Improving the Internet General

There are many threads here discussing the reasons we don't like the current state of the internet. Most of us already know it su­cks. This thread is about discussing ways we can improve the internet. This includes: * small scope projects to ensure enthusiasts who care will continue to have good places to be (such as lain webring/tilde projects >>33813 , >>34563 , open hostable services like those mentioned in https://qorg11.net/darknet.xhtml#orgdc17b5e , or communities like privacy-friendly imageboards or similar) * medium scope projects that have wider impact (such as projects to improve salvageable sites (like the ReverseEagle project does, convincing FOSS projects to replace Google services like fonts, analytics, etc. on their websites with healthier alternatives), making or improving condom services for unsalvagable-but-useful sites (like Invidious/YouTube, Nitter/Twitter, Bibliogram/Instagram), joining meshnets (Freifunk, Guifi.net, NYC Mesh, Ninux, etc.) or even upstream projects like trying to fix soykafty education resources used by normal user devs so that they make less harmful sites) Focus more on proposals, brainstorming and solutions rather than plain venting (there are many other threads for that). Linking to existing projects is encouraged.

Some of the messageboards mentioned in the Alt Chan Discussion thread >>>/r/14350 have some interesting features/ideas such as ncurses/ssh interface, NNTP federation, PGP integration. Aside from more-or-less purely technical projects, I think one way to improve the internet, is to find and discuss interesting small special-purpose or for-the-hell-of-it projects. For example, the lainring thread did that to some extent. >condom services Er.. what? I'm not sure how to construe that term in that context. Off topic: Can someone explain the renewed interest in Billy & Mandy? Just another bout of nostalgia?

This is a psychological problem. Technology won't fix anything. Only thing that this will achieve is more abandonware that nobody will use after 2 years when devs give up on it or when it becomes a financial burden to host. Internet doesn't suck, image of the internet that you made in your brain is like kicking dead whales down the beach. It's like complaining that you have soykaf on your hands when you pick up crap that lies on the sidewalk. Instead of inventing gloves, why don't you just not pick up the soykaf?

>>34742 >[spoi­ler] If you mean the recent posts here, they might all be from me. There are a few shows in particular I can pull reaction images out of as easy as words from a dictionary, so it's more convenience than avataring. I can limit it if it's annoying Plus there was that cover of the Erisian zine on /lit/, which is understandable because that show reintroduced Discordianism to the newer generations. www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/Discordianism.html

No, it's fine, just thought something noticed. Not doesn't look avatarish at all from where I'm sitting. I've started seeing it on other boards recently, too. Anyway, the >>34747 thread is about interesting messageboard systems/features/ideas.

Rolled 2, 1, 1 + 5 = 9 Here's something I think anyone can do, or that ought to be made easy to do, that is in line with the broad (and worthy, in my opinion) goal of the repersonalization of the internet: net-radio. The idea is that each person might have a station they might curate. It might be as simple as a shuffle of favorites, which could be doable with ready software, but I'd like, for myself, something more complex. For example, if there's a lecture series that I think is good, I might want to schedule it to broadcast the next lecture at the same time every day. Or shuffle the lectures in, but with the condition that a lecture will only be broadcast after each prior lecture of the series has been broadcast. Or rather, it's not about whether it was broadcast before, but about whether listeners listened-through and understood each prior lecture. Of course, as a radio, it shouldn't actually collect any data about listeners---I consider that essential, not to one of the most beautiful aspects of radio stations---so it whether a lecture is considered listened-through and understood might be based on heuristics, e.g. if it's assumed that a listener tunes in for a few contiguous hours each day, and needs to listen to a lecture 3 times before really understanding it (not saying they're stupid, just busy attending other work), then the lecture would have to be played many times, so that when the days in which it's played are overlaid, each 3-hour interval has 3 instances of that lecture---it might be necessary to not play it more than a couple times in any one day, so that longer listeners aren't bothered by repetition, so it might take a few weeks to get through one lecture. And there might need to be a way for the listener to automatically switch back to the channel when the lecture ends, so that if they already know everything of the lecture, they can tune into a different channel until the lecture ends. I don't see picavataring against any rules, and we don't seem to care too much about maintaining pure anonymity here. I like picavataring better than using a constant name or tripcode, because it preserves the flavor of anonymity, and it's plausible deniability (who's to say someone else isn't posting Billy & Mandy pics, too?), while also injecting the flavor of persistent personality into the posts. It's like a brand. I've noticed that there are certain such `personality brands' that tend to have good posts. I think it can be an over-all good to internet culture.

The only way to improve the Internet is legal action: data protection laws and antitrust. Everything else is smoke and mirrors and a waste of time. GDPR is an amazing piece of legislation, the next step is antitrust investigation and hopefully the break up of tech giants.

Free software has a solution for 99% of the users needs. Even if you just use suckless software and a few other minimal programs you could do almost anything. The real problem is making these tools popular and simple to use. Writing scripts and wizards and guis might not be the simplest or most suckless way to do things, but if writing a gui is what it takes for the Ubuntu user to contribute to making the web a less awful place then I'd say its worth it. A good example is the GUI for youtube-dl. The youtube-dl program is simple, but it has a lot of options and reading the manpage to find what you need could turn people off. The gui makes the whole process of using youtube-dl much more user friendly. In addition, all the gui does is generate a youtube-dl command with some options and then runs it. If guis like this just taught the user by example of how things work then people would be more inclined care about making things run better.

