The internet has always been my salvation.
As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.
But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.
I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.
Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.
I’m ready to give up on most things.
Already have. Continued existence is mainly just for the benefit of the spouse who actually has things worse than I.
Inertia is really the only thing keeping me alive at this point…
Set up your own website if you haven’t already, the indie web/smallnet/etc movement lately has been really cool to see and has made the internet fun again for me. Neocities is a great place to start if you need simple hosting, completely free and without ads
How are people finding these types or sites? I love the idea of it but I don’t understand how any of it gets discovered.
Here’s one place https://neocities.org/browse
this search engine finds smaller unique sites, lots of them happen to be neocities sites. Just refresh the page and see whats out there: https://old-search.marginalia.nu/search?query=browse%3Arandom
Neat, but this only makes me miss StumbleUpon. It was so freaking good for discovering niche websites. I have no idea why it shut down.
Oh StumbleUpon…thou shalt be remembered
I just tell people to go visit https://soulism.net/ as often as I get the chance
how did anyone find zombo.com back in the day
I think everyone’s friend just told them about it one day.
Wasn’t there just a thing with search engines de-indexing neocities and the like so no one could find them from search engines?
Search engines are the achilles heel of the internet. The enshitification bottleneck. We need ways to access information around these large for profit companies, as they no longer are doing an honest, honorable job, but maximizing profit in a plutocracy governed by dictators and corrupt soon to fall to fascism liberal democracies.
as far as i know, it was a bug with bing
My most recent lil obsession/project has been to see how doable getting the start of a community mesh network going would be. I want the internet to live up to its decentralised promise but that means actually decentralising it.
I’ve been seeing a lot about this stuff and I really want to get into it, seems really cool
It looks like meshtastic/meshcore is the easiest entry point depending on what has more nodes in your area, as far as I can tell it’s just messaging but the barrier to entry is really low if you wanted to play around with it
The easiest way to do this is to get a cheap or free VPS with wireguard and use that as a proxy for your self-hosted website/services.
The Internet sucks now. There’s just not “things” on it anymore. When I was a teenager, there was always something new and interesting to do online. Modern Internet is social media, streaming, and shopping. It’s just not the same.
Yep, it was a trove of discovery, now its all data gleaning and AI marketing slop, and other garbage.
The library of Alexandria, burns again.
I’m sure it still exists , it’s just not easy to find these websites. In those times you had search engines that worked, Even before google existed, and the other search engines weren’t as good , you could find authentic websites
I understand completely but am trying to mold my access to the world in a way that doesn’t cause me such depression. I don’t use the normal social networks, I’ve used the piefed filters to block everything about musk, trump, ice, america, politics, etc. and I’ve never followed any kind of “news”.
Before I did that, I was literally becoming chronically suicidal(well, that’s not gone but it’s better) from the absolute shit-show that the world has become(it’s not just the US, other countries are quickly adopting the bipartisan hatred model now that they see it works to divide). It would be different if you saw something regarding a change towards improvement but that’s never seen, you just get another endless scroll of shit that is destroying society with no way to change it.
The fediverse is just as bad as any other social network out there. Although the leaning is opposite, it’s still full of extremism, hyperbolic hatred, ridicule, mockery, division and sufferporn. Without filters, it would be as unusable to me as, say, facebook or trump’s social network.
I’m withdrawing a lot from people online but still spend a lot of time online, it’s just not as interactive as it used to be.
If this is not sustainable, I’m sure I’ll likely follow your lead and leave it to the rest of the world.
It would be different if you saw something regarding a change towards improvement but that’s never seen, you just get another endless scroll of shit that is destroying society with no way to change it.
Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. It’s almost as if it’s being deliberately rubbed in our faces about our true collective powerlessness in this moment.
The fediverse is just as bad as any other social network out there. Although the leaning is opposite, it’s still full of extremism, hyperbolic hatred, ridicule, mockery, division and sufferporn. Without filters, it would be as unusable to me as, say, facebook or trump’s social network.
