This also could have a positive aspect, eventually, maybe.
It could cause a revival of BBSes, Packet-Radio on CB radio/amateur radio etc.
Or give birth to new messengers only used by real people etc.

This reminds me of the mailboxes nets of the 90s, such as Fidonet, MausNet, Z-Netz (comparable to WWIV network).:
There had been a telephone line-based network that existed in parallel to the internet.

No what I can see occurring is that the Internet will fragment even further than it already has, big corporations clearly want to control it and I fully expect the free internet to slowly disappear as more and more controls and sanitization are put into place by the corporations seeking to control it and the people using it will be shit out of luck, youll get what the corps want you to have and youll like it.

Tor and the darknet will always exist but even there more and more controls are being forced upon it by the people/corporations in power .. they don't want a free internet as it provides the plebs with too much power and knowledge and far too much freedom.

So I fully expect there to be a few versions of the internet in the near future and all of them will be infested with AI and Bots and the ones not infested will be full of vapid boring clones eating social media shit for clout and licking big corpo boots for the latest money wasting bullshit thinking it makes them look cool.

Wish I could go back to the late 90s or early 2000s and just stay there ...the early Internet was so much fun.

There is a push from some US state governments for mandatory age verification. There is a push from other governments (Europe, Brazil, etc.) for other forms of censorship. There is a push from big tech for requiring a mobile phone number for everything and for "device attestation" to limit the range of acceptable device/OS/software. All of this seems to be converging on an "internet ID". What do you want to bet that, once the infrastructure is in place, the same web developers who don't hesitate to subject their users to tracking, crapchas, and cloudfart malware, will also not hesitate to require an internet ID?

the3dfxdude wrote on Today, 02:06:

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The culprit? It's likely from companies, world-wide, trying to seed their LLM. It wasn't like this more than a year ago. These are certainly not like the classic search engine bots.
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I agree with the sentiment here actually. If the small web hosts don't take action to make themselves free of bots, they'll just give up, and I think the old way of the internet will go away. The internet will mostly be chatbots left of the largest tech companies conveying any information that exists, and a few bloated applications that are a pretend sorry example of what things were before the internet, and that is dystopian.

It is almost certain that "the internet" as we knew it is vanishing - all traffic is diverting to protected consolidated enclaves (social media....) and some larger sites (news sites, universities, big corporates, governments, places like imdb and so on). The 'wilderness' is being destroyed. It's like an exaggerated version of multiple settlements being abandoned or absorbed into big cities in the west of the US way back, but more rapid and more pronounced.

what's left in the wild now still looks plentiful - but increasingly populated by nothing but bots - so many articles, media and news just looks generated only to be read by other bots (increasingly on social media too!), search engines losing their usefulness, advertising on everything and the average person now encounters endless checks for websites (all the squares with cars.... sometimes 10, 20+ times and even then nothing) or cloudflare or other bot filters than clearly dont work, and then there is an accumulation of hostile malicious activity all time.

I feel sorry for anyone running servers now, it must be like trying to row a boat up a waterfall

I feel sorry for anyone running servers now, it must be like trying to row a boat up a waterfall

Like a personal website hosted locally on a DOS PC, C64 or a PIC Micro? 😢
Personally, I always had this on shedule as a future project..

But not all is lost, maybe. Perhaps we really see other niche networks to emerge again?
As it's usually happen in the novels about dystopian futures?

I liked Packet-Radio, for example. The DOS program "Graphic Packet" used to be cool, I heard.
It even allowed playing games, displaying pictures live when being received and so on.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5kFWvUBKqs

Edit: There's also HAMNET, a WiFi-based "internet" operated by radio amateurs.
So it's in principle possible to establish an alternative to the internet.
just needs enough dedication..
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMNET
https://tapr.org/wp-content/uploads/DCC2014-T … MNET-DG8NGN.pdf

This worries me to no end. Look for tips on what to do in a city. Every result is a SEO ad trap listicle stating the same 'facts'. Or try to find out if a tool is any good- all you get are AI generated pages that start with an introduction of what the tool is for, and then a 'comparison' of features from the spec sheet. If you want something from a human you have to go to reddit, or youtube.

And even those platforms themselves are just trash. I used to watch a lot of youtube on my iPad, but lately all I get are these weird low-rent ads for 'trading courses' that will make you rich filmed by some dude on his phone, or the 'procrastinator vs whatever' song. It's all so icky it literally chased me away from my iPad. Just make me watch an ad for a car. Or cat food. Anything from a reputable company instead of all this scammy shit.

Of course there is still a non-platform internet out there, but if nobody can find it, what future does it have? Take Deskthority, quite an active forum a couple or years back, now its dead. Once new people stop flowing in (i.e. they go to reddit instead), posting deminishes, regulars stop hanging out and all that's left is a small group of diehards basically talking to themselves. At this point Vogons is my last forum hangout and knock-on-wood it keeps on thriving.

The 'small internet' movement looked hopeful, but I cooled on it considerably after checking it out. No matter how useful some may be, 'neocities'-like micro webpages are basically impossible to find with a normal search engine, so they only attract traffic from within the niche. I also checked out the alternative protocols like Gopher. After a few evenings of playing with it, it sadly became clear that most 'gopherholes' consist of a hello world from 2019, and three microblogs within the span of a few months after. If no-one reads it or reacts to it, I suppose most people don't see the point.

I feel it might be naive to think we can hide from the shit. It's essentially security by obscurity. Once an alternative becomes sufficiently mainstream the slop will follow suit, if it's too small it will peter out. Please tell me I'm seeing this wrong.

Since Firefox handily disabled NoScript for me (thanks) I now browse with the Devil's script permanently disabled. Naturally an increasing number of websites simply refuse to load anything at all. I saw this comment on Slashdot, I think:

"Cloudflare just makes sure you are running JavaScript [...] to protect their clients' ad revenue. There's nothing about a stupid little check box "Yes. I'm a human." that a bot can't handle. Even a bot written in JavaScript."