Sums up my experience growing up
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@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
@mutkitta Re forums, I miss them too. Many groups that would have been on forums are now on Reddit, in Discord servers, or Facebook Groups.
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers
I remember a #search machine developped by an university in the early 1990s (?), before #Google came up. They found the best content, even for very complicated scientific searches, they found the smallest private website on any island in the Pacific, or in Asia, Africa. The world outside the USA was still connected.They were destroyed by Google and the users prefering the #convenience of the biggest, believing their hollow promises. The biggest got the money for development.
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@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
@triptych Yes, it's up there but more and more hidden by AI Slop.
And people don't dig the mud, they are tired.
For a normal, simple professional search, I nowadays need more than 3 times longer: to find "something", to fact-check, to find traces for more. I work with a bunch of internal databases/platforms but it's crazy to get results inside the fog. Often I don't get these results anymore. I'm not very optimistic.
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@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
@hackillu We have something like #groups https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/ but it feels more like RSS than a forum. It's just boosting everything for the group.
Unfortunately, the very vibrant gup.pe groups are destroyed and the new ones are only slowly taking traction.Everyone can set up such a group with @hello
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Sums up my experience growing up
I was actually talking to my cousins about this the other day, a lot of people in our generation (Millennials but also Gen X and older Gen Z) were using the Internet before all of the really bad dark patterns were added in so we got them at a trickle rate and could develop defenses for some of them as they got more refined
How can we replicate that slow creep for kids now so that they can also build up their defenses instead of getting hit hard while unprepared?
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers Don't buy the pulp. Your clicks are like dollars; don't give them away for nothing.
We all need to spend time away from the machines, myself included. -
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...
you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.
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Sums up my experience growing up
It is really an old story. Money doesn't just talk it dictates.
Using the propaganda model...news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail — and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media)
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@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...
you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.
@bweller This sounds both terrifying and a familiar behavior, I'm curious about this process, would you have a source at hand? For reasons exposed in the original post, I'm afraid a web search won't cut it. -
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers This hits home hard, as I for with almost anything, from programming to learning Linux and all, there was very little resources in the early 90s. After learning the first steps of Linux from a booklet that came with the Walnut Creek CDROMs, it was almost insane that 5 years later you could just use Altavista to find help for your problems and discover someone's Geocities site on how to put Linux in a certain laptop and have all the devices working.
My distaste for the current state of the Internet is very hard to put in words without it being mostly swearing. I also mourn the death of actual web sites and how all the nuggets of information are nowdays social media posts, that do not get archived the same way as bare web sites were. SEO gives me the most unadulterated feelings of rage as it makes web search completely pointless chore.
If things weren't bad enough, the LLM generated web sites may start as a promising lead on something, but need to be quickly scanned through first so they don't end up just being pointless suggestions that end with "if things won't work for you, buy our Wonder Repair product".
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@bweller This sounds both terrifying and a familiar behavior, I'm curious about this process, would you have a source at hand? For reasons exposed in the original post, I'm afraid a web search won't cut it.
@hypolite nope, because I'm a primary source
i did this for them*, at a company they hired
as in, i could testify in court and discovery would show my employment and records would show the loads we took in and out
*i wasnt management, and I only worked there briefly
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Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
https://ourfavoritevoid.club/directory is a webring for smolweb peeps that like to blog (or like black cats, or both)! Check out some of the folx there! We've also an old-school phpbb forum, but unfortunately would probably not qualify for your definition of "active."
https://32bit.cafe is just fantastic, too. Lots of tutorials and smallweb denizens to connect with.
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers - When Yahoo bought Geocities for the sole purpose of shutting it down, that's when I knew it was over.
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers
But the library of Alexandria still exists.
And social media is toxic whether it's algorithmic or not (source: fedi). -
@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
@sarajw
Adding to this: https://ooh.directory/
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers -
Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Here’s a ton of resources for discovering indieweb stuff out there on the web - https://shellsharks.com/indieweb. Happy surfing!
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers Come to Project Gemini, we have ASCII art
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers And the reason for all of this is "Monetization".
Things used to be different because people put stuff on the internet because they wanted other people to see it, not to sell it.
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@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
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Sums up my experience growing up
People using their real names and faces
Governments wanting to control it
Corporations flooding itJust a few things from the top of my head that made it all go to shit
It was certainly a group effort
