The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
Hopefully the rest of the boring internet will let me read text in the lower half of my screen.
This was a great read. Thank you.
The interesting thing is the fediverse and the tildeverse are extensions of that older internet.
Tildeverse?
Tildeverse.org its a group of servers that are community run that are like shell accounts like you would have back in the day. They are modern OSs but you have an account and you share time on that system like you did with a mainframe.
They have IRC, websites, .plan files for updates via finger, mailing and news servers.
Just did a quick dive on it. It looks, and this is just from a quick search, to be similar to fediverse but likely older than our instances here, and has a basing from old school public access Unix systems. Kinda neat might dive deeper to get better understanding.
I always knew these as Pubnixes which I think is just an older word for Tildeverse
Yeah its a great community over there.
I wonder what that is too. Perhaps that’s ‘today I learned’ but I’m not sure on that.
A tilde is this ~ thingy, but that’s the best I got
The tilde is a shortcut for home in most shells.
I just really enjoyed this essay and wanted to share it. Cheers, nerds.
thank you. reading this article/discovering his other work genuinely might be the best thing I’ve seen all year
The statement that the new commercial veneer is dying needs to be backed up: YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Reddit still drive traffic, despite the slop, and because of the commercialization. Meta and Facebook are doing fine.
I like what he says about the underlying protocols, but it is missing a bit of nuance: Google has been instrumental in the evolution of HTTP; SMTP became a very different game when Google (via Gmail) pushed authentication; DRM made it into browsers thanks to Google and media companies.
Commercial companies may be benefiting from open protocols, but they are also pushing them in new directions. The stack the author remembers still exists, but it has been changed by that commercial “veneer”.
XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.
I am on the same side of the issue as this author and I should be reading this and agreeing. But I disagree with nearly every statement, god this is such a bad essay. I think it does a terrible job of making its case.
The cherry on top for me is the author making a fucking RSS reader… I swear people in this space do not understand why its dying. They keep doing the same things over and over again instead of trying to actually fill the gaps. The solutions back then were solutions for the time, we can take them and improve them.
Ok, that’s the first thing I bookmarked. Whatever that bookmarks functionality is.
