this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Now that Google , FB wants to trap us and control every aspect of the Internet browsing, Is it even possible to break free.

Or creating new Internet is a unrealistic idea ?

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[–] Andonome@lemmy.world 91 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The internet's fine - the web's the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, 'make good art', write and share good content, don't feed the machine. Sounds like you're doing that already if you're on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren't all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT...download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It's a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

[–] hardypart@feddit.de 7 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Yet another thing that capitalism is destroying.

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[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 41 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Seems like all we need is a search engine that only returns sites that don't shove unwanted content down your throat. Tall order though.

[–] lustrum@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I've started using Duckduckgo, less specifically for the search and more for the bangs. Fed up of search surfacing sites they care about. I can now quickly search wikipedia with !w etc.

[–] Jamie@jamie.moe 6 points 2 years ago

I host my own searx instance and use that to search, it supports all of DDG's bangs by default if you begin a query with a double bang !!

[–] hardypart@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Not advocating for Google here, but you can do that with "site: wikipedia.org" as a search operator in Google.

[–] vector_zero@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

DDG's bangs actually use the site's own search feature though, rather than narrowing the search engine's results to a given site.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

And, less typing. That's a plus for me.

[–] lustrum@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago

Yeah but that's slower and not using the sites specific search

[–] Rooty@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

more for the bangs

desire to know more intensifies

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] IHawkMike@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Kagi has been amazing for me so far. I signed up as soon as they changed the pricing to allow unlimited searches at $10/mo.

I'm still working on my filters and promoting/demoting/pinning sites in my results, but it's already night-and-day better than Google and even DuckDuckGo (which still deserves much respect).

[–] Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Looks promising if you're on a Mac/iOS setup, but I'm on Fedora Linux, so sadly they don't offer an option for that. If they ever offered Linux support in the future, I'd definitely give Kagi a try.

[–] bender223@lemmy.today 30 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can see how some people can get trapped in a bubble of Google and FB. I hope they can realize that Google, FB, Reddit, and Twitter are not "the internet".

I stopped using FB when the timeline became useless (it was hard to filter to a specific friend or family member), and also that I no longer wanted to see updates from people I didn't even want to hear from. I have since switched to smaller and more personally curated social media platforms like a group chat or a discord server.

Sure google is a common homepage for a lot of people, but there are other alternatives that work well. TBH, a few years ago, I wanted to switch to DuckDuckGo, but their search results were lacking compared to google, but fast forward to now, DDG gives more accurate and useful results than Google's ad driven and AI driven "search results".

I've enjoyed my "internet experience" much better after switching from Reddit to Lemmy. Just the fact that it's not driven by profit, and policy changes are not a the whim of a monolithic corporation, makes the experience much better. I generally don't see people trying to grift on lemmy. I really appreciate the useful and well thought out comments/posts on lemmy compared to other platforms.

Also, Mastodon is so much more enjoyable to use than Twitter (deadnaming it, I don't care).

[–] mercury@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 years ago

Corps aren't people. Deadname twitter forever!

[–] vidarh@lemmy.stad.social 27 points 2 years ago

It's wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.

Convincing "regular people" to move is the hard part.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The Internet is actually very fine and alternatives to the big guys will keep popping up.

For tracking in general there are several options like pihole, adguard and NextDNS on a DNS level, Firefox/Orion browsers, Proton / Mullvad etc VPN and services.

For search I’ve been fairly happy with DuckDuckGo for some years, but not swears by Kagi.

What is gone is the early days of the seventies / early eighties with free servers at universities accessible to anyone. It doesn’t scale.

Various models tried to figure it out until we got what we’ve had for the last 10 years, “free” services where you are the product.

What you won’t get going forward is free services that gives you what you want without also tracking and collecting data on you and using it for ads etc.

What you can get is high quality services that you choose to pay for.

For now, a fair bit of them is niche and sort of expensive. Hopefully that will expand to giving is fairly broad service coverage from providers that are mostly crowd funded and open.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

DDG makes a profit without tracking. Why couldn't that become more standard?

[–] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 9 points 2 years ago

Because the alternative makes a lot more money.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 20 points 2 years ago

At the end of the day you just create websites without trackers. Plenty of sites like it exist.

There's simply not enough demand for it. The majority of people simply don't care.

[–] Gigan@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

With blackjack and hookers?

[–] Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

With blackjack and hookers!

[–] spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee 17 points 2 years ago

There's no need for a new internet. Every garbage service has a somewhat viable alternative.

You have peertube instead of youtube Kagi, duckduckgo, marginalia, etc instead of Google search Lemmy instead of reddit Mastodon, polycentric instead of twitter Gitea instead of github Bandcamp instead of spotify There are probably more things but you get the idea. The problem is not the internet itself but that you have to have many people go to objectively less polished or paid services to protect their personal data. I don't know how that would happen since honestly, the privacy shit doesn't affect people's everyday lives, but using different services does affect their lives.

