but wait there’s these spaces
Image description:
Young woman helping an old woman as she reminisces about the old web, “The web used to be open and distributed! Not closed and concentrated in the hands of a few companies!” The young woman, “Sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed.”
The web is still open and distributed. Its just that everyone decided to concentrate in a few areas (reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc) and the thing that excited us about the internet back in the day (the web) has become an ai generated, Chinese dropshipper ghost town or appified.
It doesn’t help that more popular websites all became the legacy ui for mobile apps.
I’m also saying this as someone who doesn’t really go to web forums or websites anymore and mostly uses apps for things since I’m on my phone a lot more than on a desktop or laptop when not at work.
I do go to web forums for my hobbies (brewing and growing things) but either those websites tried to optimize for mobile and became unusable on mobile or they haven’t optimized at all and its like reading text for ants.
And yes you can make your own website today but the signal to noise ratio of your single website among everything else out these makes the chances of anyone visiting you remarkably low.
It is what it is
I don’t want to circlejerk about Lemmy too much, but joining Lemmy did revitalize the “old web” feelings for me.
Seconded. I really like the fediverse. It has just a little of that wild-west old web feel. Just need people to make a geocities instance with family vacation photos and the like again.
While not entirely correct when reading the meme literally my feeling or interpretation is that the “distribution” applies to what you’re saying. The web used to be a lot “flatter” and egalitarian. Anyone could make a crappy html site for their family web page and everyone ran the same bbs software for hobby or other interest group forums.
But just like you said, the concentration of power in these megasites is huge. It really crushed what the web used to be - but they aren’t the only problem. The search engines that led us to these smaller sites no longer work the same or have vanished alongside the proliferation of SEO and preferred sites thanks to ad revenue. So the chance of a smaller site getting seen are next to zero. No ad revenue, no traffic to drive ad revenue, and too niche or low-budget to compete with SEO sites.
It isn’t difficult to optimize for mobile if you know what you’re doing. It’s downright easy if you use a mobile first approach to website development.
I guess. But doing forums on mobile is also aggravating af. I might just be too used to desktop displays when it comes to forums. I really hate contracting/expanding web pages. I hate workflows for typing on mobile devices.
It’s all just a shit experience for me :)