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what the hell happened to the internet man! it used to be such a fun place for us nerds and hobbyists to hangout. you could say whatever you wanted without it being used against you personally, companies didn't keep trying to exploit us for money 24/7, and overall, the general attitude towards people here felt less serious and more down to earth. most websites and forums back in the day were very chill and favored actual discussions over soykafposts and memes. you just don't see this stuff anymore. every new website has to have memes or be used by the masses nowadays if they want to stay relevant! and that's just sad. I started going online since 2003, what about you?

kid me started going online in like 2000, In the 90s I discovered that there was this thing that let you play vidya with people in other places, and then I got into computers (even though my mum objected to me spending too much time on the computer) as with anything else, once advertising was shown to be more profitable than selling actual products, that's the route that everything took. Back then TV was the major medium to reach people, now the internet is. you cant escape the way the world has become, so just embrace it and hope it will get better

>>6936 > Back then TV was the major medium to reach people, now the internet is. The upshot is, TV was garbage back then and now it's better than ever. It has to be if it wants to compete.

>>6939 >TV was garbage back then how far back are we talking about? 90s to early 2000s were great years for TV!

>>6940 Perhaps you are forgetting all the horrible stuff that lasted for years back then, and the even worse stuff that got cancelled after half a season, and are remembering only Red Dwarf, X-Files, Kids in the Hall and such. TV was a goddamn wasteland back then.

There used to be a barrier for getting into the internet. Not everybody knew how to use a computer less so, connect it to the interwebs. Nowadays any dummy can. There is no filter and there are much more dummies than there are interesting people.

>>6943 yep, this is pretty much why. in between the 90s to early 2000s, only computer geeks from the age of 16 and up knew how to get connected and use the internet. the average person might have at least known how to send an email, but even that was a challenge. the only way to fix the internet would be to literally make a second internet. one that barely anyone will know about. we would also have to make it so you can't get connected with a smartphone, only with computers. of course, that would be ridiculous and no company would actually do that since it would be a waste of money. it would require a very rich neckbeard with absolutely nothing better to spend his money on for something like this to happen

>>6942 well, to be fair, in the 90s I just watched cartoons, like spongebob, rocko's modern life, ect. I wasn't interested in mainstream live action shows. then in the 2000s I just watched anime from toonami at day time and adult swim on saturday nights.

>>6943 >>6944 I remember those times because my brother used to hang out in newsgroups where they would debate stuff like Borg cube vs. Death Star and he would shout out the proceedings from his room so the whole family could hear. If this is the classic wild west internet you idolize, so be it. Let's be honest about what the approach of keeping normal people at bay actually results in though. also lost his virginity at age 23 to a customer while driving taxi

The internet man is very ill and needs treatment.

>>6946 >neurosuggesting the internet wasn't vastly better when it was full of Borg cube vs. Death Star debates instead of social media attention whoring bullsoykaf >neurosuggesting ameritard normal users aren't the worst thing that ever happened not only to the internet but to the world in general >neurosuggesting your pitiful space zombies can stand against the might of the glorious Galactic Empire

We are all products of the Eternal September. Let's all live in the wired together in harmony.

>>6962 I don't mean to be rude cyber dude but that sounds pretty gay

>you could say whatever you wanted without it being used against you personally you could never say whatever you wanted without it being used against you personally. people have been flaming and doxing each other since the first bbs >>6936 >you cant escape the way the world has become sure you can. it's called suicide

The internet is the gentrified Wired. Centralization is the problem because it inherently favors big companies with over individuals. We need to work together to build decentralized alternatives to take back the Wired for ourselves, there's already a bunch of great projects (ipfs is the most obvious example). My question is should we be working on making these things user friendly to attract a bigger userbase or should we be purposefully including some sort of "skill check" to keep out the facebook users? Either way: THE INTERNET IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE WIRED

smartphones, soccermoms, people trying to make money off worthless soykaf, and politcs

well sense we're all being all nostalgic n stuff, I found this thread on 4ch's worksafe gif board where they are posting some gold from the good old days https://boards.4chan.org/wsg/thread/2077564 this thread made me insanely happy but also shed a few tears from the nostalgia

>>6962 The Human Instrumentality Project Except it's Wired

>>6967 I would argue Chans are one of the few ways to take it back (Until we get flooded by normal people) but another great way is to start your own blog/forum/bbs/mastodon for discussion.

>>6944 basically as long as physical infrastructure isn't a must for you, >>6967 has the right idea. Other than that there's meshnets but if you're not interested in talking to people in your area, or you're on a desert island, that won't work. Probably the most important thing for resurrecting the good parts of the old internet is it should be so redundant and/or useless that no-one will want to try and make money from it, and tell anyone who tries building the next amazon on it to piss off. >>6980 I'm starting to blog a little on a non-cyb site that's just starting up. My theory is maybe there are people out there that would care about the things I do, but they have no idea any of this exists. Rather than bring them to a chan, I'll go where they are. If nobody cares then oh well, I honed my article-writing skills a little. As for my actual cyb plans, if any of the tech-apathetic people in my life become jaded enough about facebook and such, I'll use an overlay network to set up a friend-to-friend network with them. All of the socialization with none of the datamining.

>>6980 Chans were flooded by normal people several years ago (at least 4chan) and are currently in a decline as it is. The bigger chans have less traffic than they used to and the dozens of smaller chans that popped up in the last decade have mostly evaporated.

>>6950 Believe it or not I don't think either example is particularly ideal.