Yes! I have so many filters enabled in my Lemmy client, but this morning, I stumbled upon a screenshot (since filters aren’t smart enough to extract content from screenshots) of an Epstein email that was so incredibly disturbing in its implication. These aren’t my vile thoughts, yet they’ve been bouncing around my mind all day.
I can’t take it anymore.
Please stay strong out there.
I’ve done this as best I can too. It was hard because I feel a need to be informed, but I came to the conclusion that being informed was actually only making me miserable, and didn’t actually spur any kind of action. It was actually the opposite because the fear machine kept me paralyzed with despair and cynicism.
I cut out as much as I can, and while things are still tough, I have more mental capacity to focus on what’s actually happening to me in the here and now.
You might know it already but I would recommend a free newsletter called Fix the News. It’s a roundup of only positive news, and not fluff either. It’s honestly done a lot to make me realize the endless bad news is a very narrow look at what’s happening in the world.
No, not “off” the internet.
Off the big corporate-driven soulless sites, maybe. Smaller discussion groups/forums, dedicated services, etc. still works. It’s less tedious, less eating your brain.
Basically, going back to internet before central planetary services that feed on everyone being miserable.
Kind of reminds me of how Pride just became another advertising platform for businesses.
Money really does ruin everything.
Yes, exactly what I said!
Use a custom DNS, don’t use yhr big 3 corpo sites, youll have a great time.
The other thing, get more tech literate friends. My dumb friends are annoying the hell out of me with how ignorant and unwilling to learn they are.
I’ve given up on the super-corporate side of the Internet.
99% of my Internet use is Mastodon and Lemmy, both of which don’t really represent “the Internet”. I sail the high seas occasionally to help meet my other needs.
Yes, multiplayer gaming is toxic as hell. If I’m doing that, I have chat turned off, but mostly I’ve managed to finagle the Internet into my own personal, cozy little Hobbiton derivative, so it doesn’t feel quite so toxic to me as it might to the population at large.
Don’t give up, stick to places that don’t suck. Corpotrash is replacable
Get off gen social. Contribute what you can and help to build niche communities that interest you.
I agree! If we give up and move somewhere else, they’d just follow us and ruin it.
Not if it’s set up right. This federation is the model, it just needs to be tweaked. Clear rules on instances that can talk between the lemmy and piefeds to the open source facebook and twatter and instagram type social medias. One account that can travel between them.
More than that, to have a clear set of rules for moderation, both in the instances and the general forums, and for violations to be appealable, and a final decision contested to end in a jury trial of users. To prevent the powerful from getting their hooks in, and to prevent the moderators and administrators being unjust. It’s the only way to get the critical mass we need to have a viable alternative to these silicon valley parasites that are in thrall to big business and government.
Also in addition we need new sort of organizations, ones where innumerable groups can cooperate on what they agree on on general forums, as they see fit. Privately and publicly, where we can pool knowledge, funding, create businesses where maximizing revenue isn’t the only concern in sectors where the private market isn’t providing needed outcomes, finding and grooming and electing political candidates, pooling votes and collectively using votes and other actions to force poliiticians to adopt our positions over those of monied interests.
Monied interests cooperate on what they agree on, and if we don’t do the same we can never counter-act them. We are stronger than the united greed of those interests, that is hurting itself long term to maximize it’s short term profit. We just need the forums to work together. Federated systems are that forum, to remove liability from he whole for one thing.
If what was meant when OP says ‘internet’ is the cesspool social media, then yes, we should totally ditch them.
However, the fact remains that the real definition of internet is simply a bunch of interconnected devices that run the internet protocol (IP), nothing more and nothing less.
Though I have my doubts, I’m not disagreeing with you or anything, just pointing out that there’s a lot of people confusing this term, and simple as it may be, it might be harmful.
I think I was just trying to say that it’s not doomed to enshitify if we set up new systems to work despite the malign forces at work. The idea behind open source and federation could work to set up systems that could be resistant to the enshittening.
