To be fair, the definition is a bit muddier nowadays. Is Lemmy on the Web? I don't use it via the website. Bulletin boards used to not be part of the Web, as they pre-date the Web. But nowadays everything is HTTP. There's so little non-web left, and the vast majority of users never use it, that the Internet is only used for accessing the Web.
But it's not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn't mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.
The thing is: what people call the Internet is not the infrastructure. It's the content on the Internet. There's the technical term "Internet" and there's the coloquial term. Unfortunately, engineers and scientists suck at naming and explaining things at the level that the general population can understand. So "the Internet" became synonymous with "content on the Internet", be it Web content, torrents, bbs and what not.
Not sure if a serious question. So forgive me if your question was meant to be a statement.
The internet is a large set of computers connected via a set of protocols: IP and on top of that TCP, UDP or very occasionally SCTP (more common on mobile networks).
There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet (IP network).
The web runs on port 80 and 443 via TCP (mostly).
The internet supports all sorts of other traffic/channels too: Time synchronisation, games, file transfer, e-mail, remote login, remote desktops etc. None of these run on the web, but is traffic that runs in parallel to the web, using either TCP or UDP protocols.
The distinction is getting blurrier as lots of traffic that used to be assigned (or simple chose) its own port number is now encapsulated in HTTP(s) traffic. But the distinction is definitely not gone.
Yes agreed. I suspect it will collapse to “non-time-critical traffic will run on HTTPS via REST” and “everything else will run on UDP, using their own ports”, except for maybe a couple of golden oldies like NTP, FTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP.
POP and IMAP are pretty much dead at this point. Email is basically dead at this point. Want to spin up a machine and have it email you system messages? Nope. Want to run a Python script that sends to gmail? lol. https://mailtrap.io/blog/gmail-smtp/
On all my microservers I have pretty much have 22, 80, and 443 open. I try to interact exclusively over web ports for as much as possible.
Appreciate this, I thought they were both called "the internet". I knew we called it the worldwide web when I was a kid, but I thought that was just a phrase that fell out of fashion.
Where does Lemmy fall on this spectrum? Obviously the website part is 100% web, but I’m accessing Lemmy through a mobile app, so I don’t see any website here.
Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.
The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.
The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.
If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?
Nah, I'm allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I'd read it.
If you're the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I'm not picking it up.
Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind
That's more like it, this is a discussion that people can actually interact with! I am not the author, and I agree with you that the title isn't great, but I am interested in discussing what they wrote and appreciate that you've now at least opened the door to a discussion on clickbait titles rather than just leaving a one sentence "gotcha".
I would not have clicked if it had any of those titles. And I do actually agree with the title. We are watching the death of the internet. It will never be again what it was. And what it is now is a clean white washed drip fed version of the expansive and deep knowledge of everything that it once was.
I find that way too dramatic. There was once a firefox extension that randomly clicked on links starting from a randomly generated search term. It went to so many different websites and blogs that I had never seen before. There are still link registries grouped by category out there and they are marvelous to discover on lazy afternoons. Searching for home directories is of course a trip of randomness where people unwittingly expose so many personal thing. Entire music and video collections, family albums, art projects, etc. There is still a massive deep web out there.
There's also of course the dark web (I only know of I2P and TOR). It's smaller and more difficult to find, but there's a bunch of stuff on there too.
The fediverse is also growing, but not only that. There are self-hosted instances of many different things gitlab, gitea, nextcloud, owncloud, wordpress, and so much more. I'm not worried about diversity.
Going down the protocol stack isn't worrying either. Sure, multinationals buy up IP space and have their own AS and require BGP to route between them, but there are still many internet exchanges out there and at least in Europe, every country has multiple ISPs with some countries quite strictly regulating that there must be competition. IPv4 address space is supposedly full, but somehow getting a temporary IP in existing classes isn't a problem. I also doubt switching to IPv6 would "kill the internet".
