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.
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.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it's insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it's still not enough for them. I'm just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they're willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that's a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you'd be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn't enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you're still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It's gross.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That's how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
What they do is the essence of capitalism. More growth. More profits. Enough, or the same as last year, is not sufficient. It must be more, the numbers must go up. And any publicly traded company is legally bound to pursue gains for its shareholders, they actually cannot stop. What makes a corporation is the same thing that makes them hellbent on yet another fraction of a percentage in profits.
The whole system is utterly ridiculous and fundamentally incompatible with reality, once you actually think about these things. A system demanding infinite growth in a finite world.
You need to make the worst product that you're still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn't. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I'm thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today's preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.
The 90s were worse imo when it came to quarterly returns
Yeah, for all of Lemmy's shortcomings, it's the best thing to happen to my internet in the last year.
A decently thriving online community of thousands of active users, not run by an entity or corporate board intent on sucking every last cent from people? Hell yeah!
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
I've been looking into continuing or updating old programs that don't have maintainers in the FSF/GNU list, but the mailing lists and archaic webpages don't help much.
I'm still learning, but I'm tired of not seeing enough good FOSS alternatives or only discontinued ones.
yes, it's much needed now as many projects needs contributions and you can create a website and list all of the contributions that is required to make it a real foss alternative
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 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.
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.
There didn't even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don't need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.
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.
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 🤷♂️
Google has been trying very hard, for a very long time, to be the only destination on the internet. They want all the traffic. They started with site summaries at the top of the search page, then they moved to AMP, where they're in charge of serving the content that others create, now they even show Reddit chains on their home page, and who knows what they have planned next. By serving content that other people created they get to serve their ads and keep 100% of the revenue, rather than sharing a pittance with some small AdSense publisher. They announced to the world that their values had changed when they changed their motto from Don't Be Evil, and they're certainly ignoring it now.
Even before it changed its motto, the idea of a company saying "don't do evil" is on the same level as a cat saying "don't scratch furniture".
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.
Bit of a silly question:
I got quite the overkill server‡ for free‡‡ a little while ago and I've been struggling to find stuff to do with it
What kind of stuff do you self host?
Basically all I've got currently is TrueNAS Scale running on mine and it feels like a bit of a waste just running that.
‡ My server is from 2012 but it's got dual hexacore Xeons (can't recall exact model), 192GB of RAM, and about 40 TB of storage in Raid-Z2. The storage came from my old crusty NAS, I didn't get that for free.
‡‡ Well mostly free, I was told I could have it if I got it out of they're garage which took about 2 days.
Here are a couple of ideas:
- Nextcloud to host your files and replace GDocs/Office
- Home Assistant to control your smart home
- Plex + Radarr/Sonarr to replace streaming sites
- RSS Feed Reader to read news and blogs (sorry can't remember the name from my phone)
- Single user ActivityPub instances
- Host your own blog site
I'm sure there's more
I’m not hosting a lot, just things i wanted to have in order to replace having a pc with installed apps. I want stuff to be a available on a web browser.
Some of the things i host:
NGINX Proxy manager - pretty much required Joplin - notes, apps for all platforms available Wiki.js - to replace Joplin, i don’t like installed apps HomeAssistant - home automation Mealie - converted my family paper cookbook Paperless-ngx - documents organization Mumble - voice chat server for gaming and meetings NextCloud - pretty much self explanatory Jellyfin - i want to be able to play media that is stored on the NAS, family photos, videos MQTT - self explanatory ZigbeeToMQTT - connect zigbee devices to MQTT Grafana - pretty graphs WireGuard - VPN access Trillium - to replace joplin for actual note taking Homepage - to display and organize all services VS Code Server - self explanatory OctoPrint - printer management Whoogle - i don’t like ads and “algorithms”
My total TDP is 15 watts. Idle is about 5W. I can’t imagine what i would do with a higher power consuming machine, it wouldn’t be financially feasible.
The best (and simplest) thing I have running is AdGuard Home. It’s a DNS server you run that blocks ads on the entire network.
I also run a wireguard server on my router and clients on my laptops and phone.
With these combined when on the road on cell or Wi-Fi connections all my traffic goes right to my home internet and it’s like I’m home.
