[HN Gopher] How to make the internet small again
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How to make the internet small again
Author : walterbell
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-02-14 06:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raptitude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raptitude.com)
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Part of what the author ignores here, is the always-on
| expectation of you by other users. If they send you a WhatsApp
| message, and you don't reply within minutes, or your 'last seen'
| timestamp is hours/days ago... they'll panic, convinced that
| you've falling down a ravine or something.
|
| For those thinking of trying this experiment, I would recommend
| briefing your whole social circle beforehand.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I've unintentionally run this experiment my entire adult life.
| I'm an unreliable responder and people who message me already
| know that. Still, I've filtered out (intentionally or
| otherwise) people who expect prompt responses to low-
| criticality chats.
| deergomoo wrote:
| "The internet was small compared to your real life, which was
| something that happened offline."
|
| Perhaps the author is more extroverted than me (almost certainly,
| actually), but I find this interesting. What attracted me to the
| internet as a kid in the early 2000s was just how huge it was
| even then.
|
| Sure, you had to go looking for stuff rather than having it
| shovelled in front of you en masse, but there was such an
| enormous world of weird little creations that had nowhere else to
| exist. Stuff to see and people to speak to that I simply never
| would be able to otherwise.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think you're misinterpreting the title, which admittedly is
| misleading.
|
| It's not the internet itself being small, rather your exposure
| to it. In simpler times, you'd lead your normal "offline" life
| during the day and then at night one would have "computer
| time".
|
| Now life is pretty much only "computer time", all day long.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent
| reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went
| viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass
| media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections
| in public spaces; the "streets" were important.
|
| I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers
| in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I
| still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online
| figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance
| and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen).
| With these experiences, making the internet small again might
| be possible.
|
| Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That
| one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the
| nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to
| walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers
| they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace,
| that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little
| creations" will have to go...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > nothing went viral
|
| Things didn't have societal impact, but viral was things were
| there at least since the 90's. Normally dumb jokes like that
| email propagating virus that instructed you to scratch all
| your disks and forward the email to all your contacts.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent
| reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went
| viral, nothing had societal impact.
|
| Memes could easily go viral on big decentralized platforms
| like Usenet, even in the early days. And their real-world
| impact increased gradually over the 1990s and 2000s, before
| reaching current levels with the mainstream adoption of smart
| mobile phones for Internet access, and big social media sites
| "pivoting" to take advantage of such.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| To me the internet felt bigger in the early 2000s than today. I
| went to more individual web sites than I do now, though they
| had less on them, and there was more diversity in how
| individual sites looked than today.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I agree with you. Instead of being four sites incessantly
| reposting from the other three, it was an adventure to type
| in random dictionary words and append .com just to see what
| lay on the other end. Perhaps even .net if you felt
| adventurous.
|
| These days, doing that gives the impression that the only
| options for random surfing are porn, SaaS businesses, and ad-
| filled parking pages. The porn and parking pages have always
| been with us: it's the directly commercial nature of the
| remains that soured me from surfing like I did in middle
| school.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Gemini space has been my most interesting discovery in 2022. It
| seems to have the potential to deliver what most people say they
| want from a progressive "small internet" ie. not a nostalgic "old
| internet".
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Gemini space? What is this?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| mattlondon wrote:
| I was reluctant to get involved with Gemini initially - it
| seemed like Gopher had already existed and could benefit from a
| revival, rather than someone creating something new (after all,
| Gopher+ actually offers some good possibilities for doing more
| modern things, and TLS support is now ubiquitous in gopher even
| if not officially in the spec)
|
| Upon reading some more about Gemini though - especially
| solderpunk's "ponderings" phlog entries (https://gopher.floodga
| p.com/gopher/gw?=zaibatsu.circumlunar....) that I grew to
| appreicate where gemini came from - a considered criticism of
| where gopher has not aged well. Gemini has grown to address
| some of those short comings and that is actually quite nice,
| and the main driving force for it came from an active user of
| gopher already so that seemed nice.
|
| What I do find a bit annoying is gemini-the-protocol vs gemini-
| the-philosophy. E.g. there was a client (I forget the details -
| sorry) that introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a
| few people lost their shit about it. Nothing was wrong with the
| favicon thing - it was totally legit use of the gemini protocol
| but people were angry about just the concept of a client making
| requests that they felt did not fit their view of what gemini
| "means", with various threats about blocking all users/IPs that
| made requests for a favicon etc.
|
| I find this viewpoint from "small internet" proponents fairly
| sad and annoying. If the protocol allows it, who are they to
| say what is right or proper and what is not? It makes me want
| to write a gemini client that supports styling and some sort of
| "GeminiObjectModel" and javascript support purely out of
| principle/trolling-lolz :-)
| foxfluff wrote:
| > E.g. there was a client (I forget the details - sorry) that
| introduced the concept of a unicode "favicon" and a few
| people lost their shit about it.
