📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet
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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
I strongly disagree, because first the terminology Internet describes the borderline structure and in my opinion not the layers on top of it.Secondly, this so-called Internet is a vast and almost infinite space, literally in the name.
Third, there are so many layers of or in this Internet that are split into other layers in itself and so on. When one gets filled up or mutilated beyond repair, another one takes over or else.
Long story short, there is no "the internet" but many different flavors/variations of this concept, running on top of hardware that spanning the globe across cultures and borders alike.
Internet was and is what you and people in general make of it.
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New Essay: The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
@tg the start of the essay is right, that *did* make me feel better.
I first got online in 2001 and I miss 2000s internet every day, it's lovely to know that what really *made* the early internet is all still around and never went away. Makes me want to learn how to use it.
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@CowMan You did see the link to https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii right there on the page, didn’t you? @tg
@sr_rolando @CowMan @tg OMG THANK YOU... I really wanted to read this but I HATE sites that slowly/barely fade in a few lines at a time the entire time, I cannot do this progressive whatever design.
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New Essay: The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
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@tg HELL yes. Been working on a piece about this myself, collecting up articles and such for it, like this one! Great piece -
@jake4480 i shall read it when you post it! been subb'd for a while
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@tg Now I feel old because the Internet I grew up on is the old rusty bits.
@spinni81 me, too
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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 Internet
The 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 Internet
The 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 Internet
The 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 Internet
The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.
A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
MAGA - Make Archie Great Again!