>>6944 >the only way to fix the internet would be to literally make a second internet. one that barely anyone will know about. we would also have to make it so you can't get connected with a smartphone, only with computers. hmmmmmmmmm

>>7786 That's because most people want to go to where everyone is at and in this case it's 4chan. But still, I remember when 7chan was new and incredibly fast, but now look! 7chan is even slower than 8ch. But whatever, I think the real tragedy is that it's impossible to make a chan from scratch. No matter how hard you try, people will always compare it to the original (4chan) and if it doesn't have a very specific theme, it'll just become a very slow 4chan clone.

>>7792 Yeah. The chans that have avoided being flooded with generic chantard nonsense only did so by having very few regulars, and then the admins eventually got sick of running such a slow site. Even this site, as much as I like coming here, has more 4chan and especially /pºl/ garbage than I'd like. It's like people assume that any site that uses a certain interface must automatically be part of some juvenile subculture as well. If you point out how stupid this is they just say *hurrr but imageboards amirite*, kinda proving the point. Then they inevitably tell you to go to reddit.

Why not just stay in the niche parts of the internet like lainchan?

Apologies in advance for this fuarrrking essay of a post. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. >tl;dr: imageboards are a bad fit for mass culture. the spirit of the internet as we know it will live on in smaller, semi-private chatrooms (think discord). it's not so bad you guys. we just need to figure out how to federate these chatrooms on a social level so that we don't rely on the social-media feeding tube to connect with eachother. I don't know if this is a symptom or a cause, but the ways that people socialize on the internet has fundamentally changed in recent years. Well, more accurately, a new model of socialization has emerged and it has quickly become the most popular one. I call it (for lack of better language) the 'creator/follower' relationship, and the opposite idea is maybe the traditional 'peer' or 'forum' relationship. >Creator/Follower: >Prioritizes personality/identity over content. Creators are incentivized (not just monetarily) to ensure that all content they produce is associated with their identity. >Creator maintains a 'legacy' or 'brand'. Everything they say online becomes part of the brand. Nothing public is ephemeral. >Followers are almost completely objectified. They have no individual ability to create or influence creation (in their capacity as a follower... most people are both creator and follower, but the relationships can be understood separately). >Peer/Peer: >Typically anonymous or pseudonymous. This isn't a necessary condition, it's more of an observation that online platforms that let you create an extensive profile for yourself tend to breed celebrity in a way that is impossible on imageboards, reddit, forums (incl. places like stackoverflow/wikis). Sure, forums might have local personalities but people don't come to forums *for* those personalities. >Content and identity are separate. You might be remembered for some of the things you've said, but it's not like people are reading everything you post because they like *you*. >Content is generated collectively and in aggregate. 'Board culture' if you prefer, but it's not unique to imageboards. Now, what I think happened is that Creator/Follower replaced Peer/Peer in large public forums. That's why imageboards are dying out. It's not normal user invasion.. if anything it's normal user exodus. When's the last time you've seen a large general-topic forum? The closest we have are the big gamer forums that manage to be somewhat general by virtue of the fact that gaming is a pretty common interest. The majority simply prefers Creator/Follower over Peer/Peer for their public socialization. There are two main areas where the peer model is still prevalent, and will likely remain so: chatrooms (incl. discord, secret facebook groups, etc.) and hobby/interest forums. The latter case is easy to explain; when everyone just wants to talk about cars or synthesizers or whatever, it makes sense to use a model that prioritizes content. The former is more interesting. As I see it, the growing popularity of chatrooms (loosely defined) presents a promising 'way out' for people like us looking to avoid the social media funnel without becoming digital hermits. Obviously not all platforms are created equal, and we should look to free/open/federated services, but that's a different conversation. Public online spaces will inevitable end up just as trashy as public meatspaces, but I think I could see myself avoiding all that by jumping between online social groups on different platforms. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? In some ways, it's more appealing than the rose-tinted 'glory days' of 4chan. Every new group is a town where nobody knows your name, and there's going to be a hell of a lot more of these towns as these services become more popular. I could go on about how I think darknets+decentralized web services are an excellent way to remake the "alternative public sphere" imageboards used to represent, but this post is already too long so I'll leave it at that.

>>7818 I wouldn't say the masses aren't attracted to forums/imageboards anymore, I mean just look at reddit. That website has barely changed since 2005 and yet still managed to become the 4th most visited website in the US alone. I think the real problem is reddit itself. The fact that you can make a sub out of (mostly) anything means there's no real reason to go to websites that are dedicated to certain things, since you can just find it all on that one internet forum. This means that places like gamefaqs and myanimelist become irrelevant for most people, since it's much more convenient to just go to one website rather than going to lots of other websites, but it is exactly this type of mentality that makes smaller forums/imageboards like this one suffer from low speeds and give off the illusion that forums are irrelevant. I guess to put it simply, forums are all mostly dead not because the masses have become a stranger to the concept of forums, but because they have all moved on to their "respectable" subs.

>>7819 I completely agree re: reddit draining single topic forums, but I do still think declining interest in forums in general might play a role. In reddit's case I don't think it's necessarily reddit users leaving the site, more that the next generation doesn't seem interested in places like reddit. Who knows though... I guess gen z is still young and a lot of us were on MySpace or whatever before we got into image boards and forums. Also, more to your point, I see reddit and discord as the exact same kind of private-centralized evil. These pose a bigger threat to our communities than facebook or the latest vine clone because they are actually viable replacements for the things that we would like to keep decentralized. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has a good idea how to combat this.

Anyone else feel like people have changed too. People are more sensitive to jokes and the language people use. Also everyone is abscessed with fame and followers to the point when everyone is copying one person rather than doing something different and creative. This pretty much makes everybody the same like you would expect anonymous image boards to be. But when you look at image boards like here and the other chans, there is way more creativity. No one cares who you are becaue no one knows who you are. And people are way more creative. Does anyone else feel like image boards are more social than networking sites like twitter and Facebook?

