Do you think the web will become less centralized in the future?

[Bakartridge]

I honestly wonder if the whole indie web or web revival(?) thing will become more popular or remain niche, but even outside of that, do you guys think there's a chance that the internet will go back to how it was in the 90s/2000s with it not being as centralized? I ask because I see tons and tons of people talking about quitting social media and how sites/companies like Facebook (well, Meta) and Twitter are just bleeding money and users, especially as of recent. Not just people I talk to who are more biased towards that, I mean even normies are talking about quitting social media and how it damages people's mental health and all that. Maybe in the future we can go back to having a bunch of websites we go between and having a unique page for something rather than everything being contained to Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, TikTok, etc. etc., especially with the recent news of stuff like age verification laws and big websites censoring content and whatnot, makes me think people will either start looking for alternatives or even make their own.
Who knows, maybe even forums can make a comeback outside of everything being on a Discord chat, but we'll have to wait and see on that, I guess

[st3phvee]

do you guys think there's a chance that the internet will go back to how it was in the 90s/2000s with it not being as centralized?

I sure hope so! I'm not getting my hopes up or anything, but I'm slowly starting to see more anti-social media sentiments from normie friends and family members. I don't really see a lot of these people seeking out indieweb spaces, though; they're just spending less time on traditional text-based social media (esp. Facebook & Twitter) and more time texting / sharing TikTok brainrot among themselves.

Once all the AI hype blows over, I think the internet might eventually go back to being a space for "nerds." I'd be OK with that.

[Seren]

I keep seeing new people show an interest in Neocities on my TikTok feed. And I know that can just be the algorithm showing me what I want to see, but 6 months ago when I tried looking for Neocities content on TikTok there was only one person posting about it. Now there a substantial number of posts of people showing off their personal websites and encouraging others to give it a go! There are lots of people commenting things like "I want to learn how to code now!" and I think once that seed is planted, they might give it try, even if not immediately.

I personally think that the shift from social media is definitely beginning to gain a bit more traction in terms of word of mouth at least. There's this whole movement of the 'dumbphone' as well that many people seem to be jumping on. I think it's only a matter of time before people discover that they can still use the internet outside of social media and it's horrors haha

[Tuffy!]

I honestly wonder if the whole indie web or web revival(?) thing will become more popular or remain niche, but even outside of that, do you guys think there's a chance that the internet will go back to how it was in the 90s/2000s with it not being as centralized?

Yes, I do believe there is a chance. We have to stand united and help others to find the good stuff on the web.

I got so bored from using reddit and youtube for 8+ hours a day. I was kind of addicted. This is what they do to our brains. They basically fuck around with our brain chemistry by presenting us just the stuff our brain lingers for. They promote the videos that people engage with the most. They show us the videos or posts that keep us on high alert, sobbing for more stuff while our body releases hormones and neurotransmitters that make us crave for new content even more.

especially with the recent news of stuff like age verification laws and big websites censoring content and whatnot, makes me think people will either start looking for alternatives or even make their own.

The time is right to. We need to promote & recommend the good side of the web.

Who knows, maybe even forums can make a comeback outside of everything being on a Discord chat, but we'll have to wait and see on that, I guess

We can't wait, we have to take action. Spread the word. Make more people realize how great the web once was. Especially the younger/youngest generation has no clue about how much fun the internet was back in the day. Communicating, learning stuff for hours straight within a forum. No Youtube video is as in-depth as the posts in a good niche forum. Forums are they way to go imho.


We started the Forum Revival Movement and you can be part of it.
It is a loose association of like minded internet enthusiasts working together to revitalize the old forum culture. It's all about sharing knowledge, teaching others, learning from others and of course connecting with other people.

| | |

It's our turn to take back the internet!


I remember having met a lot of users from the old web forums in real life back in the day. Because we really got to know each other by reading our posts on the forum and wanted to get to know each other for real.

