# Reply on Leaving the Web, and More Thoughts on the AI Mess

Lucio [0] sent me a nice email about my post on leaving the web [1],
telling me of his reply on his own gopherhole [2]. I really like his
description of gopher:

    I don't know if you've seen any of those Christmas movies[3]
    where you can see the typical hotel of the big hotel chain,
    completely standardized and impersonal, vs the village's small
    family hotel.  In the end the family hotel always wins because
    it is much more welcoming, people are nicer and the air you
    breathe is healthier and quieter. To me, Gopher is that
    village's family hotel, much more welcoming and nice than the
    standardized hotel that the web is.
    ...
    Compared to the web, Gopher is an eternal Christmas on the
    Internet.

Meanwhile, I seem to have the AI bots under control for now on my
little RPG forum, but the AI-craziness continues in other ways. I
keep hoping for a crash soon, as it seems like AI adoption is out of
control. Colleagues at work tell me "I asked ChatGPT about that,
and...", at which point I stop listening, because you can't trust
anything "factual" spit out by an LLM. I'm not sure how that is not
obvious at this point.

But the search engines _really_ want you to rely on the AI-generated
nonsense they are spitting out at the very top of your search
results, which is just increasing decentralisation of the web. All
the big players want you to just interact with their AI's, and go
nowhere else.

It sure doesn't seem like this model is sustainable for very long,
as the outside data sources decrease in number and quality. If I had
a commercial website, why would I publish on the web at my own
expense, just to feed someone else's AI model for free and not even
get visits from search engines anymore? And if I was losing revenue,
I would lay off human workers and generate some or all of my content
with LLMs. The AI-bots would then begin to feed on their own
garbage. If you're already big enough, you can go full paywall,
and/or make an agreement with the big search engines to allow them
to scrape you for money (what Reddit does). This just kills the
smaller sites, and again hurts decentralisation. This is not even
taking into account the externalities - the huge power and hardware
requirements of these AI models. All while we live in a world that
has made itself reliant on the commercial web. What a mess.

The good news in all of this is that smaller search engines are
still responsibly indexing the non-commercial web of homepages,
blogs and forums, and of course we have gopher and gemini, and they
have their own search engines and aggregators. So the small web is
still alive and well, and may be experiencing some growth due to
people's unhappiness with the current state of affairs.

[0]: gopher://lucio.albenga.es/
[1]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/thinknix/glog/goodbye-web.md
[2]: gopher://lucio.albenga.es/0/lfa/en/phlog/2025/1016-gopher_an_eternal_christmas_on_the_internet.txt