All walled gardens, none of the democratization we know now
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
Now, the web is basically a giant funnel into six monolithic corporate controlled websites (ie. Walled gardens). Enshittification has ensued and the fun has ended.
I pine for the days when you would log on to BBSes to have genuine discussions about niche hobbies and topics. It didn’t matter who you were as your only identity was your username; you could be whatever you wanted.
Now, the web is overflowing with millions of desperate, near identical 19 year olds shilling for BoredVPN while showing their arse cracks for fake internet points and sponsorship money.
Lemmy / Mastodon is the first platform in a VERY long time which has the same feeling as those early days and I really, really hope it sticks around.
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.
Usenet was for geeks who didn’t want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.
I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters “bbs” to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now — reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.
People didn’t want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.
Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they’d be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.
And again, I’m not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody’s going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
Now, the web is basically a giant funnel into six monolithic corporate controlled websites (ie. Walled gardens). Enshittification has ensued and the fun has ended.
I pine for the days when you would log on to BBSes to have genuine discussions about niche hobbies and topics. It didn’t matter who you were as your only identity was your username; you could be whatever you wanted.
Now, the web is overflowing with millions of desperate, near identical 19 year olds shilling for BoredVPN while showing their arse cracks for fake internet points and sponsorship money.
Lemmy / Mastodon is the first platform in a VERY long time which has the same feeling as those early days and I really, really hope it sticks around.
This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.
Do you know what a BBS is? Or Usenet?
Usenet was for geeks who didn’t want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.
I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters “bbs” to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now — reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.
People didn’t want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.
So all of the current monolithic sites would notnexist without web browsers, and things would be far more decentralised
Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they’d be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.
And again, I’m not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody’s going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.