For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
Bye bye internet. Hello splinternet.
Essentially.
The fediverse, small-web, ubb-boards, xda, and parts of the darkweb, as well as places like 4chan all belong to a sort-of bound community.
Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Instagram etc make up the mainsteam internet with Tumblr and Reddit on the sidelines.
It’s getting worse, it even trickles down to software choices and piracy. Choose Linux and trust the community, run Kodi and fight constant update breakage on Youtube and corporate streaming solutions when Jellyfin and samba shares just work?
At what point does their world of influence become seemingly worse than ours by default and everyone just ignores them? Will the giants allow themselves to be ignored? I believe they will eventually make self-sufficiency impossible. Somehow, some day, you won’t have any of these choices and everyone will be nickle and dimed to death until the entire internet is an unskippable full-screen ad.
From some mobile-only average working Joes out there, that’s all it already is.
I’m from the 90s Internet. Geocities. Tripod. Webrings. My awesome gothy co-worker staying late after work to update her vampire fan-fiction site because hardly anyone had a computer and the boss let her use the company’s windows 95 machine.
We are categorically lazier as a culture now than then. I expect things to enshittify further until we collectively take responsibility and accountability for our own culture, engagement and entertainment online. As we used to. We need more stupid web tricks, this place used to have all sorts of public art and weird monuments to human quirkiness.
Until they take away from us the ability to purchase a 10$ domain, use DNS, and make HTML forbidden knowledge, anyone can be out there contributing. I realize, however, that most will not; I’ve recently started getting wide eyed stares of amazement because I have my own domain and use it for my email address, so we seem to be sliding further…
Not sure how we fix this.
Me too. Even earlier.
But your last described problem is getting more and more obvious with the years. I always had lots of domains since there were domains for purchase. Even when it where very very expensive. Yet, despite all the progress, people so often respond to your own email with “errr...@gmail.com?” And you have to explain, no it’s just name@surname.de and they don’t understand what you’re talking about and why your email doesn’t end in gmail. And some at least know a world outside gmail, yet struggle with TLDs other than .com or .de (or other local TLDs in other countries probably)…
It hurts. And it got worse. People totally unlearned what the net even is.