>>7821 >I'd be interested to hear if anyone has a good idea how to combat this. There is no stopping reddit. Redditors will continue to use reddit and reddit will continue to suck out the life off of other websites. The only website that has managed to stay the fuarrrk off of reddit (for the most part) is 4chan. 4channers know better than to leave their own site for a different one, which ironically causes redditors to get angry at them. Like how dare they use 4chan for its intended purpose and not for brewing soykaf! Pic related. Aside from 4chan, the only people that aren't attracted to reddit are people like me that don't want to feel like there's a teacher with a ruler ready to hit your wrist every time you say the wrong thing, and I think it's going to stay this way forever. Places like these will forever be populated with that small group of people that just wants to have anonymous, unfiltered discussions. Maybe we could grow more if we raised awareness about anonymity and freedom of speech, but think this through for a second. Do we really want an influx of facebook moms using places like these? And as for all the oldfigs from the 2000s making a potential comeback, I don't see that happening either. Most of them simply moved on with their lives, got a house, a wife, a job, ect.

>>7827 >>7823 So do you guys know any chatroom sites that are interesting and are decentralized? I only use lainchan and 4chan.

>>7846 IRC is a good place to start for interest groups (although it is not decentrilised). Other than that there are programs such as signal, tox, etc.

good times will come back when richard finishes building new internet just wait for it

>>7847 I never found IRC appealing. I always landed in chanels that are eaither dead (or at least very slow) or chanels that demand from you to much time and concentration to keep up with the discussions.

>>7847 >IRC is a good place can you recommend some channels

>>6944 There's no need to an neckbeard Elon Musk to create a new internet. We have the technology. I would say... Gopher. Not well known, not sure about smartphones, but it will be tricky. Maybe that protocol could work.

>>7857 Gopher clients already exist for smartphones. Issue would be in making dynamic pages, as gopher is literally just directories and text files.

>>7859 I see. Pardon me for my ignorance, I don't know very much about Gopher. I thought it could be used, but it will miss several features discussed above.

>>7855 due to the nature of irc people dont want to post their channels everywhere, unlike discord underageglitterboys

>>7847 I never grew to like IRC because real time chats give me the same feeling of anxiety I get when talking to other human beings.

>>7866 Same here

The normal users came, and they overran the n33ts. And being normal users, they chose big brands like faceberg, twitter, etc. over smoll forums. Basically >>6943 >>7855 https://lainchan.org/irc.html fren.

We seriously need to use and develop I2P more. It's the logical next step from analyzing the present era within communities like this.

>>7827 >Do we really want an influx of facebook moms using places like these? I see why I'd give you that impression from my post, but that's not quite what I meant. I'm thinking about how to ensure that the next generation of people like us still congregates on imageboards and forums instead of discord and reddit. For many, the anti-censorship and anti-datamining ethos will be enough, but if that's the only draw then it's going to turn into a crypto nerd echo chamber where the only thing people want to talk about is anti-censorship and anti-datamining like GNU social. I recently made a bunch of social media socks (after a lifetime of avoiding them) just to see who I could connect with. Instagram, tumblr, and reddit were all worthless, but I was surprised at how many cool people I was able to find on twitch, youtube, and particularly discord. Often they were people that would fit in quite well on this site, perhaps even better than a lot of the /v/ or /r9k/ runoff we sometimes get. Obviously they are in the minority, but the question I'm trying to ask is "how do we fish for these people?" or to put it another way "why aren't they already here?" >>6943 >in between the 90s to early 2000s, only computer geeks from the age of 16 and up knew how to get connected and use the internet I hear this explanation a lot, but I think it's vastly overstated. If you were talking about pre-1995ish, you might have a point. Obviously I don't know how old everyone here is... but how many of you actually remember a time when it was genuinely difficult to get on the internet? I certainly don't (born 1994, got online 2002ish fwiw). My point is just that simply packing up shop and moving to i2p isn't enough on its own. Setting up a live stream is significantly harder than using i2p, but plenty of "normal people" figure that out just fine. Effective SEO is harder than both, but we have a generation of 15 year olds on youtube who understand it on an intuitive level. All of those things are harder than using 4chan, but (for all its faults) 4chan has managed to preserve a unique and independent culture more successfully than any social media giant. I think the key is building a technical and cultural structure that attracts the desired kind of person to the exclusion of all others. I'm not even going to pretend I just thought of this; it's been a key facet of imageboard culture for as long as I can remember. People didn't avoid 4chan because they were too stupid to figure it out. They avoided it because they didn't want to see gore, or because they heard legends that 4chan is full of scary hackers, or more realistically because it offers them none of the features they want in an online social experience: celebrities, personal profiles, names. We benefit from the same kind of structure on lainchan. I just think we need to put more effort into attracting the right kinds of people, to match all the effort we already put into driving off people we don't like.

>>7874 >why aren't they already here Most likely, they don't know about us. Places like this don't like to promote themselves very highly (not that I blame them). To get more people here we'd need two things: 1- Post as much as possible to make the speed of the place bearable to newfriends. 2- Bring something new to the table that gives them a reason to come back. Lainchan definitely has those! The programming board, for example, is something lots of people are seeking for, especially in this modern day and age where computers are the future and everyone wants to learn programming. Promote this website on the right places and you could be fishing yourself some good anons. This isn't a 100% sure way though. Even if we did this it doesn't change the fact that new websites emerging in this day and age is pretty difficult. It should also be noted that newfriends tend to be the downfall of any website's culture if not handled properly. Not saying I don't like to see new faces around here, just that they should be well informed and introduced.

