Can we create a new Internet ?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨bullshitter@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

Now that Google , FB wants to trap us and control every aspect of the Internet browsing, Is it even possible to break free.

Or creating new Internet is a unrealistic idea ?

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Andonome@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The internet’s fine - the web’s the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, ‘make good art’, write and share good content, don’t feed the machine. Sounds like you’re doing that already if you’re on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren’t all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT…download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It’s a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

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- hardypart@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yet another thing that capitalism is destroying.
  
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  - NAK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This is, quite easily, one of the dumbest comments of all time.
    
    You are free to setup and run a server, and create whatever experience you’d like. Worth how cheap hosting is it would probably be free for you to do for quite a long time too.
    
    But you won’t, because you’re a consumer
    
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  - Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah I’m sure the internet in China is doing so much better.
    
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- DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - fubo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    “Plain text” and “plaintext” are not the same.
    
    “Plain text” = “not images, video, etc.”
    “Plaintext” = “not encrypted”
    
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TimeSquirrel@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The internet hasn't changed and is still the same Internet from the 90s. We're all still using TCP/IP to communicate. A network device from 1993 would have no issue connecting to a network from 2023 thanks to backwards compatibility.

The problem is that everyone decided to congregate around the same four websites and the same web browser. You can, you know, stop using them anytime and seek alternatives RIGHT NOW that sti exist. You're here already, so that's a start.

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- SoleInvictus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Make your own website! You can even host it on neocities for free.
  
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  - HidingCat@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Thing is deciding on what to post and making the time to do so. xD
    
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- AlotOfReading@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  TCP has been amended in backwards incompatible ways multiple times since 1993. See e.g. RFCs 5681, 2675, and 7323 as examples.
  
  Plus, speaking TCP/IP isn’t enough to let you to use the web, which is what most people think of when you say “Internet”. That 1993 device is going to have trouble speaking HTTP/1.1 (or 1.0 if you’re brave) to load even the most basic websites and no, writing the requests by hand doesn’t count.
  
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- soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m convinced that any “new” internet protocol will eventually fall victim to capitalistic human greed in the exact same way. Human greed is what causes the world to be what it is now and that greed still exists in a strong percentage of people today
  
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  - Jako301@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It wouldn’t fall to greed, bit to laziness and convince. Why would anyone use a protocoll that limits the user instead of the one that let’s you talk with anyone you want.
    
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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Seems like all we need is a search engine that only returns sites that don’t shove unwanted content down your throat. Tall order though.

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- lustrum@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’ve started using Duckduckgo, less specifically for the search and more for the bangs. Fed up of search surfacing sites they care about. I can now quickly search wikipedia with !w etc.
  
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  - Jamie@jamie.moe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I host my own searx instance and use that to search, it supports all of DDG’s bangs by default if you begin a query with a double bang !!
    
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  - hardypart@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Not advocating for Google here, but you can do that with “site: wikipedia.org” as a search operator in Google.
    
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  - Rooty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    more for the bangs
    
    desire to know more intensifies
    
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  - daredevil@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bangs are awesome, and so are the Vim keybinds
    
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- GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Kagi has a “small web” search option, as well as an RSS feed and bare-bones front-end. blog.kagi.com/small-web
  
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  - IHawkMike@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Kagi has been amazing for me so far. I signed up as soon as they changed the pricing to allow unlimited searches at $10/mo.
    
    I’m still working on my filters and promoting/demoting/pinning sites in my results, but it’s already night-and-day better than Google and even DuckDuckGo (which still deserves much respect).
    
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- HidingCat@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  People aren't putting content much on the open web as they used to as well. Think the high point was when blogs were a thing, the second high point was during the Geocities et all free webspace peroid.
  
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bender223@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I can see how some people can get trapped in a bubble of Google and FB. I hope they can realize that Google, FB, Reddit, and Twitter are not “the internet”.

I stopped using FB when the timeline became useless (it was hard to filter to a specific friend or family member), and also that I no longer wanted to see updates from people I didn’t even want to hear from. I have since switched to smaller and more personally curated social media platforms like a group chat or a discord server.

Sure google is a common homepage for a lot of people, but there are other alternatives that work well. TBH, a few years ago, I wanted to switch to DuckDuckGo, but their search results were lacking compared to google, but fast forward to now, DDG gives more accurate and useful results than Google’s ad driven and AI driven “search results”.

