The Great Internet Divide - How can we recover the old internet?

[Ewan McGregor]

So, it is apparent that there is not much to do on the Internet nowadays.

Most people use the Internet only for Social Media, News outlets, Messaging apps, Youtube and Porn. There seems to be no use for the internet outside any of these.

If they wanted, they wouldn't be able to get out of that approved range of things as all search engines, but especially Google which is the one most people use, have been nerfed to death. Any given query on Google will lead to News Outlets, Wikipedia or SEO-Conscious businesses that have realised taking advantage of people looking for stuff is a good way of ending up selling them something.

So, for any given search you will get either two pages of journo shit with very little variation on what they're saying about the topic in question (since they all steal from each other at best and agree on narratives at worst), hidden ads masquerading as opinion pieces, SEO content where six or seven entries are the same (Since they steal from each other), perhaps the wikipedia entry if relevant and nothing else.

If I want to know about something current-event related, I will be flooded with "approved" news and a wikipedia article concoted from these news. I will get the exact same information from all of them and, typically, I will be none the wiser after reading it.

If I want to know about something technical, I will get a shit ton of SEO content websites all ripping each other with incredibly shallow information that really I already knew or, sometimes, something like StackExchange where, depending on the topic, they are either extremely insular and have a shit ton of in-group knowledge that doesn't transpire in the answers they give (This is typically on things regarding science and technology) or they might as well be the pajeets from Quora in terms of abrasiveness, entitlement and woke self-righteousness (For anything not hard science and technology)

If I want to know about a product, I'll have lots of fake independent opinions that are actually paid shills or fucking reddit.

If I want to know about books, movies, videogames or such, it's the same but worse.

Maybe I'm having nostalgia filtered goggles but, wasn't the Internet way more diverse? How can we recover access to all that lost Internet? Surely it must still exist somewhere.

How can the masses be freed from what essentially amounts as the west version of the Great Firewall of China?

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

The Internet is just a bunch of servers and clients talking to each other. Search engines used to be shit, now they are returning to shit. It's unfortunate that you can't effectively disseminate information to the masses without slamming into a bunch of brick walls, but you can find smaller communities where you can spread stuff around.

Search? I bookmark.

 

[Divine right to rule]

I think it is more moving in the direction of regional/power bloc internet, meaning a fractured net.
Every bloc has their own censorship, and their own censorship sensibilities.
For example, what the Russians censor is allowed on western sites, and in reverse. The chinks don't give a shit about you writing "Nigger" but you better not mention a certain square.
With all the sperging about fake news and hacked elections, I think a lot of countries will nationalize some aspects of their own internet infrastructure, because they will not trust foreign companies with the primary medium of information anymore.

 

[Saint Agustin]

I'm trying to get my site on google and is really hard. I have absolutely no experience in SEO and Google is shit in helping you.

I would like to have my site indexed, but I have to either spend money on someone who knows or learn it myself.

Internet is hard nowadays.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

I'm trying to get my site on google and is really hard. I have absolutely no experience in SEO and Google is shit in helping you.

I would like to have my site indexed, but I have to either spend money on someone who knows or learn it myself.

Internet is hard nowadays.

It used to be the case that you just inserted your url on a list, like the opposite of using robots.txt

If you want to do SEO shit you need to use a very specific language, know the trigger words and the no-no words. Some words will get you higher on the list and some words will outright ban you from appearing on it.

That's one of the reasons why all journos nowadays write in the same retarded style, when they're not doing the story-focused shit where they will larp as being authors to write about some stuppid roastie that got fired for trying to teach sixth graders how to use a dragon dildo.

 

[Whatevermancer]

I think there's nothing we can do about it, even if search is unfucked, because of how convenient social networks are.
Let's say you want to create videos and post them online, are you going to pay for hosting them on your own website, which costs money, is likely to never get accessed by viewers, and requires registration to be able to comment or just upload them to Youtube, free of charge and with billions of potential viewers who are already registered there? I think the answer is obvious. Oh, you don't like Youtube's censorship? Then you're going to upload it to Rumble or Bitchute.
Let's say that all social networks disappeared, then what? New ones would get built and take their place, and they would have the same bullshit censorship as the old ones.

Sure, there are enthusiasts who are trying to bring back webrings and RSS, but nobody cares about it except for other enthusiasts.

 

[SilentDuck]

I think it is more moving in the direction of regional/power bloc internet, meaning a fractured net.
Every bloc has their own censorship, and their own censorship sensibilities.
For example, what the Russians censor is allowed on western sites, and in reverse. The chinks don't give a shit about you writing "Nigger" but you better not mention a certain square.
With all the sperging about fake news and hacked elections, I think a lot of countries will nationalize some aspects of their own internet infrastructure, because they will not trust foreign companies with the primary medium of information anymore.

The internet becoming "balkanized" as the ICANN type American policy wonks used to warn.

But totally ok with it if it means only 4 or 5 nearly trillion dollar companies control everything the public can see and do and those companies spy for the NSA to create more freedom.

I remember the days of hundreds of thousands of websites. You can start a few thousand websites yourself today and even host them for pennies on a $10/mo. VPS but you will never see any of that normie traffic again. They are all trapped in the machine and love every minute of it.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

we should make our own internet, with blackjack and hookers. i think since Null has its own DDOS protection service and is his own ISP, i think he'll create his own internet when this internet died out.

 

[Drkinferno72]

So build a online text based bbs that requires an acoustic coupler modem

 

[Hyperbola]

https://landchad.net/

Start a website. Discovery must be preceded by existence. Why use someone else's blog platform when you can run wordpress (or just post static HTML) yourself? I've run my own email servers, git server, etc myself as a toy.