>>7875 >It should also be noted that newfriends tend to be the downfall of any website's culture if not handled properly Yeah I don't really have a good answer for this. I think to some extent the difficulty of finding places like this contributes to what makes them special. Not trying to say lainchan is the most remote community out there or anything, but you definitely have to be looking for... something... to find your way here.

>>7875 >>7876 also, that's really something you have to do organically. idk about you but something about restricted communities (e.g. private trackers that require invites) leaves a bad taste. i understand why it has to work that way, but i still don't really like it.

>>7876 i found this place completely by chance.I was browsing around neocities and found the lainzine website and thought it was interesting and found myself here.The boards here match what i'm interested in.You guys seem like ok people and i hope the community thrives.

>>7876 I don't know how to pull it off, but I think the trick is to prevent too many new people from coming at once so that they adapt to the existing culture instead of replacing it.

Something something Dunbar's Number, something something Monkeysphere, once it gets too big it becomes the world instead of your little patch of the world.

>>7880 is that what that means? i thought it just referred to groups of people being treated as individuals rather than as a group, not an upper limit on in-group size.

>>7878 I found it through a thread on 4/a/ where we were discussing theories on SEL. On said thread someone mentioned this place so I checked it out. Since I'm a fan of SEL this place seemed right up my alley so I stayed. I also really like the cyberpunk/hacker aesthetic.

>>7876 Look I'm just going to say the thing everyone in this thread seems to be hesitant to mention, and that is the possibility of newfriends (primarily from 4chan/8chan) turning this place into a brewing soykaf heaven. I don't see this as a big possibility considering the mods do a good job of removing soykafposts, and the fact that no one does the "ironic brewing soykaf" thing here either. It seems like lainons know about the good old "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe they're in good company".

>>7818 >Creator/Follower The old internet -aka the non-soykaf internet- was like this as well. People would have their domains and post the stuff that they liked. There was no way for followers to interact except writing a mail to the author - interacting with the personality. There were no users to like or subscribe the content. It was selfless sharing but at the same time would support the author's identity. The good thing was that popularity didn't destabilize the author, there was no number of followers to give some mental jerk off. In this way, it was even superior to real life.

>>7846 Some one made a new thread about comfy alt chans on /r/. In that thread someone mentioned 4kev.org, it's quiet and only a few people actually use it.

>>7792 >7 chan Uaee to lurk there but now look at it. I soykaf you not the last post there I saw was "kek ded site". But you're right no one is going to stay on alt chans when everyone's on half chan and full chan. I'm only on here now to escape summer users. No new sites are doing anything new they're doing the same copy and paste fotuba style image board with northing new.

>>7823 People are like war, they never change. It's just that nowadays their actions reflect on their communities so they behave differently. RP and alternative identities are not the majority of the internet anymore so the behaviour changed, not the essence. People were always sentive to jokes and language, now we have a clash between what some people used to be sentive about and what some people are sensitive about now. Going to hickville and talk soykaf about agriculture will grant a similar reaction to going to glitterboytown and talking soykaf about gay marriage. >everyone is copying one person That is how culture is born, not always one person but culture is basically learned repetition with little evolution as that is frowned upon. On chans people are more individualistic because they are anonymous and surrounded by anonimity, this breeds points outside the curve better but it's not that much different on most ocasions because board/chan culture is a thing. >>7821 >I'd be interested to hear if anyone has a good idea how to combat this. I think Reddit is here to stay for a long time. Because anybody can create a sub there is always an easy response to fracturing and dying communities, the new is always a possibility. The way i can see it failing is by interference from the owners making users disdain them and later the site or taking notes from the FOSS community and forking every sub to dilution. Both are unlikely to happen now but probably will in the future.

>>7819 I agree, however Reddit has done some good for smaller communities. Stuff like bread stapled to trees and every sign has a story wouldn't exist and those things would be buried under loads of other soykaf in unrelated threads. There needs to be a place for super niche communities like that that are too small for their own website.

>>7790 I2P? Can you give me a quick rundown on this? Also looking for more advice on active IRC channels. Discord is full of glitterboys, though its popularity might be due to modern anon-like people craving the chatroom format and pseudo-anonymity.

>what the hell happened to the internet man! We're all talking about that time from the early 2000s up until the smartphone boom when the internet seemed "innocent", right? I interpret that as the net directly becoming profit-oriented, and maturing as a result. Yeah, accessibility barriers were there before smartphones. I still remember my middle school teachers telling me not to get more than an hour of screen-time per day (I'm pushing 12+ and I'm sure many of you are the same), and now everybody gets at least 2-3 from their phones alone-- but I digress. Internet used to be a popular place but an alien place for lots of companies, they didn't know how to pull revenue in (especially cause dotcom scared off a lot of them). As a result, the internet existed as this huge, rich community almost entirely without fiscal interests. In a post-scarcity society, mankind would resort to endlessly creating/consuming art, which is essentially what was going on there. Now companies (and google led the way on this) really know how to squeeze every penny out of the net, and how to keep people in bubbles designed for them from the top down. Kind of like how childhood ends once you take on serious responsibilities (need to worry about money and join the rat race), the internet's childhood ended once people at the top started learning how to make money off of it, and set off the rat race. This is just my opinion; I could be wrong. Also, is anybody else amused by the fact that we used to be told never to put our real name out on the web, and now those without their real names on the web are social outcasts?

>>6944 Amateur radio has had a lot of digital modes for a long time, and many of them could be useful for creating a radio based internet-like network. Some that I can think of off the top of my head are AFSK BBSes over HF (basically really long range dial-up over radio), the Automatic Packet Reporting System, and even converted Wi-Fi routers (part of the Wi-Fi frequencies are in the ham radio bands, and hams can transmit with much higher power than usually allowed to consumer devices. With some antennas and amplifiers, they can cover a fairly large range. There are also ham satellites that can facilitate very long range communications. In addition to the various digital modes, voice or morse communication is enough to establish a community, and the equipment can often be built at home. Of course, radio is not anonymous nor encrypted, but it is - by nature - decentralized, and doesn't involve the data-mining and advertising that the internet does. Some technical knowledge is also required to use it.