I have access to all internal services, devices, and I get no ads in apps and websites (where technically possible). Highly highly recommend. I couldn’t live without it.
I also have home assistant running but that is way more work than just installing a server. It’s almost a hobby in of itself.
Editing - I didn’t mention it but PiHole is an alternative to AdGuard Home. I didn’t mention PiHole to keep things simple but after years of using PiHole I’ve switched to AdGuard Home mostly because of the per client configs, ease of maintenance and UI. As always, check out both and choose what’s best for you.
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'.
Exactly.
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.
Exactly. I think lemmy is flawed, but it's a lot more exciting than the status quo, so I try to help out. Right to repair isn't Internet specific, but it'll likely have an ripple effect as people decide to take back ownership of their devices and data. Cryptocurrency is a ponzy scheme, but the idea of a decentralized service as important as a currency is exciting, especially for the ripple effect it's likely to cause (e.g. we could use similar tech to decentralize lemmy).
There's a lot of exciting stuff if you know where to look.
Do you think it was invented as a Ponzi scheme, or has that just become the perception based off the massive initial growth in value? I think that the goal was always for the eventual stabilization of the currency, which of course means that mining becomes less and less profitable. It needs to eventually hit a point where mining produces no new coins for the currency to hit stability. But then idk why anyone would run the servers required for verification. At that point the verification becomes massively power intensive. So maybe it was always a Ponzi scheme? I'm no crypto expert, so I don't really know.
A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They'll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.
The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it...and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.
Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people's lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you'll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.
Part of that is just experience. We've lived though a few 'revolutions' for which the net effect was...arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they're bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn't there before.
And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn't there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.
I think ever since I came here, it was with the same message: the time for postmodern cynicism where nothing ever matters is over, it's time to embrace a new sincerity, a return to a more human Internet we imagined from yester-year, while still acknowledging the the advancement and progress that happened during the Web 2.0 era.
And I think the Fediverse, decentralized social media to something more akin to the various independent forums and blogs that still has all the advantages of centralization, is the start of something beautiful.
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.
you mean the murder of this guy
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.
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'.
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn't usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
I blame Google. When the same company owns the most popular search engine, most widely-used browser, most popular email service, one of the largest video sharing platforms, and the largest online advertiser, that’s called a monopoly.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs' quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It's the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
I just ignore the news entirely and enjoy my little part of the internet with the people I like.
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
I’m really enjoying the fedi, but a return to the text and ANSI graphics and community of 93 BBS keeps calling me.
Hah, that's part of what I want to do with z0rz.net
Godspeed with your effort.
We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:
Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.
Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.
Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.
Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.
There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.
Yes there have been a lot of improvements to the way businesses operate due to the internet. I love how banking has changed, internet shopping, remote work, and all of that kind of stuff. I think that's kind of separate from what I'm talking about though. I suppose I should have said the World Wide Web and not the internet, specially the WWW as used by individuals and groups for communication and sharing.
I actually despise the way banking has changed. Elder people, barely familiar with making calls from a mobile phone, are expected to use their phone banking app as a security token, to say something that happens every day. And that's talking about people that can actually afford a mobile phone with internet access.
Who knows what this new money will do with the old ad-financed entertainment parts of the internet. VR/AR could actually get a second chance and maybe "smart" devices more usefulness than spamming ads. I hope cities and municipalities discover their role as online activity promoters for offline life.
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt "the real Internet" was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I've come to realize that it's always been shitty. That's my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn't understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn't because computers weren't powerful enough yet.
Nah, I'm a Gen X'er. I agree that the internet in the 90's was cool, but by the late 90's, early 00's it was a lot more polished and bandwidth was plentiful enough to actually get a lot of stuff done online without ridiculous wait times. After MySpace fell and Facebook took over, it was still pretty cool. It's when Facebook established dominance over the web, sharing their shitty like buttons everywhere, Google started buying out cool companies and making their search engine worse, and blogs & forums started dying that I think the internet lost its soul.
@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: "Windows '95 is Amiga '87."
They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet
Yahoo and ISPs like AOL tried that. And were partly successful. Yahoo was the 'literally' the home page for 90% of Internet users. In India, ISPs were decentralized but it's only JIO or Airtel now, if you 24x7 service and connectivity.
Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.
I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.
AOL.com ruined the internet!
old man screams at cloud
Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.
Capitalism ruins everything. Even if you can argue it’s what made it.
The invisible hand giveth and the invisible hand taken away
Popularity and by extension, money, will corrupt and ruin everything.
How can we stop it?
Be careful what you promote in case it actually becomes popular and be careful of those who lust after money if they try to worm in. Be extra careful to not lust after money yourself if you ever find yourself in position where you could make a lot of it, it will slowly but surely eventually corrupt you if you stop being mindful of it or assume you are immune to it.
Make open source choices when possible. Open source is the internet version of shopping local.
I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.
Replying to myself:
Also, tech became a place to make money rather than a passion, like law and medicine. It's full of people who don't love it, but wanted to get rich. It took a friend's observations for me to figure that out.
Where there is gold, there will be diggers.
It's full of people who don't love it, but wanted to get rich
This causes me unending frustration using the web now. There are so many terrible practices on so many websites, just because they think it'll make them a little extra money. I used to run a bunch of blogs as my primary means of income, and I always refused to do things that I found annoying. These days the companies seem to seek out whatever is annoying and use that strategy without fail.
Not sure the mega corps have it all, there are still small sites that people run, I my self run some stuff. My lemme instance for 1.
The way I see it, is the mega corps have the budget to make hosting with them cheaper that running at home.
What I meant is that they killed the ways we used to communicate (blogs, forums, etc.) by consolidating everything into a few sites, and then after ensuring the deaths of those platforms, started squeezing the new consolidated platforms for everything they're worth. Yes, people chose to move to the new platforms, and slowly abandoned the old ones, but this has been a very engineered outcome. This is always where they hoped the road would lead. They offered the bait, and then sprung the trap.
They only killed the old tach off cuz the masses moved in, in the early days (think dialup) you had only the tech savvy online. You had to wait for everything, email, blogs, news the lot. Then the alway on internet landed and all that stopped, now you can reach anyone anywhere. all the non-tech savvy joined and the mega corps saw the rich gold mine.
The real issue is the lack of tech savvy people making small sites, the mega corps have the platforms and thats where everyone went. Its cheap and easy to be on a mega platform then to run your own site, anyone who does run a site will not see much traffic as its hidden by the big names
Hey its not all bad, ChatGPT and midjourney have been really entertaining. We now also run on decentralised media.
Okay ChatGPT has been an exciting announcement. That's true, thanks for reminding me. It's somewhat of a double edged sword too though. It's hugely beneficial for my job right now, but I'm also seriously concerned about the future of my career for the first time since entering this field. I have no delusions that ChatGPT won't eventually replace millions of programmers. Programmers won't completely go away, but when companies get their LLMs set up, and figure out how to integrate ChatGPT into their systems, programmers, analysts, writers, and about 80% of the careers on the planet are going to be seriously impacted.
Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial. When the Internet was young it was more experimental as a whole and that was fun for people. Computing is still experimental but the experimentation isn't obvious as it was back then. Unfortunately that means adventure finding you across your computer screen doesn't happen as often. You either need to look for it around the fringes or look beyond the monitor.
For a lot of people, there's nothing more fun and creative than an unsolved problem.
Monetization/commercialization/organization of the Internet was a super complex problem for a lot of business trying to make it big, and it made for a beautiful shitshow.
But now that the business problem is approaching solution, it's losing that fun and creativity.
This is why I'm currently trying to figure out how to setup an intranet via something like openvpn. Basically a walled garden that keeps the corpos out. My version of it will also be locked to a max of 1.5mbit/s to help with bandwidth costs.
I've looked at private 5g for this a couple times using something like Openstack Magma. Get me and few friends and family and I've have decent coverage I think.
Holy shit never expected to see this comment on lemmy. I worked on magma in the early days of it
I'll bookmark this. After failing to build a meshnet, I'd love to fail to build a cell network :)
Couldn't you leverage i2p or tor?
I made a comment here about why I'm wanting it to be a walled garden. I'm not sure if i2p or tor would be able to achieve the same results. I don't know enough about them to be sure, and I know tor at least has proxy services that allow non-tor browsers to connect to tor sites, which is something I'm wanting to avoid for security reasons.
