The Internet Sucks

2025-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

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.</p>

The problems</h2>

Bloat</h3>
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.</p>

Surveillance</h3>
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.</p>

Clearnet</h3>
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.</p>

How do we fix it?</h2>
Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution to fully escaping the bullshit, but there are things you and I can do to help.</p>

Overlay networks</h3>
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.</p>

Write your own site</h3>
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.</p>

Alternative protocols?</h3>
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</a>, Gemini</a>, and Nex</a>. 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.</p>

Self Host</h3>
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</em> 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.</p>
Contribute!</h3>
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.</p>
Do it NOW</h3>
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</code> on nginx or the equivalent for your webserver of choice.</p>`
`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.</p>`

Server up

2025-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

After waiting way too long, I finally have a server online. Nothing big, just a RPi 5 running Alpine to provide some services for myself and other. I'm trying to focus on hosting sites built to be minimal, without the bloat much of the modern web has. It also exclusively serves on dark/altnets (Yggdrasil and Tor currently, I'll hopefully have I2P stuff running within a week or so) to promote using that over the clearnet. The service's name is "Midgard", I felt like that fits the theme of creating a more human web and goes with "Yggdrasil" nicely.</p>

Current services are forums (running Simple Machines Forum) and sites (using Caddy). The forums still have some work that needs to get done (selfhosting jQuery, fixing resource fetching outside of Tor) but it should fully work on Tor. You can access it here</a>, but I have it set so accounts require approval as I'm currently a frequent target of spam commonly including things I very much do not want to be hosting.</p>

I also host personal sites for me and some others.</p>

wanderlost

The Internet Sucks

The problems</h2>

Surveillance</h3>
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.</p>

How do we fix it?</h2>
Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution to fully escaping the bullshit, but there are things you and I can do to help.</p>

Server up

Zaydsite now

wanderlost

The Internet Sucks

The problems</h2>

Surveillance</h3> 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.</p>

How do we fix it?</h2> Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution to fully escaping the bullshit, but there are things you and I can do to help.</p>

Server up

Zaydsite now

Surveillance</h3>
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.</p>

How do we fix it?</h2>
Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution to fully escaping the bullshit, but there are things you and I can do to help.</p>