That’s the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be…Yes, I’m making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I’m very sorry!
I don’t ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.
In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you’ll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there’s no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.
Let say you made your own claymation animations. If people go to your own site, they get no ads, and can choose to buy merch from you if they like. However, a common issue for a creator like that would be content thieves with an ad plan. They’d reupload to YouTube, claim it as their own, monetize ads, and maybe the people who see the first animations there don’t even hear about new ones. It’s a bad deal for everyone now (not even YouTube’s fault - it’s the fault of the number of bots, DDOS tools, and click farms on the internet)
That’s the spirit! One of the great things about the Internet is we can build our own alternatives, like with Lemmy and DIY servers. My friends and I have our own little Internet ecosystem. Outside of some Lemmy time, my personal Internet usage is largely served by our arrangement.
I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.
I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.
I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.
I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.
If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.
I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.
I would really like to hear from people who are not web developers or creating software and firmware. I believe the experience for the large mass of humanity is so much less than the potential it had back in the day. Yes AOL existed but it truly was the low end of the scale. It’s not like there was people who did web development software and firmware and then everybody else was on AOL. However, it is a lot like that now. The people who are smart who are savvy who can find what they’re looking for in spite of the barriers put up to finding that still enjoy the freedom and the cheap plentiful access that they’re looking for. But you have to be able to get to it using command line level language and most ordinary users don’t have anything like geocities to allow them to produce a website about their model trains.
It’s indeed a utopia for the technically savvy. And that’s it.
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That’s the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be…Yes, I’m making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I’m very sorry!
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I don’t ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.
In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you’ll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there’s no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.
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I miss that old internet.
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Why do you want the traffic to specifically go to your own server? That’s reasoning backward imo.
Let say you made your own claymation animations. If people go to your own site, they get no ads, and can choose to buy merch from you if they like. However, a common issue for a creator like that would be content thieves with an ad plan. They’d reupload to YouTube, claim it as their own, monetize ads, and maybe the people who see the first animations there don’t even hear about new ones. It’s a bad deal for everyone now (not even YouTube’s fault - it’s the fault of the number of bots, DDOS tools, and click farms on the internet)
So it is a matter of copyrights and making money out of it…
That’s the spirit! One of the great things about the Internet is we can build our own alternatives, like with Lemmy and DIY servers. My friends and I have our own little Internet ecosystem. Outside of some Lemmy time, my personal Internet usage is largely served by our arrangement.
What do you use as a Google Photos replacement?
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Immich is good alternative
It was discussed here recently.
I imagine you weren’t old enough to remember the early days of the Internet and the hopes we had. Maybe I’m wrong.
I am, and as a former Unix admin, I’m also amazed at how easy self hosting is these days. Hopefully it continues to grow. It certainly seems to be.
Docker is amazing haha.
I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.
I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.
I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.
I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.
If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.
I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.
I would really like to hear from people who are not web developers or creating software and firmware. I believe the experience for the large mass of humanity is so much less than the potential it had back in the day. Yes AOL existed but it truly was the low end of the scale. It’s not like there was people who did web development software and firmware and then everybody else was on AOL. However, it is a lot like that now. The people who are smart who are savvy who can find what they’re looking for in spite of the barriers put up to finding that still enjoy the freedom and the cheap plentiful access that they’re looking for. But you have to be able to get to it using command line level language and most ordinary users don’t have anything like geocities to allow them to produce a website about their model trains.
It’s indeed a utopia for the technically savvy. And that’s it.