>>8151 >doesn't know what I2P is >talks about a proprietary soykaf spyware app If you're not trolling, I2P is sort of like the underground railroad of the internet. Each user of I2P is a node contributing to the network. A massive network of safely encrypted tunnels underneath the normal internet. There's IRC, websites and torrents galore.

>>8159 I was not trolling, I'm just a newfriend. Thank you lain.

>>8158 Hey lain, I'm fairly new to radios (just got 1st level of licence in my country) but am exploring them more. These data modes are really what I want to get into more, especially surround ideas of forming community nets for shared communication. Do you have any guidance on what I should focus on? Or any simple books I should start reading?

>>8159 Wait I have to buy a router poor user here

What I miss is forums. Straight-up text forums like Ezboards, Proboards, Yuku, Barbelith, there's hardly any left and what's left seems to change hands and break retro-compatibility every couple of years, and now they always want to add stupid whistles and bells like they're trying to be Twitter or Facebook or Disqus with upvotes and emojis and all kinds of ephemerata. I just want a stable community where I can flirt and bitch about pop culture and share videos and RP play-by-post.

>>8186 The pain. I know it well, Lain. The ultimate problem beyond what you pointed out is that people just aren't going to be there to use it. I have a circle of about five friends who follow each other's blogs after abandoning our last forum. They keep saying let's start another one because they miss categorized discussions instead of the ego trip of having followers commenting on your blog. I'm like what, all five of us? Some forum that'd be.

I was thinking about movies and stuff the other day, and I realized that the reason people like to watch certain movies is because it is a fantasy for them. Who wouldn't want to be a superhero or a race car driver? I think the same thing may apply to the internet today. People are so obsessed with internet celebrities because they wish they could be them. People put others up on a pedestal because it's easier than getting there themselves. I would imagine that this mechanic is at work in other ways as well. Most people on lainchan (myself included) think that this is a pretty cool place to be, because we have a somewhat different fantasy than most other people. Our idea of quality and fun is an online community with interesting discussion. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't think anything is wrong with the internet itself (not culturally, anyway,) but it is more that the people that use it have different ideas about what it should be. If people's minds can be changed, so can their activities. >>8166 I'm not particularly knowledgeable about it either, but I think your best resource would be someone who is. An experienced radio operator has a wealth of knowledge and experience that they can give you, much of which probably can't be found in a single book. Older modes like the BBSes I mentioned aren't really that popular anymore, and the Wi-Fi modifications are still relatively unknown. However, the Automatic Packet Reporting System seems to be incredibly popular. According to Wikipedia, it is capable of "transmitting a wide variety of data, including weather reports, short text messages, radio direction finding bearings, telemetry data, short e-mail messages (send only) and storm forecasts." Visiting the site https://aprs.fi/ shows tons of stations, so it seems to be pretty popular. Here are some search terms that might be worth researching: "AX.25", "Bell 202 AFSK", "Packet radio", "Broadband-Hamnet", and especially "APRS". And, here are some websites which may have some more info for you: https://www.arrl.org/digital-modes http://www.aprs.org/ https://www.tapr.org/pr_intro.html http://wb8nut.com/aprs/ http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ https://amsat-uk.org/2016/06/17/data-modes-on-ham-radio-satellites/

>>8159 Is it anything like this? I found out a hackerspace near me had been working on a decentralized internet-like project http://project-byzantium.org/ could use that for inspiration

>>6943 This kinda makes me hope for a new medium to eventually come up. I'm not nearly competent enough to think of what it might be or how it'd work but theres always going to be a replacement for communication technology. At best I've had a couple really stupid ideas about how to go about a sort of new wave with the existing internet. But ultimately its exclusivity culture the majority of people want in on, people want to be in on the secret which is why places like 4chan got fuarrrked originally. First edgy kids hearing about it, then memes became known to the masses who treated them as special instead of the glorified in jokes they were. I think Reddit sort of embodies this more than any other website since its such a hivemind where you can post almost anything and if you framed it as a simple incomplete idea or format it'll catch fire because people will make their own version on the assumption its an in joke that they'll look cool for being 'in' on. So the first idea would be a meeting place with a significant barrier that can't be bypassed easily or by looking up a guide. It has the exclusivity going for it, but if the entry lock changed regularly people trying to share it around wouldn't get far and people who just want in because its exclusive would actually need to find their own way. I have no idea how to do this though. The other would be one that just simply is niche and keeps quiet. I think we got that going here since our boards aren't super broad or diverse, sort of the opposite of 8chan. Like 4chan just kept adding more boards iirc and 8chan's whole thing is anyone can make a board for whatever (reddit also uses this) so it has appeal to quite literally everyone. But here? Well we don't have the variety so it should be fine. I think this is the best option, its the opposite of a marketing strategy. Appeal to a small dedicated crowd instead of as many people as possible, leaving a sort of second layer under the internet, at the top its all the big companies and what not but we're all still here scattered around. Same amount, different proportions.

>>6935 I wouldn't say memes are the problem. In fact, I would argue that old school internet had an even bigger amount of memes, with websites like somethingawful, YTMND and funnyjunk being relatively popular. The problem is that our definition of memes has changed drastically. Back then, memes were fun inside jokes between online communities, but now memes are being used to spread news, to spread beliefs, and a bunch of other things. Back then, most memes (or fads, as that was the original term) were references to anime or video games, cause you know, the internet was a heaven for nerds and geeks. What could be considered a meme nowadays couldn't be considered one back then. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it all boils down to "newfriends ruined the internet".

