Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.

You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.

The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it's anything else than amazing.

Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.

Funny I said the same thing in 1995.

The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.

In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!

This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….

In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.

Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.

Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.

I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it's always much of the same news:

• a new private messenger (like we don't have 500 of those already)
• a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
• a "simple" app/program that doesn't do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
• something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
• a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
• announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we'll never hear of the project again

So I'm not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons

In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.

The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don't answer the phone unless I've told someone to call me because it's always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn't ask for so I don't check in much, now they've got robots texting me scams. I can't even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole's quarterly report.

You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.

I've been using Linux for decades and I don't use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility...

Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.

The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.

I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it's good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.

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.

I read it as: 'They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear'.

Welcome to capitalism

I totally agree with you here. Now it feels like bots (AI) making content for bots (crawlers) and the only thing we a getting programmed to use is Google, where your question is answered without the need to even visit the website it took the data from.

It's just boring and I'm a website developer 🤷‍♂️

The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.

The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the "you told us and we listened" jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it's lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.

It's an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. 'We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it'.

That widely depends on what you are using it for. I think it’s amazing.

I can buy a computer for $500 with 8 cores, 32GB ram, 512GB NVME storage. I can install free open source linux distribution on it that manages virtual machines. It can run dozens of containerized free/open source applications on it.

Then, i can use my domain name and freely available services like letsencrypt and cloudflare to make it securely available on the internet.

Internet is what you make of it, always has been.

If you only rely to 3rd party websites then you’re missing out on a lot of usability.

I guess it depends on when you stared using it.

Today, a lot if people take a lot of things for granted.

I still remember the days of waiting for a website to load, making myself coffee while it’s loading.

Now i can stream realtime 4k video of my house on my phone, served by my computer.

I can game with friends conencted to my voice chat server that i own and has awesome voice quality and low latency.

I can have all my files available wherever i am, instantly.

I can forget my phone and my laptop, login to my server at a friend’s computer and do whatever i need to do.

All that wouldn’t be possible if the internet was stuck in the 90’s.

In my teenage years, the Internet was my favorite escape from the horribleness of my offline life. I thought it would always remain so, so decided to start a career in software engineering because that would be an improvement to the world.

Now that I haven't been a teenager for nearly ten years, often enough the Internet is actively bad for my mental health and I have to get away from it to improve my mood. I have no interest in participating in propaganda wars.

Now it's up to you to take a shot at creating the next exciting thing. Aim high and give all you can to succeed.

I just ignore the news entirely and enjoy my little part of the internet with the people I like.

I’m really enjoying the fedi, but a return to the text and ANSI graphics and community of 93 BBS keeps calling me.