The Internet Sucks
-2025-03-24
-Over the past few years, I have noticed that the internet is in a state of decay. If you've found my -site, there's a fair chance you think the same too, or have at least heard people say this. The -amount of fun one can really have online is rapidly decreasing. Everything has pretty much been -ruined.
-The problems
-Bloat
-The web is bloated. Every time I go to look up something I get dozens of articles containing popups -where I have to agree to getting tracked by every site's 800+ "partners", slowing everything -down. Then there's the JavaShit dependency so many sites have. It's even spread to "small" personal -sites that I have to wait for megabytes worth of JS to load in before I can read anything. My own -site is constantly getting edited in an attempt to make it as easy to use as possible on even the -most barebones browsers.
-"Social" networks.
-I hate concept of social media. Microblogging is shit. Short form video content is shit. Instagram -is shit. Reddit is shit. Yes, this very much includes your free and open source "ethical" -alternative. The Fediverse, Bluesky, Nostr, whatever else don't fix this. The idea itself is heavily -flawed no matter who develops it. I have too much to say about this for putting it in here, but to -keep it short, I strongly believe being on those places just slowly makes you more and more -retarded. Everything is optimized to get as many internet points as possible and well thought out -posts that actually express the author's point are discouraged with tiny character limits and -replies from children complaining about how long the text is.
-Surveillance
-Shouldn't have to explain this one much, there's surveillance problems on nearly every mainstream -platform that's been treated as normal for as long as it's been around. If you're here, you probably -already have strong feelings about this one.
-Clearnet
-I think the clearnet is beyond saving at this point and that we should not make an attempt to rescue -it. The damage has been done and will continue unless you do something about it. Everything is -centralized, and the system is a mess. CAs are centralized and you have to give them full trust to -not do anything bad to your site, which they can do. ICANN is how everybody gets their domains, and -they care more about making money than stopping things like parking for reselling or making the -process more private. It also is harder to work with clearnet hosting than it is to work with an -overlay network, which I see as something that gets in the way of people hosting their own things.
-How do we fix it?
-Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution to fully escaping the bullshit, but there are things -you and I can do to help.
-Overlay networks
-Explore overlay networks like I2P, Tor, and Yggdrasil. There's others out there too. I'll go over -this more in a later post, but to keep it short, Yggdrasil serves as internet done right (and about -how one would expect) while I2P and Tor focus specifically on being anonymous.
-Write your own site
-Write a site for yourself and/or your projects! Instead of a Facebook page or a Twitter profile, get -out a text editor and write some CSS and HTML, or even better, XHTML! It really isn't that hard to -do, and you get full control over your own content and design. You can use static site generators -like Hugo, Jekyll, Zola and many more to help if you need to mass produce templated pages. This site -uses Zola, which does have its quirks but I find it to be the best to work with out of the ones I've -tried. If you're running a blog or have other regularly updated content like news or updates, make -Atom (and RSS if you want) feeds too to so your visitors can subscribe to your sites and get those -updates instantly. A lot of static site generators have this built in. I'll tell you to self host so -you're fully independent in the next section, but if you really can't, I can help with getting your -site online over on Midgard.
-Alternative protocols?
-HTTP, or the Web, is not the only way of creating a "site" for yourself. There are other protocols, -though all of them (or at least all I know about) are far more minimal than what you can create on a -website even with just XHTML and a stylesheet. I don't have a full list of these protocols, but some -are Gopher, -Gemini, and Nex. -I don't hear much about Gopher nor have I got around to setting up a server for it yet but Gemini -has been gaining a lot of popularity from what I've seen lately. Nex is much more obscure but I like -it for how extremely simple it is, literally just plaintext served over TCP on port 1900.
-Self Host
-The best way to get full control over your sites and services is to self host them. Not on some -managed hosting service, not on a VPS, not anywhere in the cloud, actually self hosted on a -machine in a location you can physically access. This way, you have 100% control over your own -things and will truly own your services. Many ISPs do not want people self hosting and will put -people behind CGNATs, but if you use overlay networks and don't host on clearnet, then that won't -really matter. With Tor, hosting your own XMPP server using Prosody is pretty easy and you can throw -an IRCd onto pretty much any network. Running your own media server on Yggdrasil is entirely doable -and I use my Jellyfin running over it daily. Almost any service that doesn't involve S2S can be set -up on Yggdrasil, given that the client software is able to use IPv6.
-Contribute!
-If you're able to, start running nodes/peers for I2P, Tor, and Yggdrasil or any combo of -those. Those networks always could use more peers available to help make things faster and more -reliable for everybody.
-Do it NOW
-Stop waiting for the current internet to get worse. If you already host a personal site, start
-mirroring it on the darknets! For all of them it's as easy as installing the daemons, editing a few
-configs for them, and adding the names to your server_name on nginx or the equivalent for your
-webserver of choice.
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In the future I'll write a more full guide to the overlay networks, but I feel like this has been -long enough of a rant by now.
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