>>8193 I don't know if it's the same. The self-insertion thing with movie characters, vs following the same actor on twitter or listening to their weekly podcast... in the latter it's more that the follower thinks of the celebrity as a friend. Intellectually they know the celebrity is not even aware of their existence but it touches the same emotions somehow, the same sense of familiarity. >>8513 You have a strange definition of "old school internet". That's not even old school www.

>>8514 Well, old school to me is the very early 2000s, since I didn't use the internet in the 90s. When I think about that era, most of what comes to my head is just random websites that are just a gif with some music in the background. I remember seeing a lot of websites like that. I also remember things like newgrounds flash animations being pretty popular. My point is, I consider all those things to be memes, and they used to be everywhere back in the day. So, I don't think memes are the problem, the problem is what memes have become, and the type of people that use the internet now. The internet has become SRS BSNS.

>>8515 >Well, old school to me is the very early 2000s, since I didn't use the internet in the 90s. Same. MMO's were either expensive games like WoW which killed the genre or free chink ones that ran some spyware on your machine. Browser games popped up and were a precursor to the FtP app games we have now, and Newgrounds was being ripped off by hundreds of different flash sites. Still miss playing AoM and AoE II on multi, I tried a few years ago but its not the same. No more Hoplite Fight, Lost, or Zelda for me. > So, I don't think memes are the problem, the problem is what memes have become, and the type of people that use the internet now. The internet has become SRS BSNS. This I attribute to the introduction of normalniggers to the internet and that all the cultures have centralized and homogenized themselves. This has not been the intent of anyone really but a social effect caused by peoples laziness the present and future effects of this are brought to their pitch irritation because corporations and government entities have the worlds population right where they want them. And that is where it became SRS BSNS Which is why governments and companies are now spending millions if not billions of dollars to influence online culture with guerilla campaigns and social media managers. The Mountain Dew contest comes to mind as them getting bit in the ass on half assing their online efforts so when it crashed it burned and made them look foolish companies took note and now they're operating a complete and total psyop site by site. The Wendy's girl meme comes to mind and that one is disgusting. People all over the internet but even places that should know better willingly passing around some guerilla marketing logo because they think its organic is fuarrrking mind boggling. Same with that Earth Chan its an obvious fuarrrking psyop and it comes from reddit crap. Passing around corporate content only cheapens the culture by making it susceptible to advertisers. Which is where this became SRS BSNS: money got involved. And once computers weren't the massive AIDS magnets they were back in 03 it became pretty important to make a market and then control. Its why Russia and China are so strict with their internet rules. They know that NATO has control of all the major platforms and could strangle theirs into the dirt and just start pushing US propaganda down their peoples throats. And after the Arab Spring and the interest in Iran they know they need a strategy with the internet as NATO would without hesitation, manipulate their people into something destructive. They wouldn't even be at the table on some of these issues if they were able to get their tech industries off the ground like the US did back in the 70-80's; with Russia trying very hard and failing. And because burger won that tech race, we decided the tone for the rest of the world. Not to mention the bot factories and literal armies of paid propagandists on websites for the worlds interesting players. In summation the regular internet is going to be serious business and develop itself into a walled garden consuming the cultures that used to make up the internet into marketing campaigns and snuff out any efforts to break oneself of this affair. The major governments of the world know that people are susceptible to mass psychology and a tracking collar that tells them things is probably the most important device to protect and control in the modern era for the war of hearts and minds. Enjoy these places while you can, as they will inevitably be consumed to give us the shopping mall Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and some Jew's from SF and New York desired for us. All the metaposting is just a result of topics running dry and exhaustion from sifting through the excess of mindless garbage.

>>8515 You really think mindless gibberish like YTMND is something to be nostalgic about? The decline was already well underway by then. >>8525 "Normal" people were already online during the times you try to glorify.

>>8528 Mindless gibberish was the culture of the internet when it was in it's most creative stages though. Suppose a better word would be absurdest or something but even then you always knew no matter how weird something was someone was serious about it. Elf kin or whatever it was and the final fantasy house come to mind as very silly seeming stuff taken seriously which I'd say was definitely like the internet version of a story about the town loons. It was like that because the internet wasn't serious business. Just something fun, do something stupid, if you worked hard on it maybe people will notice it. Twas always a very silly place, but usually it had some kind of heart behind it either from actual interest or by it being an in joke as opposed to sterile forced feeling stuff, made to make money, or politically charged. Wendy's meme already pointed out I'd say look at Youtube and how it seems every channel does roundabout the same sort of stuff with only high production value ones or political ones ever really going anywhere. Unfortunately I gotta use that website for example since it feels like most sort of home video still gets consumed by it, ditto for any animations being put up there as well just because other media sharing websites are getting eclipsed by it.

>>8528 Its not glorification its analysis of something clearly observable. The usage of the internet as the cultural monolith it is now didn't occur until it was easily accessible. Normal people didn't interact with these sub cultures and in fact derided them constantly.

>>6944 I love how pretentious you're all being, whilst clearly knowing soykaf all. >What is AMPRNet? >What are is the niché Chanverse? >What are dark net message boards and forums? (And I'm talking about the ones that you have to display some technical knowledge to even be allowed to register on). I just think you aren't either looking hard enough, or are those very same posers you lambaste. Stop treating the Internet like it is your sekret club, when there are still sekret clubs you're either too lazy, or inept to find.

>>8531 The internet was completely accessible by then. It was in most homes, every school and every library. You didn't need even average intelligence to access it. If you were talking about going on usenet in 1990 you might have a case.