|
| Here's the whole story: https://github.com/makeworld-the-
| better-one/amfora/issues/19...
|
| I wish the ML archive linked down there weren't dead, sigh.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It is on archive.org - https://web.archive.org/web/20210513
| 001351/lists.orbitalfox....
| foxfluff wrote:
| Yes, that message is, but the rest of the thread isn't.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Gemini itself is quite silly though - the "tech" is just the
| modern equivalent of a hairshirt. You could easily have
| similarly lightweight sites on a modern HTTP(S)+HTML5 platform.
| It'd be nice if there was a social norm that all 'Gemini sites'
| must always be provided as both, without the user having to
| fiddle with proxy sites, "alternative clients" or whatever.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| I think you've hit the nail on the head here. What's needed
| is a HTML-Lite specification that can be used to drive the
| 'small' web. No need for bespoke clients - totally
| accessible. It would also allow older machines to access it
| as well.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| HTML5 could easily be that specification. Clients could be
| set to ignore not just JavaScript but even CSS
| automatically (this can easily be done in current
| Firefox!), and a separate social mechanism could be used to
| certify sites as "working properly" when doing this. This
| would be a meaningful way to make "Gemini-equivalent" near
| mainstream, in a way that Gemini itself will likely never
| be.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| I don't disagree that this is one approach, but I don't
| think we can wholly rely on end users to do this. If
| small site owners start using this defined 'lite'
| specification with some sort of visual cue (bring back
| those little GIFs! 'Proudly built as "WebLite"') we may
| be able to start a grass roots movement.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, "works properly when ignoring CSS" could just be
| used as a convenient objective standard for "lite", that
| obviates the need for an incompatible spec altogether.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Thanks for linking to this. It looks like something I've been
| looking for if I understand it properly. It would be neat to
| have a barebones OS running on a tiny computer that you could
| access a simplified internet.
| foxfluff wrote:
| I'm hoping I could find a community interested in.. I don't
| want to say exactly "low tech" computing but I guess the idea
| is pretty close. Cheap microcontrollers today are incredibly
| powerful.
| anthk wrote:
| Alpine Linux, sacc and cgnml as Gopher/Gemini clients.
| CWM+Urxvt as the only X interface, because Gemini uses
| Unicode and the framebuffer support is not that complete.
| Alpine should be installed with a diskless/RAM mode, so
| there are no FS changes commited unless you do an "lbu
| commit -d".
|
| Once you set up sacc, cgnml, and nsxiv for pictures, (and
| maybe moc for music) there's nothing much more to save.
|
| On hw basis, maybe an RPI B+ with a tiny display. Done.
| mro_name wrote:
| The Low-Tech-Magazine proposes a speed limit to the internet:
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-r...
|
| High speed wipes out distances and dramatically increases
| pressure. Both in real (topology!) and cyber.
| anthk wrote:
| Gemini and Gopher/Usenet/IRC would perfectly work under
| "dataless" phone connections where the speed is capped to 128k.
| I tried it and it worked as fast as a fiber connection.
| numlock86 wrote:
| That's what we have at most places in Germany an it works
| pretty good. (provided you have access at all) /s
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Worse is the unpredictability ... my family in a 150-souls-
| village in the middle of nowhere got FTTH a few weeks ago.
| Meanwhile, I am happy to get 6 MBit/s in central Berlin.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's pretty easy to understand though: that 150 soul
| village is in the middle of a much less dense area than the
| heart of Berlin, so a line that would pretty much always be
| saturated in Berlin will have plenty of capacity left in
| that small village.
|
| For the best - and cheapest - bandwidth: total deregulation
| of telcos. Like what happened in Romania, which has the
| cheapest and best connectivity of any European country.
| Which really isn't what you'd expect.
| tomatodevice wrote:
| I'm not sure if I prefer a slow ftth deployment or the
| spaghetti cabling of hell from Bucharest streets. There
| must be a way to do it correctly...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Last I lived there (2015) it was very well organized and
| more reliable than most other infrastructure in Romania.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've had a nagging idea to knock together a small app (using a
| WebView, MacOS) that takes you to, for example, Hacker News and
| that's it.
|
| No URL text field where you can type in a different address --
| perhaps a just back button. In other words, a wildly gimped web
| browser to keep my surfing much, much more focused.
|
| I have no idea if I can trust myself to stick to just launching
| that app in the morning, leaving aside the standard browser. I'm
| not sure if a diet of only HN is smart or right or would make me
| happier.
|
| Just a thought I've had.
| orang2tang wrote:
| This would also be good for something like
| https://search.marginalia.nu/ where the results you'll get are
| mostly text-based.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Great search engine but it makes it depressingly clear how
| many text content sites are just forgotten "last updated:
| 2005" zombie sites still humming along only because nobody
| remembered to take them offline.
|
| Though, through it I found that Neocities has a great "indie
| web" community. Good for them.
