musings about how the web used to be better, long
I often see people musing about how the web used to be so much better two decades ago, and while I don't disagree...
I think it's important to realize that we're remembering the *good* parts of the web back then; the parts that provided us with community and a sense of togetherness.
But there was widespread corporate meddling in communities back then, too. There was plenty of co-opting going on, too. There were a ton of unsustainable exploitative tech companies too - that's what the dotcom bubble *was*. Even the oft-lauded things like webrings often had commercial encroachment going on.
What made the web good back then wasn't the absence of shitty corporations. It was people building and finding community *in spite of* shitty corporations and hostile environments.
Yes, there's a subtly different set of problems on the web today. But what really makes the situation different isn't that the environment is more hostile now; it's that people have, by and large, given into it.
The way we fix the web is not by musing about former greatness, or by trying to replicate old protocols. We fix the web by *taking* it back, and that goes well beyond "being on the fediverse". It means taking on a subversive attitude towards the established systems again, and deliberately not playing along with them, in every way we can.
And, ultimately, making it so that we don't *need* corporations anymore to keep communities alive, make them obsolete. And hopefully fix things for the long term, this time. And yes, that is going to involve anti-capitalism somewhere along the way.
The fediverse is a good first step. But it is only that. And now it is time to organize further.
re: musings about how the web used to be better, long
@joepie91 A lot of the “sameness” of modern sites that replaced the diversity of the old web isn’t just “because corporate”. It’s emergent from people actually figuring out which design patterns actually work well, from a responsiveness and accessibility perspective.
Outside of settings where the UI is part of the point of something (e.g. games): novel UI elements are unnecessary at best and unusable at worst.
musings about how the web used to be better, long
@joepie91 I fully agree that the biggest part is people who just gave in.
For some things, there need to be technical solutions tho (and yes, that means fighting capitalism)... back then IPv4 were still way more available than they are now.
We've got the solution: IPv6 but it's not wide spread enough in use to run your website on IPv6 only and thus off of your home connection without public IPv4 like it is in many places in germany for example. By now I believe that they intentionally slow down IPv6 usage cause they can profit off of those limited IPv4 addresses.
The other thing that needs a technical solution imo is DNS. We need a free name system... without any cooperations making a profit off of renewals! (and without a central corporation who can take down and thus silence domains and the people behind them)
musings about how the web used to be better, long
@joepie91 No, sorry, there's definitely a much larger amount of power being _taken_ than _given_ in this change, and the way to change and reverse it isn't just to create better alternatives, but to actively work _against_ the silos and commercial platforms.
Blowing up the data pipelines, as it were.