I’ve enjoyed my “internet experience” much better after switching from Reddit to Lemmy. Just the fact that it’s not driven by profit, and policy changes are not a the whim of a monolithic corporation, makes the experience much better. I generally don’t see people trying to grift on lemmy. I really appreciate the useful and well thought out comments/posts on lemmy compared to other platforms.

Also, Mastodon is so much more enjoyable to use than Twitter (deadnaming it, I don’t care).

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- mercury@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Corps aren’t people. Deadname twitter forever!
  
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vidarh@lemmy.stad.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.

Convincing “regular people” to move is the hard part.

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rodneylives@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Much of the old web is still there. A lot of old sites have gone dark, but there are still some that remain, and some have persisted for surprisingly long.

Usenet and IRC still exist! As public and distributed services, like the Fediverse and the World Wide Web itself, one node can go down but others remain. Things that don't remain? AOL IM; Yahoo Messenger; MSN Messenger; Google Talk (in its original form).

When everyone chased after social media, many people declared the old web dead. They were wrong. When mobile platforms hit it big, a lot of people thought the days of the desktop PC were gone. They were wrong too. The demise of Google Reader was an attempt to kill off RSS, but a lot of sites still have feeds. And a lot of blogs still exist, even if it's getting harder to find them due to Google Search's ongoing decay.

Corporations have big PR budgets, and a lot of tech reporters are uncritical about what they hype. Witness the attempts to get cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now LLMs, to take. But we do not have to buy what they're selling.

We don't need a new internet. The old one survives, for now at least. But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.

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- spittingimage@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.
  
  Is it time to bring back webrings?
  
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  - skulblaka@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yes, it is.
    
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  - surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    StumbleUpon!
    
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  - sirboozebum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Hell yes.
    
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Z4rK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The Internet is actually very fine and alternatives to the big guys will keep popping up.

For tracking in general there are several options like pihole, adguard and NextDNS on a DNS level, Firefox/Orion browsers, Proton / Mullvad etc VPN and services.

For search I’ve been fairly happy with DuckDuckGo for some years, but not swears by Kagi.

What is gone is the early days of the seventies / early eighties with free servers at universities accessible to anyone. It doesn’t scale.

Various models tried to figure it out until we got what we’ve had for the last 10 years, “free” services where you are the product.

What you won’t get going forward is free services that gives you what you want without also tracking and collecting data on you and using it for ads etc.

What you can get is high quality services that you choose to pay for.

For now, a fair bit of them is niche and sort of expensive. Hopefully that will expand to giving is fairly broad service coverage from providers that are mostly crowd funded and open.

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- gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  DDG makes a profit without tracking. Why couldn’t that become more standard?
  
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  - muddybulldog@mylemmy.win ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Because the alternative makes a lot more money.
    
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Lmaydev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
At the end of the day you just create websites without trackers. Plenty of sites like it exist.

There’s simply not enough demand for it. The majority of people simply don’t care.

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spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There’s no need for a new internet. Every garbage service has a somewhat viable alternative.

You have peertube instead of youtube Kagi, duckduckgo, marginalia, etc instead of Google search Lemmy instead of reddit Mastodon, polycentric instead of twitter Gitea instead of github Bandcamp instead of spotify There are probably more things but you get the idea. The problem is not the internet itself but that you have to have many people go to objectively less polished or paid services to protect their personal data. I don’t know how that would happen since honestly, the privacy shit doesn’t affect people’s everyday lives, but using different services does affect their lives.

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Gigan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
With blackjack and hookers?

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- Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  With blackjack and hookers!
  
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IHawkMike@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As someone familiar with the OSI model, this thread is a bit confusing since the Internet to me is really the infrastructure on top of which all of your fancy sites and apps are built. When you say “the Internet”, I’m thinking about TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc.

That said, I’m pretty sure most people here are just taking about websites at L7, although there are arguments for change at the other layers.

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Rooty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The internet is much larger and diverse than the World Wide Web

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HarriPotero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
BBSes are making a comeback. This time over telnet. They’re just as great as they used to be.

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- droidpenguin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  This time over telnet.
  
  telnet is an insecure protocol. Ideally you should use ssh instead but most modern BBS’s support both. Of course if you want to dial in on legacy “authentic” hardware then SSH isn’t possible.
  
  💡You can SSH from your phone using Termux and it works pretty well. It doesn’t use full height of screen but is still usable. BBS’s could be enhanced to support that though.
  
  Here’s an example of how one looks on my phone:
  
  ssh NEW@bbs.bottomlessabyss.net -p 2222 -c aes256-cbc
  
  Screenshot_20231010-174323_Termux
  
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  - HarriPotero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    In my part of the BBS-world telnet is the only option. I’m a C64 guy, and a TCP stack is memory hungry enough for 64k of RAM.
    