What are you gonna use it for?
It'd mainly be for older PCs (winXP and earlier along with the Mac and maybe linux equivalents). The idea is to setup a raspberry pi as a middleman so that "retro PCs" can securely connect to a network without having to worry about the numerous security holes that now exist. The raspberry pi would block anything that isn't coming through the VPN. Additionally, I'm wanting to set it up so that people who don't have the space or money for a "retro PC" can connect via virtual machine running older operating systems.
The reason why I'm wanting to exclude newer operating systems from connecting directly (though if I feel they're secure enough then I might allow newer ones as well) is partially because older PCs and web browsers would likely struggle with displaying modern web 2.0 sites. If newer PCs are allowed to join the network with modern browsers, then you run the risk of compromising the idea of having a network that attempts to operates off web 1.0/early web 2.0 design.
Another factor is that while newer PCs might be immune to most, if not all, of the security holes associated with older OSes, a clever hacker might be able to use a newer PC as a carrier (similar to how a person with a viral immunity to a virus can still spread it). Alternatively, a user who thinks they "know what they're doing" could potentially end up creating a bridge between the intranet and the wider internet. I doubt the network would ever get large enough for that to be a real risk, but I want to try to be proactive about it since the majority of the systems connecting would already be heavily compromised due to age and lack of security updates.
One thing I'm struggling with is figuring out how to ensure connecting clients are running on certain OSes or hardware using "off the shelf parts", if that's even possible to begin with. I might be able to use a web landing page that exploits security holes to check the OS/hardware and probe for connections to the external web. However, I'm not super familiar with hacking or programming systems like this, which is why I'm having to resort to using "off the shelf parts" so to speak.
Regardless, I've been trying to put together a list of software, hardware and cloud services (I'm planning to host a node or two via a service like AWS if it looks like it'd be possible to do without opening it to the external web) that I'd need to make it happen.
Edit: an additional detail is that I'm hoping that the age of the hardware/software will mean that I can use cheap and outdated hardware to run the system. The idea behind the bandwidth cap is 50% cost, 50% trying to reinforce the idea that you're not supposed to be making super modern, flashy sites. Additionally, the bandwidth cap would only apply from the node to the user, while webservers, game servers, etc would have a higher cap (maybe eventually uncapped) between nodes to avoid congestion. Basically:
User <-1.5mbit/s-> node <- ???mbit/s -> server
Or
Server <- ???mbit/s -> node <- ???mbit/s -> server
Or
user <- 1.5mbit/s -> node <- 1.5mbit/s -> user
Why 1.5mbit/s? That's the speed of a T-1 line (it was originally going to be dial-up for that sweet, sweet BEEEEEEEDONKIDONK KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH until I realized how much of a headache dealing with analog-digital-analog would be)
Let us know if you ever deploy it!
I replied to someone else with more details if you're interested. I will definitely try to remember to let y'all know.
It’s the equivalent of a dead and abandoned shopping mall in a shit hole city once popular. It was a course charted long before the 00s though.
It's just that the Minitel was invented again to work over Internet. But internet is still there. What's sad is when the people who are interested in the technologies don't understand what internet actually is.
It's more like it's being revealed (or more obvious) what the purpose of the Internet was really for. Remember that it was created by DARPA for military purposes. It was never for altruism.
It wasn't altruistic per se, but that doesn't make it nefarious, either. At it's core, it was just a network connectivity design that resists node failure. It was us that used that foundation to create a virtual space that everyone could participate in. We now have outsized bad actors like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and alphabet agencies that are trying to influence that virtual space, but its culture was built by us.
Altruism doesn't need to be a part of it. And while the military started the Internet, universities made it what it is today, and for a long time it was merely a medium for sharing information.
The highway system was also created by the military, yet it has connected people far more than it has facilitated war. We definitely went too far on adapting to highways, but for many years it was just a better way to get from A to B.
The problem, I think, is that the average person just wants something better than what they have now (incremental change), and they don't want to pay for it. People preferred roads to trains because they were faster and they didn't pay for it directly, and now we have fewer trains. Likewise, people wanted content on websites for free, so content producers introduced ads to their products.
If you want something, you need to vote with your wallet and your ballot. Just doing one isn't enough.