We need a sort of federated social media as much as anything. While lemmy is a good start, we need to add more types of social medias that can interact together and improve their functioning, and also give a set of clear rules that can be appealed to a jury trial of users for serious infractions to get and keep the trust that would enable us to overcome the established silicon valley parasite companies that the government and big business has their hooks into and as such is a compromised forum we are doomed to lose the common good on.
Valid point.
What I would like to add to it is that we will need to defend it from time to time.
We’ve already seen an example when Meta’s Thread tried to federate.
Spammers have also been a nuisance, and thankfully our mods & admins have been handling them well.
Lemmy is a salvation spot for me, been an internet denizen since before I was a teen, it has been sad to see it slide into popularity contest/mass consumerism garbage. But I enjoy my Minecraft videos I’ve been watching for over a decade and getting to chat about homelab/Linux stuff as an alternative.
Its not like the real world (in the us at least) is doing any better lmao
Nah, it’s just getting good. The Epstein/Mossad files are slowly melting the fascist tide by exposing the perverts behind the curtain. The billionaires are losing their control over information to first hand accounts posted live so we can all see the truth before the spin. The Internet is the forefront of understanding what is about to happen.
Don’t quit now. If you want to see the truth, the Internet is the last place to host it unfiltered. Quitting is how the billionaires get people to only see the world through captured media.
Fucking optimist over there. There is nothing to celebrate, all epstein has showed us is nothing will force consequences for our connected rich in the west, our opposition to fascists is controlled to prevent us from seeing them face consequences, and that the worst people in the world hold an absolute veto over a critical mass of our lawmakers with that information.
Yeah the internet is cooked.
Im trying to invest more time in off-line things.
like the n64
If the fediverse were to collapse, I’d be done. Its the one thing worth being hopeful about right now.
Be mindful that it’s a tool, use it to benefit youself
I jave been onlone from the dialup and BBS days of the 1980’s when it was the reserve of nerds, it’s accelerated the enshitifcation process in the last 20 years and commercialisation via advertising is why, it’s the only reason Googke, Facebook etal exist
If you feel you have to step away, then do it for yourself - keep being mindful of the cause. Because it’s not a shut and close situation.
Life is always changing, tonight you might not want the internet - half a year from now you might need a very obscure information and you will be able to look it up and log off again.
I love the internet, because it is amazing tool. And so much knowledge is at the tip of your fingerprints! In my childhood if I wanted to learn something I hoped we had the right book home, or it’s library time with the cards and looking for books and hoping the book had an appendices…
Internet does have a rotten part to it - but to give up all the free education YouTube has, all the wikis on the world - it would be going backwards for me.Knowledge was at your fingertips. Now it’s not quite that. I put a question into a search engine and don’t get a good answer. Not from the search page, and the enshitified results are almost all written by machines, repeating the question over in every way it could be said, and explaining in exhuastive detail why someone would want to know the answer, all to hit the search engine requirements, then maybe a sentence or two with a lousy answer.
But you might not be able to find the answer on the page. I’ve to cycle through multiple pages and scan ai written prose to find an answer that I used to get instantly right from the search page.
I know it can work better, because it did work better. 2021 the enshitification became ubiquitous. That is hardly the only way information is no longer available. Dependent as we are on Search Engines for access to this information, and malign forces having their hooks into those For Profit search engines, we are entering a dark age.
Unless we get some players not in the Shit Trust, the anti competitive providers of any sector that have decided to all do a shit job to maximize profit rather than compete to offer the best products.
Or Trustshit, trustshittered search engines, I’m still workshopping the name.
You might be done with people, not the internet.
The Internet as a whole isn’t the problem. Specific sites are. Steer clear from those sites, and you’ll be just fine. Take notice of which sites and services result in negative emotions, and find alternatives to those places.
spoiler
All the popular sites will be on that list. Anything made by one of the big companies is permanently contaminated. If it involves Meta, Xitter, Reddit in any way, you’re better off without it. Also, many popular news are built on the idea of spreading fear and anxiety. Avoid those sites too.
