toroidalcore

I'll be honest, I'm pretty happy with how the internet is these days, at a low level. I don't recall how fast my family's first cable modem was, but I do remember how much of a leap it was from dialup. I remember when it was hit or miss whether or not someone you spoke to would use the internet. I remember them teaching us about it in school.

Now, it's everywhere. It's part of mobile phone plans, and you can find free Wifi without too much difficulty (and if you trust it). And of course, just about everyone has it in their homes. Fast, too, fiber not being uncommon.

People wax poetically about the old web. What I think, or hope, they're referring to is the days before eg Google search went to pot. When you weren't having a dialog with it, and what search results were there were trying to sell you something. No, this is back when a search would give you a bunch of honest-to-god web pages, probably curated by people who just wanted to document the thing that the subject of them was, and they probably didn't cause your browser to use gobs of RAM too.

I know that stuff is still out there. There are directories of HTML files someone hand-coded, or nearly hand-coded. Or perhaps Wordpress blogs, made by people dedicated to maintaining them for informative purposes. Not SEO, sites that try to get noticed to sell ads or something. There was a time when this wasn't just some big machine to get you to consume.

Big Social Media

People like to communicate, more than they like to touch computers, for the most part. Social networks like Facebook or Twitter and others try to make this easy. They are also businesses. They may not charge for basic service (aside from paying for check marks for Twitter or X or whatever), but they stick ads everywhere and try to analyze what ads will work for you so they can better advertise to you. And that data can of course be used for more nefarious things.

This is sort of how we were promised the engine of capitalism would work. Those entities can make money, and people get something they want. Until they think about it, and maybe grumble about how they're being tracked or advertised to. But Facebook is just too easy! It's got everything right there and you don't have to set any of it up. Just... Create a page, or an event, or post on your wall.

And there's something to it. You can't expect everyone to spin up their own server and CMS for that stuff, even if it's possible to self-host all of it.

The Web

Can you expect people to make web pages again? People still do. The spirit of the old web, where someone got free web space somewhere, perhaps through their ISP, lives on in anyone who posts cat pictures or talks about their niche interests on social media.

And of course, with the Fediverse, maybe we have a compromise: maybe not the greatest user experience, but it's more accessible than publishing HTML files, and it can be self-hosted. Maybe not by everyone, but enough people that you don't have to rely on a big corporation that wants to jack its share price up.

But, I know those pages are still out there. I want to publish them here. You know, an HTML page, static without much crap, that just dives into a specific interest. Maybe your site has a bunch of these, of assorted subjects. Maybe there's an overall theme or subject, or maybe not. Ideally, a search engine would just index it, so someone wouldn't need to know where to go exactly.

So, that's what I miss. Small pages that get to the point. Not dial-up or slow connections, although the idea of eg networking over amateur radio is interesting. Not ditching all the progress we've made, just refining it. And taking it back.

Find me at @toroidalcore@masto.hackers.town