I think what texts like this miss is that the “old internet” isn’t really gone, you just have to look for it a bit harder.
What is really happening is that the internet is eating television, it started with more direct equivalents like Youtube, but it is this general consumption only pattern what makes apps like TikTok popular and which have always existed on TV.
“The act of following another account is impersonal and one-sided. Building meaningful relationships with other people is second to amassing an audience.”
This is an interesting statement. While building two-sided relations is indeed very important, it often also is the case that i follow people because they post for example interesting content i want to follow. That person just cant follow everybody back but still provide meaningfull information to lots of people.
Even in the days of yore of the internet the old 90:9:1 ratio applied, so ignoring the vast majority of users that only lurk is a mistake I think.
And I suppose it is fine that not everybody interacts. They still do something with that knowledge only not publicly. Imagine if those 99% also start interacting. I suppose a community will become messy and people will stop interacting at the end because they don’t feel heard because some people overshadow then with their voice.
Webpage from 1986 which still is online https://www.vortex.com no ads, no trackers, no spying, no keylogging, no fingerprinting, few resources. Good old times.
If you like stuff like this you might want to check out the Gemini protocol. The internet, distilled to its basics. I really like it. There are even mirrors of some regular sites like Wikipedia for it.
Webpage from 1986 which still is online
that is particularly incredible since the web wasn’t invented until several years later :)
More https://thoughtcatalog.com/jeremy-london/2018/09/oldest-websites-on-the-internet/
There are older ones, but offlineWebpages before also exists, but there are no Http, they must be direct adressed and with specific computers because of different formats. Webpages exists since first internet conections between universities and goverments first, everyone with its own format.
Google by then still two little boys playing soccer.
They foundet it in 1998, becoming evil some years later. Today most webpages contain more ads and tracker scripts as content.
There are older ones
Nope. The World Wide Web was initially conceived in 1989, developed in 1990, and first made available to the public in 1991. The page about the project from 1991 is often described as “the first web page” and it is certainly the oldest one that is still online today. See also this list of websites founded before 1995.
Most web pages use domain names in their URLs (though they can also use an IP address instead…) but domain names are not web pages. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of domain names registered in the 80s that host websites today, but that doesn’t make them webpages from the 80s because there is no such thing.
but there are no Http, they must be direct adressed and with specific computers because of different formats. Webpages exists since first internet conections between universities and goverments first, everyone with its own format
If it isn’t using at least one of the two basic web technologies (HTML and HTTP) then it isn’t a “web page”. Things using predecessors to the web such as Gopher (released just a few months earlier in 1991) or FTP (which began in 1971) are not called “web pages” or “websites”; they have other names (such as their protocol name followed by the suffix site or server).
tldr: that “oldest websites” page you’re linking to is promulgating their own misunderstanding of terminology.
as was often said on newsgroups… HTH, HAND.
That’s a case against society and capitalism then; that’s what the Web has become a mirror of. This piece should have proposed alternatives (fediverse?, Gemini?), solutions…
I think the purpose of this piece is simply to bring people to the prerequisite of agreeing that the existing internet must change. As soon as you propose the solutions to that you risk them rejecting that the existing internet is a problem entirely simply due to ideological reasons.
this is basically why they invented gemini
This. Here’s a great talk about Gemini and the Small Web:
https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internetIt was already posted here:
https://szmer.info/post/95405
