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Long ago, when I first got on the Internet, the big social media forum was Usenet. It was a distributed network of instances where users would have an account on a particular instance, where they could subscribe to “newsgroups” dedicated to particular topics. Their instance would broadcast their posts to a newsgroup to all the other instances that were following that newsgroup, so everyone could interact even if they were on different instances.
Then the World Wide Web grew, and centralized sites like Digg and Reddit appeared that handled the same sort of social media. Usenet faded. It’s still around, I suppose, though these days last I checked it’s largely a mechanism for distributing pirated files.
Someday those centralized sites might also fade. Who knows, maybe a decentralized system like Usenet might grow again to replace it?
The wheel turns.
So Usenet was the first fedi site? Reassuring that the concept predates the current paradigm and still has legs, however niche it is atm.
Sort of. It predated the web, so calling it a “site” is wrong. Just like you can have an email application that’s completely separate from your web browser, you can have a Usenet client that’s also its own thing. Of course, people made web-based clients as time went on.
Your ISP ran a Usenet server that connected to other Usenet servers. The biggest problem with this system was that your ISP would automatically delete posts past a certain age. Following old threads was a pain.
Google Groups started as a Usenet archive where messages were kept forever. Google bought them and turned it into what it is now.
That’s why almost no ISP is offering it anymore. No one made money from it, so dump it, maybe try to squeeze some cash out of those hwo really want it but better just drop it.
No, it was every service replicating all posts in groups it served.
Like FTP mirrors of FOSS software, there are plenty of mirrors of Debian, for example. Except far bigger traffic.
I mean, sort of? It was decentralized because that was just the nature of the early net, rather than a conscious choice to avoid governments and corporations censoring you. They simply didn’t have anything like the net we have today.
That’s fair. I forgot briefly that fediverse has that political side lol but meant more the technology of “broadcasting” and inter-site communications. Seems a better comparison than email at least.
Yeah, Usenet was structured that way more for practical reasons than political ones. Local users were truly local, as in you usually connected to a server that was geographically close to you. Often it was on the same university campus you were on. The long-distance connections between servers didn’t have the bandwidth for everyone to just be freely hopping around browsing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, at least not at first, so mirroring the content was a better approach. It also made things much more reliable, the servers didn’t need 100% uptime.
Usenet was a lot more “trusting” in its structure. The newsgroups didn’t have moderators per se, and they weren’t hosted by specific instances; they were more just a “tag” you could add to a post to let people filter which subjects they were interested in seeing. There was a globally agreed upon list of newsgroups and a distributed system for creating new ones, but it was all pretty informal. Wouldn’t work well in the current Internet, it’d get spammed to death in seconds. But on the surface level it really felt a lot like the modern Fediverse does, with subject-specific groups and threaded discussions and such.
Userboards, newsgroups, irc chat
As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
Gopher was not the original protocol of the web but an alternative to HTTP/hypertext. It didn’t get the same traction, however, and has practically been dead for decades.
The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.
If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.
Back to dial up internet and BBS
I see a lot of potential for it to push people back to the small web too. Lots of people becoming interested in personal blogs lately, decentralized social media, the whole indie web movement, etc.
Just started mine! In plain html/txt. Just for fun. Eventually get rss up and running.
Hell yeah! I’ve been blogging for a couple years but I just use Micro.blog. I’d like to switch to something completely self hosted one of these days though.
I just spun up my own Ghost blog, being self-hosted and interacts with the Fediverse. Plus it’s pretty without me needing to know how.
I’ve been really curious about Ghost lately! I set it up in a container on pikapods not too long ago but I ended up staying on Micro.blog. Something I really liked that I had no idea about beforehand was that they have their own little Discover feed over there right? It felt too serious for me when I mostly run an old school link/microblog kinda blog and it seems SO optimized for mailing lists and subscribers
Yeah, there is a lot of focus on getting your site out, but I just ignore all that part. I just wanted a nice place to self-host my travels without having to think much about it and it seems to fit that bill. But yeah, there is a place to discover other feeds and to comment on other people’s posts from the Fediverse and what not.
nice! I took a look at all the options…
and decided that its all too much. wordpress get hacked daily. writefreely wouldn’t install. And some of the other centralized services kinda suck. So im back to old: nginx with a director filled with txt files haha.
Ill publish as time goes on and by interest. Ill take a look at micro.blog too. But im thinking I might create a neocities at some point just for the fun of it.
Neocities isn’t a bad option tbh. I haven’t used it in a minute but if you’re thinking about neocities I really really liked bearblog.dev too!
I got 1gbps internet (symmetrical) and a raspberry pi cluster… running my own Wordpress never made more sense… AND that botch should scale!
You’re comfortable port forwarding onto your own network?
Yes, My home network setup is a bit complicated but I am using Pfsense so I have things on separate vlans with internal firewall rules to reduce risks.
All traffic in on port 443 is routed from Cloudflare to an NginX reverse proxy which decides how to connect back into my network for things
Years ago I would just run a server on the network with 443, 80 and 22 exposed directly to the world and never had any major issues. (Other than the normal automated attacks trying to gain shell access over SSH)
Gotcha, vlan setup sounds like the best possible way to do it, I don’t trust my security skills at all, 22 with fail2ban is about as far as I trust myself!
The hammering 22 gets is astonishing though.
I’ve been seeing a slow but steady movement that direction too
You got links? Ive been working on something that fits right into this, too. It’s time, y’all.
Definitely. The conditions that created this version of the web have been gone for some time now. We’ve gone from connections that were temporarily and required hours to download a few minutes of postage stamp sized video. To always on connections capable of streaming multiple HD streams faster than real time in both directions.
