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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

(cheapskatesguide.org)
622 points ColinWright | 9 comments | 25 Jan 22 22:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.469s | source | bottom
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kstrauser ◴[25 Jan 22 22:58 UTC] No.30079330[source]▶
I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.

That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.

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1. amelius ◴[25 Jan 22 23:25 UTC] No.30079596[source]▶
The thing that is missing in the DIY website space is discoverability.

Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations.

(In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)

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2. dvtrn ◴[25 Jan 22 23:53 UTC] No.30079834[source]▶
Which is why I wish the webmention had taken off more than it did

https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

3. zozbot234 ◴[25 Jan 22 23:56 UTC] No.30079850[source]▶
We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common. Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life. This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse, if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group. https://www.w3.org/annotation
4. kradeelav ◴[26 Jan 22 00:08 UTC] No.30079967[source]▶
Why not, with web-rings?

I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.

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5. burrows ◴[26 Jan 22 00:57 UTC] No.30080310[source]▶
I think it’s all missing forums, places (both public and private) where people from different “home servers” can communicate.
6. warkdarrior ◴[26 Jan 22 01:00 UTC] No.30080334[source]▶
Web-rings are linked lists, slow to navigate. Google gives you hashtable access to the web.
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7. MereInterest ◴[26 Jan 22 01:18 UTC] No.30080441{3}[source]▶
Slow to navigate, but far less vulnerable to corruption. Each link was intentionally made by a human, vouching for its integrity and usefulness. Each link is followed only if I trust a site enough to believe its recommendation.
8. sseagull ◴[26 Jan 22 01:38 UTC] No.30080574{3}[source]▶
Slow to navigate, but amenable to “browsing” and finding related pages and sites. Think of it as a built-in recommendation engine.
9. hypertele-Xii ◴[26 Jan 22 09:34 UTC] No.30083499{3}[source]▶
Maybe being slow to navigate is actually a feature, standing against the endless algorithmic torrent of 5 second tiktok videos and meme doomscrolling.

You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.