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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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For me anyway, the modern web feels like the realization of those early internet pioneering ideas. I run my own personal site, with a nice open source google photos replacement, hosting my own VDI, streaming services, you name it. It’s all running on a pile of discarded speak and spell’s in my basement (a joke but only barely, this junk will run on anything that can host a container). It’s all possible thanks to the open source shoulders of giants I’m standing on and in spite of my lack of coding experience (I’m dev/ops). The fact that I run more infrastructure than my first few jobs combined, as one hobbyist, kinda blows my formerly teenage brain.
It’s still out there, just so long as you are willing to DIY. I am holding great hope for the fediverse, although I’ve been getting used to disappointment lately.
That's the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be...Yes, I'm making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I'm very sorry!
No worries bud, I get the feeling and it’s completely understandable when looking at the current landscape. It’s been an amazingly shitty run of luck for me lately so I’m clinging to hope.
This is why I like shower thoughts, makes for great conversation :)
I don't ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.
In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you'll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there's no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.
I’m not interested in traffic. I’m literally a bored old dude who plays with junk. The only purpose for the site is me to play but I post for fun in case anyone stumbles across it. I’m delisted from everything.
Back in the 1990’s as a teenager I loved my little part of the webrings of personal, pointless sites full of random crap. I’d check in on friends on their personal sites and geocities pages that overused the blink tag and animated gifs. That’s the classic internet that I’m talking about, and I fully embrace it on my little pile of shit. But point taken so link removed just to be safe.
I miss that old internet.
Honestly, i'd love to check out your personal site!
~~Link I had posted earlier~~ update- obfuscated: www dot snand dot org. This thread is literally the only place I’ve ever posted a link to it :).
Cool site, thanks for linking it. I've been wanting to make a personal site for ages, but just no idea what to put on it.
that is possibly the best compliment I've been given in ages, it's just a simple, fun playground and basically my social media replacement (just without the annoying audience :)
I was just going to check it out again to get some inspiration but it looks like it's blocked?
I threw some filtering on it just to be extra safe and wound up blocking everything but the US. Did get a small uptick on bot traffic when I posted a link so might have overdone the security a little.
Guessing you are from one of the countries in hat showed up in the filter logs. I’ll do some selective unblocking.
EDIT- been selectively unblocking as I see them. I'm extra paranoid but also always learning.
Why do you want the traffic to specifically go to your own server? That's reasoning backward imo.
Let say you made your own claymation animations. If people go to your own site, they get no ads, and can choose to buy merch from you if they like. However, a common issue for a creator like that would be content thieves with an ad plan. They’d reupload to YouTube, claim it as their own, monetize ads, and maybe the people who see the first animations there don’t even hear about new ones. It’s a bad deal for everyone now (not even YouTube’s fault - it’s the fault of the number of bots, DDOS tools, and click farms on the internet)
That's the spirit! One of the great things about the Internet is we can build our own alternatives, like with Lemmy and DIY servers. My friends and I have our own little Internet ecosystem. Outside of some Lemmy time, my personal Internet usage is largely served by our arrangement.
What do you use as a Google Photos replacement?
There’s a few out there that are pretty decent. I actually use two at the moment but will consolidate eventually.
Been using Librephotos for a while now: https://docs.librephotos.com - tried a few but landed on this one not for any real technical reasons, I just like the interface and it’s easy manage.
I also use https://immich.app - I started using it as a simple way to backup my families phone photos but it’s on such a furious development pace that I’m pretty sure it’s going to replace librephotos for me as well someday.
Immich is good alternative
It was discussed here recently.
I imagine you weren't old enough to remember the early days of the Internet and the hopes we had. Maybe I'm wrong.
I am, and as a former Unix admin, I'm also amazed at how easy self hosting is these days. Hopefully it continues to grow. It certainly seems to be.
Docker is amazing haha.
I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.
I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.
I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.
I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.
If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.
I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.
I would really like to hear from people who are not web developers or creating software and firmware. I believe the experience for the large mass of humanity is so much less than the potential it had back in the day. Yes AOL existed but it truly was the low end of the scale. It's not like there was people who did web development software and firmware and then everybody else was on AOL. However, it is a lot like that now. The people who are smart who are savvy who can find what they're looking for in spite of the barriers put up to finding that still enjoy the freedom and the cheap plentiful access that they're looking for. But you have to be able to get to it using command line level language and most ordinary users don't have anything like geocities to allow them to produce a website about their model trains.
It's indeed a utopia for the technically savvy. And that's it.
Right, but I wasn’t talking so much about my own experience, rather my experience with other people during that time, because I was tech support for literally everyone I knew, so I knew what they all thought. Because they told me.
AOL was what most nontechnical people had during that time. There’s a reason for those AOL disc memes. It’s made fun of a lot, but that was how the internet became mainstream. They mailed them to everyone and their grandma, and their success was it was FREE** and the discs installed and configured everything for you: the browser, the ISP settings, and even their home page. You stuck the disc into your cup holder, and it gave you a friendly icon on your desktop to click to access The World Wide Web™ (or AOL’s private version of it – most people didn’t know better). Most people would never have discovered the internet otherwise.
eta: and yes, internet society was actually that divided in the early years. More so, if anything. AOL was so ubiquitous and marketed, they made a blockbuster movie out of it. You likely can hear the tone in your head, even if you never used AOL in your life. Few brands have attained that social status, or held it for long. Oscar Meyer, Disney, things like that. And it didn’t last a hundred years; merely a few. /e
It wasn’t just the discs – if you bought your computer from the furniture store it came set up that way. Non-tech people just clicked that icon and didn’t know any better. Keep in mind that accessing the real internet was difficult and required a lot of knowledge many people neither had nor wanted at the time. The computer was for spreadsheets and solitaire, and it was a very expensive luxury.
I doubt you’ll get the response you’re looking for, because the people you’re talking about are the same people you’re decrying today. I’m saying that idealised demographic didn’t really exist, and I’m not speculating about them. I was embedded deeply in a world of those people. I remember them very clearly. I made it my career to understand them.
I strongly believe you’re seeing them through a heavy fog of nostalgia.
eta: and back to the original point, I strongly believe that people who feel the internet has fallen short of our expectations don’t remember what our expectations really were.
Good answer, but I disagree.
However, I'm willing to admit my memory isn't perfect and perhaps I'm wrong and things were exactly as you said they were.