to want your essays to be easy to read (so people read them), this is not quite that
@hsza but i think it look cool

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@hsza but i think it look cool

@tg yk what, fair enough, you do you lol
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@tg yk what, fair enough, you do you lol
@hsza honestly that's all i can do!
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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg Thanks, Terry. That did make me feel better.
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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg Thanks for this essay! At the German librarian convention #bibliocon26 , I will soon be advocating for more participation in web standards work and I am tempted to take over some of the thinking. Sometimes I believe, libraries do not want to give anyone the opportunity to call them "boring" and that's why so many are chasing the latest hypes, like currently AI. Why not just embrace being boring, essential knowledge infrastructure and also start supporting boring standards work?
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@jake4480 i shall read it when you post it! been subb'd for a while
@tg oh awesome thank you- really gotta get it out!

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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
MAGA - Make Archie Great Again!
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MAGA - Make Archie Great Again!
The old "platforms" were better too.
ftp:sunsite.unc.edu was great. There was another that I can't recall offhand.
Also the crusty Demon Internet (UK) service for nntp.FWIW I have my own low-volume blog with RSS. Maybe I should use it more.
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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg Excellent! That sums up what my brain has been orbiting for some time.
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New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg wow!
I checked the command and it is really work!
You inspired me to know about old technology. Thank you) -
New Essay: The Boring InternetThe internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
Unreadable, gray on black and/or dark colors on black DOES NOT WORK for those of us with old eyes.
I suppose I could copy it and paste it into a text editor, but I don't care enough.
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@tg oh awesome thank you- really gotta get it out!

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@HailsandAles @tg hahaa oh man you're so right. For the more specific, non news-collecty ones, I will try to - that one had a lot in it and I'd been collecting that info for months hahaha - thank you for reading, man!