"Make your own X" works just fine if you're not under concerted illegal attack all the time.

Since blog searching apparently sucks anymore, I've been thinking about writing my own index or something by crawling blogs - many blogs will refer to other blogs, and so on. It's a project I haven't gotten around to yet.

Edit: There is also RSS. Most blogs emit an RSS feed that can be used with something like liferea to glance over what everyone is writing.

 

[Saint Agustin]

https://landchad.net/

Start a website. Discovery must be preceded by existence. Why use someone else's blog platform when you can run wordpress (or just post static HTML) yourself? I've run my own email servers, git server, etc myself as a toy.

"Make your own X" works just fine if you're not under concerted illegal attack all the time.

Since blog searching apparently sucks anymore, I've been thinking about writing my own index or something by crawling blogs - many blogs will refer to other blogs, and so on. It's a project I haven't gotten around to yet.

Edit: There is also RSS. Most blogs emit an RSS feed that can be used with something like liferea to glance over what everyone is writing.

Help me up kiwi fren!

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

The consolidation and collectivization of the internet into a few supersites controlled by tech supergiants has only served to recreate the niggercattle plantation that the media is. Google being the single largest focal point of all internet usage. The search engine which ranges from braindead useless to a blatant trough of manufactured consensus where it seems everyone can agree you cant find jack shit on google anymore with no real viable alternatives (the closest being yandex however not exactly viable for different reasons), and youtube which is the video titan of the internet which ever since the revving up of the censorship engine in the second half of the teens had gone from a legitimate place to find anything from any viewpoint to another channel on cable TV on the surface, and if you dig deep enough you might just find people dancing the line of whats OK to say before getting censored and deplatformed for going against what big tech says the truth is.

Platforms like reddit which was a tumor of a plantation before the web transformed post 2016 had swelled to a terrible size and effectively killed off the small web forum (phones helped with that), Its hard to believe how reddit would be a pioneer for the norm, even more ironic when you learn about Aaron Schwartz and his beliefs which were the polar opposite of what his creation became. The trivial ease to adjust opinion on the site is disgusting and the accidental release that the most active city was a small bumblehick town in florida with a major military installation a decade ago is telling, and somehow it only got worse since then.

The moral crusading that many sites have integrated with their censorship culture is another depressing note in this, Many engaging in censorship and information control do it out of a zealous duty to punish those who step out of line, for an example take a site that has volunteer jannies and how often they become drunk with this power and immediately go on a crusade against the designated wrongthink. Sure you could try to create your own sites to break free from this like gab, bitchute, odysee, and whatever else you can think of, but the network effect is a motherfucker and the inability to get a real critical mass of users effectively screws you.

There is far worse on the horizon I fear with this, european governments enacting blatant censorship laws and now states in the US trying to bring in porn ID verification which I can assure you with total confidence will not stop there, dont you think established politicians arnet salivating at the idea of being able to put their own touch with censorship? Hopes of proper regulation of the web for the free unrestricted flow of information are dismal since I wholly doubt that politicians will act at all in anyones elses interest other than themselves and their highest bidders, as for the upcoming populists I have noticed they often have issues functioning as politicians at all, I doubt they could overcome the establishments lust for information control to re establish the iron grip that the media once had on manufacturing a consensus of public opinion.

Why dont we throw the robotic janny in the mix aswell. The extreme advancement of AI the last few years has shown that it might be capable of functioning as an automated censor, hell we have gotten a taste of that with the aforementioned niggercattleized search engines results, hostile algorithms to direct everyone down a specific path, and automated copyright snitch software is the trial version of full fledged AI censorship, IIRC Microsoft announced they were working on an AI to automatically censor "hateful" images or something to that effect.

One final note, the last half decade has shown the internet isnt this same uncensorable thing it was before at its core roots, sites being taken down for one and entities like cloud flare functioning like a protection racket. If you want a glimpse of what I fear is to come with censorship take a gander at the sagas of josh combating just about everything attempting to kill this place, kefflas and liz fong dong were able to bring more force to bear against this place than I thought possible (I didnt know you could get on a web infrastructure company's shitlist before that autistic fuckfest)

 

[SirCliveSinclairdabbing]

I saw a webring for the first time since the 90's about a year back. It was for far left tyre popping nutters and offgrid microgrid environmentalists but it worked.
Infomation out there and accessible to like minded people.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

I remember accessing the internet back in the 2000s and it was much different from now. I remember going to various different websites well before the established social media and sites like YouTube and Roblox were great for the most part. I am also well aware of the flash animations and flash games on Newgrounds during the 2000s. Wanting to go back to these times would be an understatement. They used to serve an escape from the burdens of modern life which nowadays is the complete opposite with every political discourse seen on the internet getting heated. I've made a few websites back in 2013 but never got back to making them. But even if I do make a website. It would be a pain in the ass to get them indexed by search engines. The vibe seems so dead and even if Social Media ends up getting banned, so many people will have massive troubles having to withdraw from such a stimulation.

 

[TyrasGuard]

Hey, the Internet had a good run, if people think it's dying (like me) then it's a good time to download everything you like and preserve it. Once you have everything you need, just disconnect. Reconnect with your family, friends, nature or your hobbies.

I'm pretty sure someone, sooner or later, is going to carve out their own Internet on some corner somewhere and it will go through the same stages again, perhaps in a better state. Like taking a small part of a dying plant and re-growing it somewhere else. Perhaps people will do a better job at taking care of the Internet 2: Electric Boogaloo.

People have heard this a lot but it is always true, the door is closing but God is also opening the window. I would honestly just leave the demons to their demons eat eachother for whatever scraps remain after I leave. Unlike the people killing it, I don't really need the Internet that much in my life and I'm sure a lot of people here don't need it that badly either.