For my part I’m also looking in to purchasing and trying to set up a small Adhoc mesh Halow network and running a few services on it for myself and any others in the neighborhood that are interested. A small, free (after the hardware) anarchist wireless network. 16mbps can do a lot with simple services, etc.Plus, if a number of people in the area decided to adopt and contribute more nodes to the mesh, you could go faster still.
That sounds like a fantastic way to go. You might also look at meshtastic.
It’s a much different use case, being for text messaging and stuff like that only. But, while it may be low bandwidth, it’s still incredibly interesting.
I jumped on Meshtastic but found it got too congested with noise in a medium-sized city making it difficult to get much out there. Switched to Meshcore and have had a much better time communicating. Seattle’s full on made it equivalent to SMS, which makes me jealous. But YMMV 🤷🏼♂️
What preset were you using at the time? I know that longfast is not the best preset for larger networks that have a lot of users.
Personally, open source matters to me much more than the speed or congestion or whatever, which is why I chose meshtastic. Because the mesh core, foam applications are not open source.
Until there is an open source version, I absolutely refuse to touch it. I know that the underlying software is open source, but without having open source interfaces, I’m still refusing to touch it.
https://reticulum.network/ is also pretty good for small info packets. Does a LOT more than meshtastic…but its VERY difficult to set up. Or at least it was for me.
Its a pipe dream but having small internet without a major ISP would be fantastic. But it will never happen as it is. Friends are thinking of creating a meshnet though just for fun.
Yes, the bandwidth would be the damper there. It’s great for transmitting just a little bit of data, long distances. But for any sort of bigger data we transmit regularly on phones and desktop. It becomes unfeasible, even low resolution images.It definitely has a range benefit, though that’s for sure.I think fellow Missourian Jeff Geerling had a video out a while back where he talked about using it to contact people below his flight on the way to open sauce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
The 90-minute live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS, which demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
In 1968
How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>,<a href=""></a>, and<h1></h1>anymore, for example.<blink>Welcome to my web page under construction</blink>That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you’re correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
BBS ARE THE WEB GUYS
The community noticeboard at the general store is the web! /s
That depends on how you define the web
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)
This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.
Why Gofer when Gemini?
I sympathize, but Gopher is designed against hypertext (inline links in text). It is impossible to have e.g. Wikipedia transmitted over Gopher.
I would argue that’s not quite correct. You can absolutely transfer HTML files over gopher, but you’re not going to be viewing it in the gopher program.It was very much designed to be what most people would be more familiar with in concept as an FTP server today, almost. Pretty much all you could view in app were plain text files. and no links between. Everything else was a directory of files to be downloaded.
Gemini is definitely a bit of an inbetween. It does allow for linking between documents, but otherwise keeps everything simple and small, much like Gopher did.
I much prefer browsing the web instead of 2-clicking within each FTP path. (If you built a client to 2-click that for you then that’s just the HTTP web with extra steps.)
Impossible? gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1
on mobile rn, how well does that do inline links?
It doesn’t at all. It’s just text content. They could have put all the links at the end as a menu I guess, but it doesnt even have that.
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I still think the web took a wrong turn when NCSA Mosaic first stated supporting inline images.
Gemini space baby! What’s old is new again.
Meh.
I converted my blog from WordPress to a static site generator using Gemini’s version of Markdown as the base format, and then hosted both HTTP and Gemini versions.
I later took down the Gemini version. The web site remains as static HTML driven by (a variation of) Markdown. No cookies, no JS, limited CSS. Even took out some old YouTube
<iframe>tags and converted them to straight links to videos. Doing it this way does everything anyone would want out of Gemini without having to use a specialized client.We should be promoting some kind of browser extension that flags a site as having no cookies and no JS.
I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.
Fuck yes.
I get what the video is saying, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. We moved on from many of those services because we found better ways to do things, or at least ways that we liked more. And when we move on from the services we use now, it’ll be because we once again found something we liked better.
The internet has died several times, but each time it came back in some new way that had adapted to the new ideas and ways we came up with on how to interact with each other. I’m sure when it dies next, we’ll replace it with something that better fits our changing wants and needs.
And hopefully, when that time comes, it’s something much more decentralized and resilient against governments and corporations meddling and censoring us.
…and YouTube is one of the major reasons. The web’s not a fucking TV and if you’re using it as a TV you’ll get stupid even faster than from watching actual TV.
Wouldn’t that depend on what you’re watching?
You can watch reality TV on YouTube, or traditional television.
You can watch educational content and documentaries on YouTube, or traditional television.
Hell you can watch some traditional TV shows on YouTube or traditional television.
YouTube is just a platform for hosting content. Now they may have a “better” algorithm compared to traditional television, but that doesn’t really change much.
Well, have a look what content is getting the most views. I had no idea someone could be that stupid.
Well, have a look what TV show is getting the highest ratings. I had no idea someone could be that stupid.
I’ve heard this argument for like 30 years. Everything old is new again.
Aside: what’s the gist of this channel? I’m not really familiar with it but the last few things I’ve seen of it appear to be two brothers communicating to each other via vlogs?
Pretty much, vlogs as if it were two people communicating back and forth via message. Hank is a really smart dude and also works on the SciShow channel, and his videos are generally pretty good/insightful IMO.
The Green brothers are interesting and thoughtful. They try to be an overall positive influence on the internet, even aside from their vlogbrothers thing.
just general vlogs about their interests
im ded guys
*This comment will eventually become accurate.
