site/_zola/content/2025-03-24-the-internet-sucks.md

+++
title = "The Internet Sucks"
date = 2025-03-24
description = "Yet another internet random complains about the state of things blog post"
+++

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)),
[Gemini](https://geminiprotocol.net/), and [Nex](https://nightfall.city/nex/info/specification.txt).
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.

***
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.