As a major pillar of our modern society, for the internet to die - not just for a day but for years - the interconnected networks would all have to stop communicating with each other. To reach that level of disconnect, something truly major would have to happen. Infrastructure would have to be destroyed or shut down or legally prevented from transmitting to certain parties at a massive scale.
The world's economic system would come to a grinding halt.
Given this world is heavily influenced by business, I highly doubt killing the internet would be in their interest. Neither in the short, nor long term. This is not like climate change where business as usual can continue for a few decades. Without the internet, changes will be seen very quickly - maybe even immediately.
As I said, overtly sensationalist and clickbait title with an article behind it that probably blows everything out of proportion. No way am I reading that.
Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they're single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.
The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that -- particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it's a big network of a large number of small sites -- it's relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren't keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.
A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren't looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.
If it really ramps up, we could share block lists too, like with ad blockers. So if a friend (or nth-degree friend) blocks someone, then you would block them automatically.
We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.
The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we'll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we'll raise our game again.
It's true that the toolset isn't here now, and the network is actually very fragile at the moment.
It's also true that platform builders don't seem to want to deal with these kinds of tools, for raisins.
But it's also true that temporary blocks are both effective and not that big of a deal.
I'm not sure why you'd think that manual moderation will lead to small instances getting barred, though. Unless you're predicting that federation will move to whitelisting, rather than blacklisting? That's historically been the tool of corporate services, not personal or community ones.
We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
I don't think that's a perfect system anyway though, spammers could create a massive tree of fake accounts and just only use a small proportion of them for spam
Use a number of compromised user accounts to set this up and it becomes a nightmare
Most of the internet is made up of echo chambers now even though anyone and everyone can access a majority of it. I don't think being selective in who we allow into communities worsens the pre-existing echo chamber issue. If anything it may help to be more selective. It can sometimes be impossible to tell the difference between trolls, bots, and real people, so I feel like we assume every person we disagree with is a troll or bot. The issue with that is that we may be outright dismissing real opinions. In theory, everyone in a selective community is a real person who is expressing their true thoughts and feelings.
Instead of being this gen's September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they're reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.
also to an “every company that doesn’t get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind” economy.
That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].
I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I've turned around, for the past thirty years now, I've seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I'll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
I don't expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.
I'm just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that's self-evident bullshit.
If anybody's acting"entitled" in that scenario, it's the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.
Uhm ackshully the "late stage" in capitalism is in late stage in the same way a Cancer is late-stage. So it doesn't mean Capitalism dying, it means Capitalism killing its host (humanity)
That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.
Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?
The current internet search is becoming obsolete. People are able to tell apart BS, though. This means, there's a possibility for a smarter filter. Hard to tell whether we will see one in the near-future.
Please help me be optimistic. Why do you think this is the case? No matter where I go I see mostly confirmation bias and the lack of even the most basic level of critical thought.
Yeah. The unpleasant situation this person is describing is also described by the Dark Forest Internet theory, which also includes more of a plausible solution, as opposed to purely terror and resignation.
I don't think anyone's ditching mainstream social media en masse though are they? Sure a bunch of us have but let's be honest 90% of Lemmy/mastodon users are of a very similar demographic and not exactly a huge chunk of the population
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
It is ok. I actually prefer the internet as a niche phenomenon. I was on it and I was the only one, and I was cool with that because it had all kinds of nerd stuff. Now it's all normal people stuff and hostile nonsense and money, and I'd kind of like to just have the unpopular nerd internet back.
This isn't a new thing. It's been a long time ago that the internet shifted from being a level playing field and a means of connecting people, to a place where the big companies make money. And it brought some of the currently biggest companies on earth into existence.
Things changed a bit. Harvesting private data and selling information about the users used to be the dominating business model. It still is, but now it gets mixed with selling their content to train AI. I'd argue that in itself isn't a dramatic change. It's still the same concept.
But I also always worry about centralization, enshittification and algorithms shaping our perspective on reality more and more.
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