Lemmy is pretty chill. Combined with a rss feed viewer, a few youtube channel (ff+extension), Nexcloud, and my internet experience is cool. I don’t care about tiktok, instagram and all that shit.
I recently started collecting feeds for my RSS reader, and it is so refreshing. I haven’t added any Lemmy feeds to it yet, since I’m on here a lot anyway, but it’s nice for blogs and websites that I’m not going to remember to check regularly otherwise.
blogs and websites that I’m not going to remember to check regularly otherwise
Yep, exactly.
collecting feeds
I’ve been moving back to RSS and have found https://scour.ing/about to be helpful. No affiliation.
What reader do you use?
RSS Guard. I tried a few, then decided that what I really wanted was just a simple app that would run locally, doesn’t run in browser, doesn’t rely on me creating an account to sync with some external server, and doesn’t have limits to the number of feeds I can add.
It was pretty painless to set up. The only downside is that if I ever want to transfer my feed list to a reader on my phone or another PC, I would have to export the list and then import it, but that’s not hard.
Is there a place that gives directions on how to set it up? It looks interesting, but I’m not great with installing non-normie software.
Rest assured, I’m very much a normie with tech stuff too. It wasn’t bad to set up. It’s been a few months, but I’m sure I just downloaded it from the link on their site and followed the installation prompts.
The hardest part is finding websites that support RSS. But for an example, say you wanted to receive reports about outbreaks from the FDA, here’s their RSS feed: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/contact-fda/stay-informed/rss-feeds/fda-outbreaks/rss.xml
You would just go to “add feed” in the RSS reader, and paste the URL, and you’re done! You can customize how often you want it to check your feeds for new updates (I have mine check every couple of hours), and when they show up, you can view them within your reader similar to email.
Thanks, that sounds about my speed for installations.
I hate autoplay videos, and I think this feeling of unease when a video autoplays comes from the earlier days of the internet.
Yo what extensions? I had a really good one that made thumbnails less interesting, and cut out a lot of the CTAs, but I seem to have lost it.
Obviously Ublock origin, the graal of extensions. Otherwise, the only way I can use youtube these days is with the following extensions: “Hide shorts for youtube”, “Youtube search fixer”, “Replace youtube’s home with subscription”. Also “return youtube dislike” and “blocktube” (to block stupid channels youtube keeps recommanding" are cool.
One more general level: I still dont care about cookies, darkreader, bitwarden (password manager), detrumpify (replace trump with a random insult), google sign-in pop-up blocker, flagfox, and many more lol.
Nice, ty for this list
Rose colored glasses.
Dead Internet Theory is becoming mainstream now. How long will it be until we get AI slop rants about how worthless human content is?
We won’t know because it will be AI bots who will be arguing that human content is better than AI
Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.
Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.
Hey, that’s not…ehh, whatever.
Whomever wrote this had to have been a child during that time because this doesn’t describe the internet I saw.
The 1990s internet was closer to this fantastical notion.
No, 1990s internet just hadn’t actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don’t realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple’s website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn’t use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
People’s identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000’s. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
That time period was after everything was monetized and full of ads though.
You don’t remember NetZero, do you? A free dial up ISP that gave free Internet connections under the condition that you give up like 25% of your screen to animated banner ads while you’re online.
Or BonziBuddy? Literal spyware.
What about all the MSIE toolbars, some of which had spyware, and many of which had ads?
Or just plain old email spam in the days before more sophisticated filters came out?
C’mon, you’re looking at the 1990s through rose tinted glasses. I’d argue that the typical web user saw more ads in 1998 than in 2008.
I remember that if you feared everything and only used programs and visited websites your friends recommended, you’d be much better than now. If you were careless, you had a bunch of banners and a porn blocker at the end of the day.
There’s something refreshing in this TBH.
I used NetZero dialup and played shooters online. I’d get killed a LOT with the lag. Also I uninstalled that damned ape buddy from dozens of peoples machines.