>>8534 Yes but, what the difference was is that back in 05-07, I remember people going online to hit their myspace page, if they were a little more savvy they went to NG to play some flash games. Forums were specialized by niche. And admitting you were on those was something that weirded people out. Now its completely socially acceptable to admit you're at a computer all day. Until you admit you're outside of the mobile/reddit/discord bubble then it sends people for a spin. >completely accessible To someone who knew how to use a computer yes. To the drooling drivelers who make up the majority population of faceberg, imgur, and tumblr no. Getting them online was like teaching the retarded to read. And teaching them not to download strange executables was another miracle that took until win7 to get under control; and this was the only major thing preventing constant use adoption for people. A safe consistent environment for an uninterrupted flow of vegetation. When I graduated high school back in 2014 the only thing people did in the computer lab was still go on facebook, funnyjunk, or play the games on the computer. Thats if they didn't just use their phone, to do the exact same things. What is aggravating, and op has brought up is that now we're moving into the compromise of forums, social media, and anonymity, which has people in this mix of discord use and reddit/imgur on top of their mobile identity apps. The conversation occurs on discord, but the tone is set on reddit.The spillage of people into places like 4chan and 8chan is only making the people who want a slower more methodical environment aggravated because now things are short quips instead of being thought out. It's "le sekrit club" like you glitterboys are thinking this out to be, its the death of discussion, synthetic sterilization of interaction, and the consumption of everything into mindless noise. Its many things that people have been hammering to death, with different words, symptoms and causes.And people who grew up on the internet from the period of until 2007 feel more and more foreign on it. Especially those who value their anonymity.

>>8546 > like you glitterboys are thinking this out to be Now that I'm positive you aren't absorbing a single thing I wrote, I am going to start ignoring you.

>>8546 >I graduated high school in 2014 The actual temerity required to post like you're some old user, when in actuality, you were still a child in 2007, not even an adolescent. I highly doubt at that age, you had the required soundness of mind to make such an asserted observation as: >these adults in 2007 were totally inept! I'm, of course, paraphrasing, but that's the general gist of your trite loquacious word-vomit. Just shut up, seriously, you sound more vapid than I hope you are.

we all live in a filter bubble now. you just need to adapt your means to search good content.

>>8586 Kill yourself you reddit kike. >highly doubt The observation is backed up by observation feel free to dismiss it. Watching the computer science teacher have their mind blown by ctrl+f or getting paid to plug in vga cables because the admin at my school had no idea how to hook up a computer is something I remember doing up until I graduated. You must have lived in a magical fuarrrking place where people weren't pants on head retarded. >I'm, of course, paraphrasing, but that's the general gist of your trite loquacious word-vomit. No you lying kike. The point was that people are being herded, and that the platform of the majority will be real identity tied to pseudo-anonymity in a corporate friendly sterile culture so that people are conditioned by a media they have no escape from. The lament of loss of culture and fun is something that a human being should feel when you compare today to then. But you being a kike and thus lacking a soul are unable to note that things are more boxed in than they were before. Go back to reddit where you belong. People won't effortpost there I promise you. If not wanting to be a part of some corporate pozhole like Discord or Reddit makes me vapid fantastic I'll wear that with pride if it makes me less like some soulless creature as yourself.

>>6979 >The Human Instrumentality Project Except it's Wired Serial Experiments Lain actually references Human Instrumentality Project, pic[0] related: > Think Bule Count One Tow Obvious reference to the sci-fi short "Think Blue, Count Two" by Cordwainer Smith, which is set in the "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history. Plot centers on a psychological trip-wire which was installed to keep a "sleeper" ship from becoming an abomination or some such. Which is what Neon Genesis Evangelion references... and the existing wireless mind-machine interface is what they're all occulting in plain sight. I love you Lain! (the "joke" being that she really can hear it when you read/write/think that) >>8532 > the ones that you have to display some technical knowledge to even be allowed to register on The trick is making the barrier to entry in such a way that keeps folks from leaking how-to-enter guides to noobs. pic[1] related >>8158 > hams can transmit with much higher power Yeah, I know. So, back in the BBS era we decided to reimplement Fidonet over store-and-forward packet radio, and basically leapfrog the wired Internet; But the govs had invested a soykaf-ton in the wired system, the better to snoop you with, my dear. So, rather than leaving the Internet stillborn persistent store-and-forward packet radio was derezzed by the FCC. A lot of soykaf was brewed over whether or not it would have worked. I always maintained it would, and now we have Cellular, which proves it would have worked... Our goal was a self organizing community operated network where you just buy hardware and never pay connection fee. The bigger your cache and antennae, the more data you relay faster, the better your connection. Just pay maintenance. Use frequency hopping and reduce power to reuse "common" channels, while some hardcore enthusiasts would operate point-to-point links. Yeah, that's is so hard to spy on, you'd have to set up listening stations EVERYWHERE, and not only that it would reveal the CIA's "Black Weapon" (its scalar wave tech now quasi-declassified, on their own site). The Web is a steaming tub of soykaf. The Internet is amazing: A decentralized peer to peer system that can withstand war, cities dropping off the map with packets rerouted in moments. Atop this system a bunch of morons were praised for creating a "world wide web" of data silos. We don't have to replace "The Internet", and we will not be allowed to. All the bitching done ITT is really over the state of "The Web", not "The Internet". Net aware applications (Apps) are already beginning to replace websites. Sadly, "smart phones" are dumb devices: You can't really make and deploy apps with a smart phone, and you can't really run smart phone apps on a desktop (well, you can but it's soykaf, let's face it). So the app system is flawed. It's obvious where things are going and what solutions will be coming down the pike... I plan to get out ahead of the next big shift, maybe make a few waves myself. Screw The WEB! Long live The Internet!

