No, the platforms are enshittifiying, but the underlying nuts and bolts of the internet are still there untouched and so far every attempt by big tech to enshittifiy/proprietarize those has thus far failed
The search engines don’t do what they used to do. New sites cannot gain traction without million dollar advertising budgets.
Meh, fuck the search engines, let’s bring back webrings!!
Self hosting:
Let’s go back to dialup and BBS forums over cmd
I’m down but much of the landlines have been converted to VOIP and won’t handle dialup any more :(
I feel like smartphones have just made people “internet lazy” - myself included. The masses just want to get an app and let it accomplish whatever you need, without worrying about any kind of enshitification as long as it’s free.
I hate apps and refuse to use them in almost all cases, unless they’re FOSS or collect little to no data.
It’ll still ‘evolve,’ just not in a pro-user way.
You’re asking that question in one of the places where it will be evolving. The fediverse, or something like it, is the future of the internet.
Never say never. Once the VCs wake up and realize there is no ROI left they will take their billions out of the pool and 90% of companies will struggle to actually create value from a hostile userbase.
I think 90% of the AI investments really have no commercial viability and are being developed to suck up clueless venture capital.
Never is a long time
The internet, no. World Wide Web, unlikely. Commercial domains however have been shit and will continue to enshittify as long as people support their business models.
So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.
I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.
Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?
Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.
I also want to get into ham radio and have been messing with sites like this to scratch the itch for now.
So the answer is no but only because the web is only one part of the internet. Someone somewhere will create a new protocol that we never thought off and start a new service and no I’m not taking about the web3 scam and crypto. Stuff like gemini and tildeverse are pockets of the 90s internet. Still alive and kicking.
See the enshitified hotspots as fly traps for the limp minded. An authentic, simple, commerce free web is still out there, one just needs to look outside of the drivel served up on page one of mainstream search engines
This ‘death of the Internet’ talk really irritates me. It’s not. Stop using the big websites and look for or make your own corner in the Internet.
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