A map in your browser with full scrolling and zooming may have been impressive back then, it’s true. But you know what’s impressive today?
$ telnet mapscii.meA map in your terminal with full scrolling and zooming. 😎
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
If the web today didn’t consist of “5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4”, that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
That’s a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.
That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.
Maybe that’s how it should have been still.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
That’s a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That’s one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.
I’m not worried. We’ll make a new one.
It really doesn’t need to be this way.
At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.
If we don’t like them, we don’t need to use them, and just switch off.
Blogger is free I think - though a domain name will cost ya. I’ve thought about doing this for a while. Back to blogging. Seems so therapeutic.
take a look at neocities.org
Looks very cool! I like the relaxed vibe.
you can publish independently, but it’s hard to get found. Search engines are cluttered with nonsensical link farms these days :-(
We all found our way to Lemmy, and we can start building from here.
Advertise here, right? Build small communities. How many readers do you even want? I mean that seriously, too. Maybe you would be happy with 100 people who subscribe to your RSS feed, depending on your goals.
it’s also about the perspective of the one looking for information. how do I find the info I search?
Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.
Goatse is what killed friendster imo
You’re the man now, dog!
We all lost our innocence back then. We stared into the void, unable to look away. You remember how we all were.
And napster was for taking naps! Until metallicock ruin it.
If we can collectively collectively decide who, how, and what fucked it up that will be beneficial for the future
The internet, collectively agreeing on something? It sounds like you’ve never been on it before lol
corporations im pretty sure
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
Capitalism ruins everything, just look at America
Britain ruined North America (ask the many natives of colonial times) before America could ruin the rest of the continent, then itself
I’m not sure I’d pin the ruining of north America on the Brits. They got that ball rolling.
While the big three empirical powers that colonized the Americas are all at fault, they are late comers compared to the Spanish. By the time the British started their first colony Desoto had ripped through appalachia, on a quest for gold, and had murdered, raped, and enslaved many natives. More importantly though, he introduced most of the tribes to old world diseases, which was apocalyptic to them.
True, that ball was already rolling when the Brits kicked it, but my point is that it didn’t stop being kicked afterwards either. Or to this day, really.
Oh yeah, the Native American genocide is still happening. These days it is mostly ignoring treaties to take their land for things like oil pipelines, but still going on.
Stop blaming capitalism - people are the problem, not the systems they create.
The average person is a fucking retard and that’s not changing - when they reach a space, it goes to shit.
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Lmao speak for yourself with the “self loathing” label - I hate the rest of y’all because you’re dumb as fuck.
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I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism
when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition
Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)
As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself … and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
How much?
I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.
So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.
they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
They would sell you a subscription for the rope nowadays.
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse
Normies ruined the internet
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It’s not a big deal, we’ve made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can’t rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
Both are rights, but the normies definitely destroyed the internet culture. They invaded forums without any regard for the rules set before (remember “RTFM”?), and when capitalism arrived, they all moved to commercial sites.
It’s not a big deal
It’s absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of “making niches for ourselves” will save us from that.
True
Plus the corporate web constantly kills off our niche spaces in the effort to make them palatable for advertisers by sanitizing minorities out of their own spaces.
I used to be super active in r/traaaa before the 3rd party plugin exodus and subsequent shutdown of the forum. Now? Those people either made a new Reddit or scattered to the 4 winds, and a similar space has struggled to take off here on Lemmy. And that’s just one of many instances of this sort of thing happening.
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It feels unsustainable, right? Like the value of of this tsunami of advertising has to be inflated, especially with bots/agents taking over traffic. People’s tolerance for junk isn’t infinite. At some point the illusion has to crack, and the advertising bubble will pop and burn the internet/app ecosystems down, hopefully…
Yeah, there has to be a point when they’re going to realize that they’re hosting bots to advertise to bots, and nobody is going to want to pay for that.
Yeah, there has to be a point when they’re going to realize that they’re hosting bots to advertise to bots, and nobody is going to want to pay for that.