>>7870 The IRC has gotten pretty bad. Feels like any other place, back then I used to go to lainchan's IRC to find interesting people, now that seems impossible. A problem I have had with any IRC or even imageboards is that the people there are still normal in their own way. They detach themselves from social norms and trends, and create their own norms and trends instead that everyone follows with a hivemind mentality. Consquently the people usually aren't that interesting or unique and it just feels like the same bullsoykaf I deal with with normal users with a new skin.

the irc is lame atm since it keeps getting m'd and it's full of a bunch of dipshиts that need to get derezzed.(You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

>>8590 >guys, semi homogeneous communities are bad >eberybody should be yuneek and speshul!(You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

>>8590 Aren't there some tor pedos who comes in who would start pissing off Appleman and just start pushing him to a mental breakdown? The IRC just needs to be chemoed and burned for a while and then left as a place to contact mods or site admin if its as bad as I'm to infer.

>>8593 You're misunderstanding me. I do think that groups should be "semi homogeneous". While people should also talk with different kinds of people and explore different opinions and perceptions, people should have a group they feel at home with. I'm not saying every person in a group needs to be different from one another, I actually think more the opposite. What I am talking about is how many people in these places claim to be different or better than normal people but often have all the same annoying qualities just reskined. It's like hipsters or something. If you are one of those people who doesn't believe that anyone is unique, because everyone is special, think of it like this. There are brown labradors and golden labradors, and then are entirely different breeds of dogs, or different animals all together. My point is, there are different degrees someone can be abnormal. Everyone is different, but some people have more similarties compared to more extreme cases. Some people are born with abnormal brain wiring, for instance. An example would be something like schizophrenia. Of course, the abnormality can be good, bad or neutral, and isn't always a mental case.

I have no doubt that the internet has generally dropped in quality, but we should also consider that nostalgia may be clouding out vision a bit. Sorry for mentioning 4chan, but it's a good example. People have been saying "/b/ used to be so good man! but it's dead now:(" since the beginning of time. The truth is /b/ was always soykaf. I'm in fact generally optimistic for the internet and I'll tell you why: People say the internet was better when there was a barrier to entry, when it actually took some minimum of technical knowledge just to get online. That way it filtered out all the trash. Well if you think about it we've actually come full circle and we now have a new filter. What I call the surface-net (facebook, youtube, reddit etc) works to filter out the lowest, hell I bet many kids today don't even process that youtube is a website not just an app on their ipad. These people will not make it to lainchan. At most they'll end up at 4chan, which will act as the last filter. Those edgy ones will stay there, and the rest will turn back. Only a very small percentage of those who make it to the 4chan stage will continue down the path to alt-chans. As the web becomes more centralized, this effect will only become more pronounced, meaning that only the top percentiles will make it to the places where there's cool soykaf going on. I know many here soykaf on lainchan for some reason, but trust me if you try and go back to 4chan you will realize just how much higher quality this is on average. Sure it's not perfect, but it's kind of endearing. The internet dying is the best thing that ever happened for people like us.

>>8600 This is an interesting optimistic take on the subject. I agree on some points but I think that any kind of person can find a place like this (and especially 4chan). All it really takes is someone telling their friend about it or finding some article or tweet about it. Being smart or tech saavy enough to find these sites doesn't automatically make someone a quality person or poster either. I agree that /b/ was always soykaf. The worst aspect of 4chan to me was always how it attracted really soykafty people. It often felt like I was talking with legitement psychopaths, even if many of them were probablly just edgy kids. This was the down side of the anonymity and freedom of speech, is it gave people like that an outlet. And of course everyone has that nasty side to themselves and they saw it as an oppurtunity to let out their thoughts. On the other hand, 4chan sometimes gave voice to good or interesting people, who were maybe too eccentric to be listened to or accepted by society. For a while I have hoped that imageboards would branch out and result in new and interesting micro subcultures. I have always saw potential in it for that. Unfournately many of the imageboard's cultures are just like 4chan, at best more like oldschool 4chan. Lainchan sort of has it's own thing going but parts of it just seem like /g/ 2.0 a lot of the time (depends on the board though).

I actually had this discussion with my therapist after I told her about my teen years and how I spent a lot of it posting with my internet friends on online forums, and how it just doesn't feel the same anymore. She said that maybe forums these days aren't bad, and I've just created an unachievable image of a "perfect forum" to which I have attached to many of the things I feel nostalgic about from my teen years. Things like not taking anything seriously and having fun without any responsibilities. She says that it's okay to have good memories, but getting upset about the present because it isn't identical to the past isn't healthy, and I need to let go of it and find something new to attach myself to.

>>8589 4chan's /g/ is working on an AMPRNet-like project.

>>8604 The only mistake I see here is you picking a female shrink.

>>8606 link?

>>8608 Found it: >https://warosu.org/g/thread/S66521877

>>8159 I know a lot of dudes talk about Tor being some kind of honeypot, but is there a particular reason to use I2P over Tor or vice-versa?

>>8611 Tor can't be a honeypot, simply from the virtues of its technical specifications. Besides, it's been tested (and is probably tested on a daily basis) and seems to hold up for the better part. The only actual convictions from Tor hadn't been due to technological failings, normally a failing of the OPSEC of the end user. Heck, even if your look at people like the Dread Pirate Roboerts, you find that his was because of poor OPSEC, that being he posted for help in setting up his hidden service on the clearnet from a clearnet IP.

>>8610 Knew the creator of these threads, Opal. They do nothing to help the project and get salty when called out upon. Also he spammed several IRC networks with CP.

>>8615 Well, that's a shame. Although, I'm not particularly surprise and most (if not all) /g/ projects amount to soykaf-all. Just like that text only web browser.

>>8616 >*surprise and most = surprised as most