- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
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)
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They are making it happen.
By their hands
If the internet were a forest, Google opines the forest is in such poor shape while Google uses and sells chain saws.
In your analogy I think Google sells chainsaws, lumber, wood stoves, and paper pulp.
You forgot the part where they will give you a sponsored clutch pencil, and make you buy their special lead refills…
They admitted, with obvious glee
You can tell they’re scared of it because they immediately tried to retract/clarify the statement.
Though IDK why they’d care this point since the Supreme Court already declared Google a monopoly and turned around and said they weren’t abusive enough and gave them no punishment.
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Leopards eating everyone’s face these days.
This is all according to plan for Google tho. What could be better than having everyone sign up for the GoogleNet? We’ll finally back to the ways of pre-Internet AOL and Compuserve.
Pretty sure all the AI companies were hoping to wrap the internet in their AI as a user interface, for a fee oc.
Doctorow is never wrong.
I wonder what took them so long to figure it out. After all, they are the ones that broke it.
Not broken, working as intended (for them). They just happened to say the quiet part out loud this time.
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Genuinely want to know, what web standards have been ruined by the Goog?
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
IRC is still there. The user numbers just aren’t that great anymore 😒 I fucking hate discord and what it did and how it took over. And also, of course, murican.
Lots of “muricans” hate discord too
Sure sure, you’re not all idiots. Wasn’t meant this way. Just that, on top of being shit, being murican is another no-go for an app.
I hate that everyone fucking uses discord for everything, discord when I’m using it is strictly to game and for online game related activities.
People are just clueless and lazy, and take the easiest way “that everyone else does too”. And here we are. Recently had to join one…and was asked for a phone number before being allowed to enter. Lol. Yeah sure. Guess I won’t join then 😐
I hope forgejo’s federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
Great idea. From a nerd 😁
But who do you think would be the target demographic? Critical users, that don’t want to use major crap but are also not suited for doing it all by themselves, either due to skill, time, money or a combination thereof?
I wouldn’t think that group is significantly large. And definitely not large enough to seriously put a dent in the major crap apps.
Better than nothing, but probably not worth investing in such a project. Sadly so, I might add.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a “your internet services in a box” to a layman.
But first they have to care. The amount of people who don’t care for e.g. privacy - even if explained in detail - is flabbergasting. Even today I heard two times “why? I have nothing to hide” or “but WhatsApp is superior!”
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that’s simply not happening. I’m a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
Considering that many don’t even know anymore what a website actually is, or domains (especially TLDs that are not .com or <insert local one>)…
Also take into account that people are lazy (not meant condescending). Using the major shit is easy, “everyone else does too!” and technologically challenged people can use it.
Even IF selfhosted XYZ would be as easy as downloading something (it already starts to be “too complicated” for many) and executing it, it probably wouldn’t happen.
I, personally, fear for the future of the web. I’ve seen the peak of the web and its constant accelerated decline since.
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It’s less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there’s a real movement there with tech literacy.
I sure hope so, yet am not as optimistic as you 😑
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there’s a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet–I’m not trying to universalize my perspective.
It’s just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You’ve got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that’s growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
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Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
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Misleading title.
By the way, if you still want to use google’s search engine but want to avoid the AI stuff, see https://udm14.com/ or just add &udm=14 to your search query
There’s no way to avoid the ai stuff
Ai is in all the results
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.
Ok, well our backup is safe yeah ? So, good, it should burn down to the fucking ground,
Topple DNS tyranny, blow up the CDNs, let datacenters become dilapidated, let the 101 rooms go unstaffedAfter the fire maybe something not quite as malevolent will grow in the ashes
Well at least there’s the fediverse, onion routing, nostr ID management, simplex and others. It’s not quite a Plan B, and definitely takes some effort, but is much much better than nothing.
I tried TOR earlier this year, and the 3 minute pageloads that timeout 3/4 of the time, were very off putting.
I hope we can do betterTOR is rough, i2p is rough, ipfs is nearly dead
Gemini protocol is lit and fast but dead. it’s like a fancier version of gopher.
If we could all move over to gemini, i’d be stoked, no javascript, limited cgi bin opporunities
It sounds like there was something wrong with your setup. I use Tor almost exclusively for general browsing and while its definitely slower than VPN and unprotected browsing, its never taken more than 10 seconds to load a page, and that’s on the long side. Usually no more than a few seconds longer in any other scenario. Definitely never been 3 minutes.
Sounds like the Internet in the 90s.
Nah, I had a 14400 bauds modem and even then it was never this slow
I went to the dread forum and maybe got 4 page loads in 15 minutes
simply unusable unless you really really need it and already know exactly what you need, where it is, and how to click as few links as possible to get there. And even then, reading single threads is an hours long task.Modem starts dialing up. Everything is going fine, attempting 28.8k negotiation… failed. Okay, now I’m listening to 19.2k negotiation… failed again? Ugh, ok, 14.4k… no? Jesus fuck. Please let me at least have 9600…
Edit: typoes
…ah phew, at least its 9600 so I can finally …CARRIER LOST. Ah fuck it.
