Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.
It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.
It can be commoditised but it’s hard to gain mindshare against monopolies like Facebook. It doesn’t really cost that much to run a small board / forum / chatgroup.
Heck no.
“Silos” that echo.
Links like that feel like the time I first had access to the Internet. Kinda weird but very very interesting. Thank you.
Full disclosure: I’ve been part of that cluster of communities for a couple years now. Best advice i have to give to anyone is to take their time. The speed of conversation often slows way WAY down.
Basically forums
The thing is that many people, myself included assumed most were dead and cannibalised by Reddit and Facebook groups. Turns out those specialised places have been running continuously on their own pace. Yeah, threads can still span hundreds of pages but in the end going through them makes you an expert on things overnight ;)
Oh my God, the Something Awful forums are still up: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
I would sooner die than join the ranks of SA goons.
No it’s fine, we banned Lowtax
Too little, too late 🤷♂️
And active
Maybe we’ll use newsgroups for actually talking to people again
Arr, those be the high seas now
Yes, but this time deep web forums that are unsearchable/unindexed so that information is lost forever! (Discord, telegram, matrix)actually that might actually be a return to web 1 forums before search engines were giant and all forum seach engines sucked ass 😂
Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.
God I hate discord.
And mailing lists!
Does the Networking Effect suddenly no longer apply to internet applications? Seems like we’re just seeing people gradually migrate from older and less functional applications like Twitter and Facebook over to newer and more functional applications like BlueSky and RedNote.
Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.
Depends on how you measure things. If you pie-chart the internet by bandwidth used, most of it is currently used for TV 2.0 (streaming video, mostly by subscription.)
I really don’t consider streaming services to be the “real” internet. It’s video on demand, and not a communication, socialization and creation space like the rest of the net.
True, but everyone paying for “broadband internet” is paying that premium for the fat pipes to carry video on demand.
The communication, socialization and creation space might use less than 10% of the bandwidth, less than 0.1% if you take video out of it.
And preferably a bit harder to use to keep the script kiddies out.
Most small group forums have manual user validation with very specific questions.
I’ve seen stuff like “what is on the the 5th page of the user guide for this product” along with language/culture specific questions you can’t just easily google on forums that are focused on a specific area
I wasn’t too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.
Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.
now they’re heading to lemmy to do the same thing
meh, lemmy is pretty stagnant from what I have seen, plus you can create your own instance and mostly defederate from a lot of stuff.
The future of internet is you have to ask your government for permission before you can visit foreign websites.
There is no longer “Internet”
It will be suceeded by:
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Freedom Net (where “Antifa” is Banned, and you need a swastica armband to get access)
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Euronet (where UK just left, again)
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United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland(they noped out of the UK, and re-re-joined the EU) -
Putin’s #1 Digital Fan Club
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中华人民解放互联网 (People’s Liberated Internet)
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And that’s it, Canada and Mexico got Invaded by the US; while UK, EU, Russia, China all fought over the remaining of the world
(okay maybe my worldbuilding is ridiculous, but the world is collapsing and I want to write a story about my predictions of the future mm’kay? 😉)
You think the current US would stop at Canada and Mexico?
They wouldn’t.
EU would have to defend Greenland from the USA (and given the already huge amount of US miliary presense, they would probably fail). South America would be a warzone between US and resistance forces funded by EU, but since they also have to fund the defence against Russia, they don’t have the fund to fight two fronts, so they focus more on the EU-Russia front. UK will have to also defend itself from the US military that can launch an attack from Greenland at any moment (good luck, they left the EU lmfao). Russia and China relationship doesn’t do so well and they fight over Mongolia and the “Middle East” (for lack of a better term). Australia joins China as a Special Administrative region because USA gone fascist, and EU is already fighting two fronts, so they eventually got absorbed in China’s sphere of influence. Japan is now a warzone between Vanguardist “Socialist” China, and Fascist USA.
And Taiwan is… wait what’s a “Taiwan”? Oh that boring island that has totally always been under PLA control and totally never had any de facto autonomy under the name ROC, like ever, that Taiwan? Long live CCP! (/s 😉)
(Actually, maybe I should write a story about all this… 👀)
Panama, Greenland, after that might as well take the rest of Central America, move all the people out to the Galapagos Islands and build an all inclusive ocean to ocean resort complex.
I think the future of the internet is darknets for example Veilid.
Unless something’s changed in the last few years, the darknet is too difficult for normies to use.
The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.
First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.
Your worldbuilding is in SciFi classics tier, but it’s missing all of the global South.
Australia is already more locked out, but its Internet can only exist in function of US.
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It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.
Depends on where you live, but in the US I think there will be a sharp divide between two general groups: a minority who put some thought into what they do, and the vast meme-ified masses who accept whatever is laid out for them.
They’re getting so shit people will have no choice. They’re already leaving one alienated group at a time
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
I firmly believe that connecting people to their IRL friends is an important part of the potential of the Internet, as it is shown by Facebook, for example.
But I also believe there are people looking to connect with new people and finding a community where they can express themselves wholly. I think the current Internet is weak in this regard, weaker than it has been before, but I think it’s possible to build a place where people can connect.
I have a friends Discord I set up a year before Covid, and for about a year only 3 people used it, mainly to play some games together.
But when Covid hit, it obviously gained some traction. And now it’s THE place I interact with friends since I’ve long ditched the likes of Facebook.
I keep going back and forth on whether or not to possibly set up a Mastodon server for friends. The hardest part would be convincing people to use it. But it could just be like our little shared space that could still interact with the wider world. It’d be kinda cool to have a Local feed be just people you know in real life.
A small friend group is best suited for chat programs (discord et al.) But if you want to expand the group a mastodon server is a good idea
Pretty much. I should be able tobmake friends with any human on earth with an internet connection. That this is still hard is something we need to fix
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One might suggest that it should have always been that way.
so lemmy.