[–] Rooty@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

The internet is much larger and diverse than the World Wide Web

[–] Kazumara@feddit.de 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The internet is the result of networks connecting to other networks. If you aim to replace that, then how? Making new networks just expands the internet, making new interconnections just makes it more meshed.

You would have to make networks not connected to the internet but interconnected with each other. That's expensive and all the economic network effects are against you. You probably won't have many users connected and not many services either.

But let's say you did it, what exactly is the benefit of a second internet? Would you be banning some networks from connecting to your mesh? What if one network in your internet connects to the normal Internet anyway? What sort of technologies and services would there be, just the normal ones, then what changes?

Honestly I don't see the point. A concentration of economic power and influence over web technologies is the issue. The internet works fine, and we make it work every day (my specific corner being research networks in Switzerland). You need to change the producer and consumer behaviour of people and companies using the internet, not the internet itself.

[–] cybersin@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You just build a network on top of the existing infrastructure. See tor, i2p, usenet

[–] Kazumara@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

Sure but an overlay network is not a new Internet. I still think OP is confused about his goals.

[–] HarriPotero@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

BBSes are making a comeback. This time over telnet. They're just as great as they used to be.

[–] droidpenguin@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

This time over telnet.

telnet is an insecure protocol. Ideally you should use ssh instead ~~but most~~ which some modern BBS's support both. Of course if you want to dial in on legacy "authentic" hardware then SSH isn't possible.

💡You can SSH (or telnet) from your phone using Termux and it works pretty well (though admittedly not as good without full ANSI support). It doesn't use full height of screen but is still usable. BBS's could be enhanced to support that though.

Here's an example of how one looks on my phone:

ssh NEW@bbs.bottomlessabyss.net -p 2222 -c aes256-cbc

Screenshot_20231010-174323_Termux

[–] Bakersfield@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

I really like Termius for SSH on Android (dunno if it's on iOS). I use it for all my servers.

[–] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

This looks fucking awesome.

[–] HarriPotero@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

In my part of the BBS-world telnet is the only option. I'm a C64 guy, and a TCP stack is memory hungry enough for 64k of RAM.

But yes, encrypt when available.

[–] nlm@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

Any good resources for finding these?

[–] IHawkMike@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

As someone familiar with the OSI model, this thread is a bit confusing since the Internet to me is really the infrastructure on top of which all of your fancy sites and apps are built. When you say "the Internet", I'm thinking about TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc.

That said, I'm pretty sure most people here are just taking about websites at L7, although there are arguments for change at the other layers.

[–] Critical_Insight@feddit.uk 9 points 2 years ago

I think what's more realistic to happen is that internet will be split into two and after certain websites and services become unuseable to people who care about privacy and such, then new alternatives will just emerge along the more popular ones. Kinda like Lemmy.

[–] isles@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

Tor/Darkweb, Freenet, LoRAWAN are all the alternate internets I can think of off the top of my head. The difficulty is generally the "network effect". 1 Fax machine is useless, 10000 are very useful. Similiarly, an alternate internet with one website isn't all that interesting.

[–] avater@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Stop using google products and maybe start using a vpn if security is super important to you? It's fairly easy, believe me. DuckDuckGo, Firefox, it's all there.

[–] kava@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

I think it is possible under the right circumstance. For example let's say internet disappeared tomorrow. I think what would likely happen is local areas would start to connect.

It would start would smaller groups and slowly integrate more and more until you had the internet back.

I remember watching some sort of video, maybe it was a Vice bit, I don't remember. They were in Cuba at this massive apartment building complex. Let's say like 1,000 people lived there.

They didn't have regular access to internet - they need to purchase credits from state store to use the internet. But many people have computers and want to play multi-player games even though they couldn't afford the internet credits.

So what they do? Create a localized network between the entire complex so every person could connect, share files, share games, play games, etc. You have a mini-internet between all members of a community.

That's all the internet is - networks connected to networks and done at the global scale. So is it possible to create another? Absolutely. Although you need some sort of incentive to do it, otherwise nobody will bother. The Cubans had an incentive, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason one would want to in the US these days. You never know, though.

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

It might be a bit hard to grasp, but...

We're already on that new internet, baby!

we need to get these networks to be classified as utilities, and then dont use shitty service providers for your required packet needs

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Just don't use AI to optimize the compression.

[–] Hexagon@feddit.it 3 points 2 years ago

Why? It's not like it would learn to break the encryption, right?

Right?

the internet split is beginning

[–] dbilitated@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

I'm now using ungoogled chrome, Firefox and cromite on my phone. it's working pretty well

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