| orang2tang wrote:
| I bought an iBook G4 1.33ghz single-core with 512mb of RAM and
| 40gb spinning disk to use as my daily driver. It's perfect for
| reading Wikipedia and other text-based sites and I just found a
| really good Bible program specifically made for OSX 10.4. I feel
| very focused as I don't get side-tracked by YouTube because I
| can't run it! I almost never program outside of work unless I
| have an idea for something so I put my more powerful Macbook in
| the closet!
|
| It has definitely brought adventure back to the internet for me
| instead of the YouTube algorithm kicking my ass every day
| recommending stuff that I NEED to watch.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| How do you get a modern browser on Tiger these days? As far as
| I know TenFourFox is no longer maintained and nobody forked it
| either.
| mmphosis wrote:
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/interwebppc-browser-
| a-r...
| orang2tang wrote:
| Thanks for this!
| orang2tang wrote:
| I found a version of TenFourFox that has the moniker "7450"
| which you can find in their historical releases
| https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/. I wasn't
| expecting it to work and then it just did.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| That's surprising! I'm a big fan of Tiger and that era of
| Apple hardware (I have another project in mind to cram a TB
| of storage into an iPod Mini) though it's a wonder that
| TenFourFox went on as long as it did really. Maintaining
| something as complex as a modern web browser for long-
| obsolete hardware sounds like a gargantuan task, I'd love
| to be involved in keeping it going but I think it'd be
| above my ability to meaningfully contribute to.
| smdyc1 wrote:
| I've managed to largely unplug myself from the unrewarding miasma
| of Facebook by doing this. This has inspired me to go further.
| ziggus wrote:
| The internet is never going to be 'small' again. You can choose
| to deny the changing reality of the modern internet and stick
| your head in the sand, but it's going to be apps and
| centralization from here on out. Maybe DeFi will have some impact
| on moving the modern internet in a different direction, but
| indulging in nostalgia for the 'good old days' of Gopher and NNTP
| mean you're not contributing to the betterment of the current
| internet.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| If "the current internet" is centralisation and company
| control, then I don't want to contribute to the betterment of
| it. So this sounds like a win-win.
| charliepark wrote:
| Although he hasn't written up his report yet on his blog, he
| notes on Twitter: "For now I'll say it was three of the most
| enjoyable days I've had in a long time, and that I'm never going
| back to using the internet every day".
|
| (https://twitter.com/DavidDCain/status/1491156943440064512)
| 6510 wrote:
| Before the internet I use to joke that if humans had slightly
| better memory and slightly more intellect we would sit on the
| sofa and stare at the wall all day.
|
| There use to be a guy on youtube who decided to document his
| dreams as they were getting surprisingly weird. He would fly out
| of his body towards the sun where many kinds of creatures lived.
| They had invited him, had incredibly long life spans and vastly
| superior intellect. When he brought up their intelligence they
| laughed and said there were many species with much greater
| intellect than theirs, above them many layers with more and more
| intelligent species. Each would feel dumb by comparison with the
| layer above. "We are undeveloped enough to show an interest in
| humans." Those above look at you like you look at ants. They then
| took him to an artifact or learning device left behind by truly
| sophisticated life forms. It looked like a book to him because
| humans think of books as containers of knowledge. He was allowed
| to look at the book from far far away and told not to get closer.
| His mind raged with thoughts and visions. What happens if I get
| closer? Then the book absorbs you. You will acquire so much
| information you wont be able to recall what little you knew
| before today. You would no longer exist. Only a few of the sun
| dwellers got close enough to touch it but it took hundreds of
| years to let the information sink in.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| By including a time cost to every link on a page that legitimate
| creators are willing to pay but cripples content farms.
|
| A simple cryptographic signature that takes, say, 1 hour on
| commodity hardware to calculate. Good bye SEO spam.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hello cryptographic signature computing botnet...
| anthk wrote:
| Gopher, Gemini and Usenet fetching news with the spooling method.
| Done.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Lent is coming up, which, culturally, is a good time to do weird
| things. I tend to disconnect from the internet for those 40 days,
| though the past two years have been a bit less-disconnecty than I
| prefer, with Covid and all (especially 2020, with all the
| shutdowns and such working their way through). I just use it
| minimally, for work, and basic communications with some people,
| but quit forums and most other things for that period.
|
| It's quite healthy, and I absolutely encourage it for anyone
| interested in the space to better understand their online usage
| and such.
| lariati wrote:
| So he is basically going to get bored and binge watch shows on
| Netflix for 3 days.
|
| The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is
| as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too
| much time and space in your brain.
|
| Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the
| problems will go away.
|
| No one is doomscrolling arXiv.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _The irony to me is I would think curating a website like
| that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up
| way too much time and space in your brain._
|
| I find the opposite, actually. I use my blog to offload
| projects from my brain, knowing that if there was anything
| weird about whatever project I'm doing, I would have documented
| it in the writeup. So it's a public presence, but also an
| external storage for projects. I frequently use it for my own
| reference later, and at least some other people read it too.
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