No.6391
What happened to the internet?
I wasn't alive back then, but pretend it's 1984
A friend of you asked for the source code for the software you've made
you put it in your university's ftp server tilde
he downloads it
while he downloads it at half kilobyte per second, you talk about Neuromancer.
The internet used to be the user's network (hem, Usenet) but now corporations have taken over the internet, for example, cloudflare have 4 million IP addresses, google has 10 million.
They have big corpos an absurd number of IP addresses, and they won't give selfhosters even half IP address. Not to mention that ISPs won't even bother on implementing IPv6, which can solve the problem the horrible distribution of IPv4 gave us.
We could have given self hosters an IP address for whatever they want. Personal websites (remember geocities?), non-profit services (searx, peertube…) for everyone.
The internet was made to be distributed, but cloudflare, google, facebook and all of them are trying to centralize it.
Is there any chance for us to have a distributed, corp free internet?
Maybe the solution for this is Tor, but Tor is a centralized network (nothing wrong with it, because it is still very anonymous) but well, we can use tor for hosting services and websites. because creating a .onion is very easy, you don't need to pay for a domain, or worry about dynamic IP address.
There's also I2P, which is somehow like tor, but it instead of using tor nodes, you use someone else's I2P router, This router cannot MITM your traffic in I2P because it's always end to end encrypted. The problem with both tor and I2P is that they need a server to serve the website. Thankfully, there's freenet, which is basically, anonymous torrents, these "torrents" are used for websites (they're called freesites)
When you visit a site in Freenet, you download it from its "seeders", and when you finish downloading it, you are now seeding the website. Just like a torrent. This means that the site can still be online. even if the first person's server goes down.
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No.6397
We need to build a new network system that is designed to prevent centralization like this.
Early internet pioneers didn't care to prevent this centralism since they were all free market evangelists or vulgar anarchists who ate anticommunist propaganda so they either thought this result will be good or never foresaw it but the seeds for it where there.
We need a new internet that is meant to empower people without needing much technical knowledge and allow them to build communities.
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No.6398
>>6397Doesn't ActivityPub aim towards this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPubNot that well read on it though.
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No.6405
>>6398how many good leftist argueboards are on there
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No.6408
>>6405Mastodon and Chapochat are on there so if you're interested in talking to big babies with reddit janny brains it's perfect for you. Gab also used to be on there but they got blacklisted by everyone so there's no purpose to them being federated lol
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No.6410
>>6398It still uses the same infrastructure
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No.6411
>>6410True but it's well within the scope of this thread. Nobody is going to try and get off the current infrastructure while it still suits it purpose.
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No.6481
>>6410Are you suggesting a new infrastructure? Like a meshnet or laying down cable?
Cubans did this (Government let it stay up as long as there's no politics or porn IIRC) and some other areas have their own meshnets.
Freifunk (Germany)
guifi.net (Catalonia and Valencian communities)
NYC Mesh (New York City)
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No.6482
>>6411>>6481Yes, a meshnet or something on that vein will be way better but not an end all solution
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No.6499
Computers started as tabulating machines, a tool for assessing census data, a literal data mining of the citizenry.
First packet switching computer network, ARPANET started as US DOD project and was used for covert collection of "seismic data" from one of it's nodes in Norway, the real purpose was surveillance of atomic bomb tests in USSR. The other use was distributed storage of data, which is very useful for surveillance systems so that archives could never be taken down. Popular culture and fiction literature fed to you by cheerful useful idiots portrays programmers as some sort of anarchist ubermenshen who wield the power of technology for le greater good, when in fact behind each of there autistic rainmen living in their own imaginary technologist utopia world there is at least one sociopathic careerist supervisor who would do anything for the government or the corp, and by proxy, these technologists do too.
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No.6501
>>6499>Computers started as tabulating machines,The Antikythera mechanism is the first computer that we know off, it calculated astronomical positions.
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No.6519
>>6501>off by one, oh the huge manateeI think Jacquard looms were among the first machines to exhibit any form of stepwise programmability.
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No.6527
> while he downloads it at half kilobyte per second, you talk about Neuromancer.
Press F to go back
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No.6528
>>6391So Biden + Big Tech may really fuck this up but I was hoping that as Big Tech increases their power threatening that of the state's power they would be hit with legal action and Anti-trust laws - this basically happened to tumblr they got too big and got a sex trafficking lawsuit thrown at them wiping away their userbase in a few days. Something similar could easily happen to twitter or facebook considering the absurd power they wield in our political process (that the current administration appears to endorse).
I think the Tor / I2P decentralization is cool from a users privacy perspective but really not the end goal - we need the 6 sites that dominate all traffic to break up and be replaced with free software alternatives, this would hopefully coincide with more people adopting GNU/Linux in their life and ditching Apple + Android phones for Linux or Degoogled android. Unfortunately most people seem fine with the computing as an appliance (appifying computers) and normies continue to ruin computers for the rest of us.
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No.6544
>>6528>free softwareWhat does that have to do with active users, requests per second, and terabytes? Software is not enough.
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No.6586
>I wasn't alive back then,
Every time.
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No.6646
>>6643you know that was always going to happen, it was literally inevitable in a capitalist society that once the internet was invented it would be used for profit