I think you’re underestimating the level of intelligence that world-wide corpos have. they do have statisticians and mathematicians, and i guarantee you they do the calculations about these things already.
I doubt they look beyond ‘number goes up’
nobody is going to want to pay for that
Except other bots
What I already see around me is more and more people moving their files and identities offline into home NAS and filesharing setups, like Nextcloud. Their conversations are moving to Signal, Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud Talk, or just plain text. For now its the more technically savvy, but even non professionals with low levels of admin experience are reaching out and asking now, and non technical people are looking for access to those private resources.
The snowball isn’t big yet, but it is rolling. How far it goes and how big it gets, we’ll see.
However what surprises me is that this did not happen sooner and due to ads, but rather it is AI and the complete uphill battle it is becoming to keep your private data out of the multitude of inbound AI vectors that is finally pushing people down the hill.
The people sucking each other’s farts in the marketing industry have no shame. They market themselves first, your product 2nd, and for some reason these cold calculating corporations throw obscene money at them.
I think it must be some good old boy network where the people at the top invest in certain marketing agencies and they use them to leech money out of the companies they work for with little risk of being caught for embezzlement.
GTA 6, one if the top known franchises in the industry, will be spending $500 million+ on marketing.
In comparison, GTA 5 cost about $265 million to release
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn’t just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech involved with making GTA6 not create enough hype? Does there even need to be additional hype created?
I just dont buy it. These penny pinching losers that run our world don’t just give away half a billion dollars for a couple trailers and some ads plastered all over the internet and IRL. Marketing looks like shit, smells like shit, tastes like shit. It’s fucking shit. Why buy a $500 million dollar turd unless you were somehow getting a cut?
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn’t just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech involved with making GTA6 not create enough hype? Does there even need to be additional hype created?
There is a bit of an “arms race,” where other games/entertainment could steal GTA’s engagement. Eyeball time is finite, and to quote a paper, “attention is all you need.”
You aren’t wrong though. Spending so much seems insane when “guerrilla marketing” for such a famous IP would go a long way. I guess part of it is “the line must go up” mentality, where sales must increase dramatically next quarter even if that costs a boatload of marketing to achieve.
There were also “no girls on the Internet”. Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop’s petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.
It wasn’t uniformly better.
We can’t, and shouldn’t go back. Ever forward.
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
Ads are fine relatively speaking. Its the data brokers that are the real problem
Data brokers wouldn’t exist without ads. The whole reason companies collect info on people is to better manipulate them into buying products.
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Online tolling and raging have been around far longer than the mid 2000s.
If anything I’d say the Internet has gotten nicer overall.
There was always a tacit understanding you were coming into someone’s house. Sometimes quite literally. The server for a forum I used for 20+ years was in various apartment closets most of that time. House rules, so to speak, weren’t controversial.
Now everyone’s used to using centralized commercial servers for rent, with things like ads and liability insurance. Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn’t.
Yup. Mainstream social media is chaos, not community. I would even extend this to fedi if we aren’t careful.
I’m reminded of some business-person(?) saying that people often forget that “store this on the cloud” is basically saying “store this on someone else’s computer”. I have used this reframing a few times to help ground discussions around data infrastructure.
Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn’t.
Like when people claim their right to free speech was denied because a privately-owned website banned them. They seem to think that if a platform allows them to speak publically, it’s the same as saying something out in a public street.
In reality, it’s more like being in a venue with an open mic - it’s a private (and likely commercial) space by default. If you go up on stage and say something the owners or managers don’t like, you absolutely can be kicked out for it. Private websites, including social media, are the same way.
It was for sure toxic af, but a lot less commercial. Actually the early internet was incredibly hostile to corps, but then the banner ads came, and the eyeballs, and the ads started actually making more money than just server costs, and it was all over.
Yeah, i remember the fucking aim chat bots fucking ruining everything
I can literally never use Reddit again but all.my search results keep taking me there
At least you have something to search unlike with discord servers.
