Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.
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You gotta get on the FOSS train.
The fediverse makes me excited. I haven't ran a server in years and now I have two DO droplets running my Lemmy and Matrix instances.
HA and WLED makes me excited. I have already built a bunch of motion activated lights that integrate with my home assistant and I am super keen to get more into microcontroller programming. I want to build my own temperature and humidity sensors.
I also just really enjoy woodworking and expoy crafts and using the internet to demystify advanced techniques is something the world wide web was built for.
In short -- stop making the internet part of your image. Internet personas are not real. Your actual image should feed the internet. Finish projects and brag about them online. That's what we used to call OC.
+1 for FOSS, but it's not easy to do. It's sort of like going vegan. It's great at first, but then you try to go out to eat and it's hard, family gatherings become difficult and political, people start to push meat or question your motives. You still feel good about it because you're doing it "for the animals" or whatever, but you're no longer in the mainstream. While your coworkers all go out to that new steak joint, you're left behind with your bag of broccoli.
To elaborate, look at Lemmy. You can get FOSS apps for your phone to browse Lemmy, but now try to coordinate some event, like your local soccer club using only FOSS. Plenty of folks are content to blindly consume what Zuck or Goog wants them to see and use.
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What is FOSS?
Free and Open-Source Software
Free Open Source Software.
Edit: there is also FLOSS which adds the French "Libre" to include "free as in speech".
In case this wasn't asked sarcastically - Free and Open Source Software.
Or in the case of leaked source Code it's also Forced Open Source Software.