>>34879 >(who's to say someone else isn't posting Billy & Mandy pics, too?) Funny you should mention that. On another tech board a while back I often used Mandy reaction pics among others (was watching the series at the time), then eventually someone else started reusing some of the same pics with different filenaming convention and grammar in posts which incidentally were often low-quality and tastelessly political. It wasn't imitation or anything, they just liked the reaction pics. Identity imitation on online imageboards is an interesting thing (whether it's random anons arguing or a celebrity in the group like an artist). I've seen it done well, done badly and done intentionally badly as a joke. The same details you notice there are the same things that might interest people in opsec/anonymity threads. I've picked up many of my tell-tale habits and avoid them if I say anything I really want detached from my identity.

>>34736 >making or improving condom services for unsalvagable-but-useful sites (like Invidious/YouTube, Nitter/Twitter, Bibliogram/Instagram I've noticed that there's no condom service for Facebook. It's a soykaf tier website anyway, but unfortunately so many people use Facebook that there are still times where it would be useful to use a condom service to get some information from there.

I'm honestly content with small forums, niche art sites/blogs and pseudo-anonymous chat rooms. Big corporate giants like twitter, reddit, and so on, dont bother me at all, because they dont prohibit you from having fun and making your own nutty sites. The biggest problem with the internet for me personally is how insecure the majority of people on the net are, and it used to not be like that. Unfortunately, you cant change soykafty people, so there's really no way to improve it for yourself other than to establish or join secret clubs.

>>35055 Facebook is probably the most walled off social media site. I've looked into doing something like you suggest before (or even just making a messenger chat bot) and you need an api key, which requires a vetting process, to do pretty much anything. Also, there's a ton of client-server interaction so reverse engineering to bypass the official channels is a nightmare. It makes sense, facebook's entire business model is build around controlling information. If just anybody could scrape their site they'd be fuarrrked.

The best way you can improve the Internet is by creating interesting things and putting them onto your own website that is free of bloat and adverts.

>>35055 >get new job set to start in a few months >official email tells recruits to join our own new recruits Facebook group >this already happened at my last job

>>35055 >>35057 Well, there's a web wrapper for it on F-Droid called Frost. It's something, at least.

>>35070 >The best way you can improve the Internet is by creating interesting things and putting them onto your own website that is free of bloat and adverts. This is right. Every little bit you host on your own helps to repopularize the distributed internet.

>>34736 I just had the idea of the decade, for people and companies to stop making such big bloated sites show them how much electricity is wasted handling their packets, receiving them etc, and when a website is light so "green" give them a stamp they can put somewhere and a certificate, companies would fall so hard for that soykaf, bully those who do not care into doing it too like "don't you care about the planet" "you are the reason turtles DIE".

what I've noticed recently is that people seem to be coming to an understanding that socialmedia is like kicking dead whales down the beach and are leaving it for instagram (owned by facebook),discord (just as bad as facebook), and friendproject (it's only a matter of time before it too ends up like facebook/myspace). what I've noticed these people want are 1 - privacy 2 - 1st amendment freedom 3 - customization I don't know any websites like that but a replacement for facebook I think is in demand rn.

>>35055 This is the closest you'll find Desktop: https://www.fbpurity.com/ Mobile: https://allanwang.github.io/Frost-for-Facebook/

I was actually going to make a platform

>>35673 Tell us about it

>>35658 Of course everyone wants that. Yet the problem is that can either turn into a festering cesspool of soykaf when enough people get onto it. Or it can be forced into censorship for profit if crowdfunding doesn't work. Seems that no one wins there.

>>35658 >>35786 we'd all be better off if it just went away without being replaced

>>35786 Ultimately it doesn't matter what people actually want, when the masses come in they inherently turn it all to soykaf. To have a large scale service you cannot avoid it turning awful because the sheer act of making it large scale ruins it.

>>35872 >sheer act of making it large scale ruins it. really you are just mad that the modern human is like kicking dead whales down the beach, not that mass co-operation is bad.

>>35872 I think it's not because of scale it's because of marketing. Companies want money. Marketing is effective on a wide scale. Whatever is popular is because it makes money for large companies.

>>35658 >1 - privacy It's what people need, but I feel like people don't really want it. I mean, they're aware that companies are gathering data on them through their phones and those dumbass smart-home devices, but they seem not to care that the same thing is happening with what they post about on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Or perhaps they do care, but the network effect keeps them from moving to another service. Either way, people are concerned about their privacy to some extent. They've also started to develop a general anti-corporate sentiment, though so far it's limited to examples like Nestle exploiting water resources in the third world and Disney buying up every media company in existence. Still, you can push this sentiment and mix in examples of software companies violating people's privacy. >2 - 1st amendment freedom This has little appeal to most people, less than it ought to. This is thanks to the forced belief that wanting free speech means you're some teenager/manchild who just wants to say slurs without punishment. It doesn't help, though, that nearly every service that bills itself on free speech always gets flooded with these types. This is highly convenient, not only for the long-standing services (who can point at alternatives and talk about how they're all full of edgy kids) but also for the opponents of the ideas censored by these services (because they can associate these ideas with said edgy kids). It's so convenient, that I could imagine someone from a major site promoting a freer competitor on certain 4chan boards, to swarm the competitor with scumbags and sabotage it. The only way I see to push for this is to fight against the meme of "free speech == i wanna say da n wurd". To do this, you'd have to provide examples of censorship that don't give ammo to that meme. Which is to say, present examples of censorship that don't involve right-wingers. >3 - customization I see one small way to promote this, and it's nostalgia. Remind people of the time when software and websites were highly customizable. Share (tasteful) screenshots of old Windows XP setups, media player skins, anything to showcase what kind of freedom users had back in those days. And then provide them with examples of sites/programs that are still customizable today. Bonus points for showcasing setups that increase usability instead of just looking pretty. Of course, customization really only appeals to power users, but it's still a good front to push.

>>35898 wish things had stayed more like the windows xp look instead of going to boring flat soykaf