    But yes, encrypt when available.
    
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  - sirboozebum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This looks fucking awesome.
    
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  - Bakersfield@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I really like Termius for SSH on Android (dunno if it’s on iOS). I use it for all my servers.
    
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- Metacortechs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If I can play tradewars again, without having to worry about one of my friends calling to knock me off so they can get in, I’m in.
  
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- nlm@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Any good resources for finding these?
  
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Kazumara@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The internet is the result of networks connecting to other networks. If you aim to replace that, then how? Making new networks just expands the internet, making new interconnections just makes it more meshed.

You would have to make networks not connected to the internet but interconnected with each other. That’s expensive and all the economic network effects are against you. You probably won’t have many users connected and not many services either.

But let’s say you did it, what exactly is the benefit of a second internet? Would you be banning some networks from connecting to your mesh? What if one network in your internet connects to the normal Internet anyway? What sort of technologies and services would there be, just the normal ones, then what changes?

Honestly I don’t see the point. A concentration of economic power and influence over web technologies is the issue. The internet works fine, and we make it work every day (my specific corner being research networks in Switzerland). You need to change the producer and consumer behaviour of people and companies using the internet, not the internet itself.

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- cybersin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You just build a network on top of the existing infrastructure. See tor, i2p, usenet
  
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  - Kazumara@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sure but an overlay network is not a new Internet. I still think OP is confused about his goals.
    
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Critical_Insight@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think what’s more realistic to happen is that internet will be split into two and after certain websites and services become unuseable to people who care about privacy and such, then new alternatives will just emerge along the more popular ones. Kinda like Lemmy.

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isles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Tor/Darkweb, Freenet, LoRAWAN are all the alternate internets I can think of off the top of my head. The difficulty is generally the “network effect”. 1 Fax machine is useless, 10000 are very useful. Similiarly, an alternate internet with one website isn’t all that interesting.

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avater@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Stop using google products and maybe start using a vpn if security is super important to you? It’s fairly easy, believe me.

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kava@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think it is possible under the right circumstance. For example let’s say internet disappeared tomorrow. I think what would likely happen is local areas would start to connect.

It would start would smaller groups and slowly integrate more and more until you had the internet back.

I remember watching some sort of video, maybe it was a Vice bit, I don’t remember. They were in Cuba at this massive apartment building complex. Let’s say like 1,000 people lived there.

They didn’t have regular access to internet - they need to purchase credits from state store to use the internet. But many people have computers and want to play multi-player games even though they couldn’t afford the internet credits.

So what they do? Create a localized network between the entire complex so every person could connect, share files, share games, play games, etc. You have a mini-internet between all members of a community.

That’s all the internet is - networks connected to networks and done at the global scale. So is it possible to create another? Absolutely. Although you need some sort of incentive to do it, otherwise nobody will bother. The Cubans had an incentive, but I’m hard pressed to find a reason one would want to in the US these days. You never know, though.

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Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It might be a bit hard to grasp, but…

We’re already on that new internet, baby!

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originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
we need to get these networks to be classified as utilities, and then dont use shitty service providers for your required packet needs

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Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Just don’t use AI to optimize the compression.

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- Hexagon@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Why? It’s not like it would learn to break the encryption, right?
  
  Right?
  
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Enlarging5805@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Use onion

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- shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Whats nice is that tor users are a paranoid bunch of fuckers. If its not plain fuckin html they want nothing to do with it. You can forget about your javascript, 3rd party cookies, external shit of any kind. All that gets left at the door.
  
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  - wolfshadowheart@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I personally run Tails OS as a daily driver. Not only does it keep others safe, but it keeps me from tracking my own online presence.
    
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crossfadedragon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s not a matter of can we, but why aren’t we? Imo, at least. They can only trap us if we let them.

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dbilitated@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m now using ungoogled chrome, Firefox and cromite on my phone. it’s working pretty well

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sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Try Firefox or Brave with Ublock origin and SkipRedirect and use Brave browser or maybe 4get.ca. On Android use Brave or Mull (hardened Firefox). Be sure to not use AMP links so as not to support Googles attempt to centralize the web.

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- soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Do. Not. Use. Brave.
  
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pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
the internet split is beginning

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mechoman444@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
We did kinda create a new Internet… the tor is pretty amazing if not pretty fighting at the same time.

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wolfshadowheart@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I was just reading a couple weeks ago about a smaller web project. Lemme see if I can find it

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