There is not much space for self-expression in for social media users. Share some words, give a like, I give a shit. Within forums we can truly express our thoughts, share in-depth knowledge with others, write tutorials that take you 26 minutes to read through... But it's worth it, at the end, you might end up beeing able to build a house,  but its worth it. Within 16 Minutes you

I personally think that the shift from social media is definitely beginning to gain a bit more traction in terms of word of mouth at least. There's this whole movement of the 'dumbphone' as well that many people seem to be jumping on. I think it's only a matter of time before people discover that they can still use the internet outside of social media and it's horrors haha

It's up to all of us to support these movements and spread the word of mouth IMHO.

It's for sure been increasing momentum over these past few years.. and as things within centralized popular internet become more unusable;oppressive;commercialized people will continue dropping out and gravitating toward alternatives if they're aware or care enough of them

We have to make them aware of the cool stuff. Let's just talk to young people. Talk to old people. Talk to the people of your age. Make them aware. Create videos, showcase your creations, showcase your art, showcase the games you made and tell them where they can find more of that genuine good stuff.


Btw.

I miss the flash scene of the y2k era so damn much. The animated movies and flash games. I remember newgrounds, Zhu Zhiqiang's stick-figure fight movies, all the great tower defense games. Damn do I miss these 

Make the internet great again

 
UNITED WE
    STAND

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I don't think so. Centralisation is a fundamental process of the capitalist system, and happened - and still happens - in basically every part of our world and everyday life; it happened to music, were a few labels are releasing most of the commercial music nowdays; Disney owns most of the film productions nowadays; and you have surely seen these graphs that show that a big part of the popular food brands are signboards run by a handful of corporations.

The internet of the 90s looked like a liberation - this is partly due to capitalism always seeking to elude set hegemonies and power that hinder the "free competition" (and monopolies and consolidated markets are doing exactly this), but I believe that the ability to further speed up and increasing the consolidation was much more grave for the spread and adaption of internet technology - the first market place most people ordered something online from were not some small-time store, but Amazon or Ebay.

The web-revival isn't really interested in true decentralization either: Neocities ain't that different from conventional social networks in this regard; everything is stored on a single server, offered by one single provider - what it "sells" is rather the impression of independence (and charges a price for it: Compared to commercial web hosters, the supporter-tier of Neocities is rather expensive).Paradoxically, from what I read since joining this forum, many people stick to Neocities mainly for these "social features" that are forcefully connected to a certain centralization and dependence to the service provider.

I believe what the Web-Revival (and similar movements, as truly independent game developers or non-commercial underground musicians) can achieve is to create alternative rooms, where the mechanisms and the forces of the hegemonic capitalist system are (at least partly and seemingly) annulled - but to do so, they have to exceed their own mediality: As long as the web-revivals most important message is the medium itself ("I made a website: It is about me, and why making websites is great"), it is only able to deliver a desire, but not to fulfill it. If it offers room for things that can't happen within the outside world, we have a heterotopia: A place were some of the rules of the surrounding world are set off, and where those who do not fit (or want to fit) these rules are driven to. It might be possible that new forms of society grow out of such Heterotopias - ideas that sprawl from these parallel spaces into the world, questioning the existing and established powers - but I came to believe that the Internet ain't the best soil for such potent "Heterotopias" - partly because its whole structure is designed to individualization rather than to community building, partly because it is too easy to shut a virtual place down once it becomes dangerous.

[ValyceNegative]

I have next to no presence on social media (I only have Bluesky... and I'm logging in maybe once a month) so I don't have first-hand experience wether the activity is dwindling or not on those platforms. I'm mainly into art communities and when I go to conventions and exchange business cards with fellow creatives I still see them using Instagram as main form of contact/gallery despite Insta being the worst possible format for posting art ever... but I think they are being rather forced to it: youths in Italy still mainly use Insta, so if an artist wants to gain traction and advertise their works, that's still the easiest place for it.

With that said, the distaste and dissatisfaction for these same exact services are becoming louder and louder, I've talked with many folks that explicitly said there was no point in opening accounts on these mega sites anymore, yet so far I've seen either just lamenting then doing nothing to move away from the unpleasant situation or, the most popular alternative here, opening a Telegram channel.
A lot of the actractiveness of Insta/FB/whatever lie in the fact that they are immediate: you can open a social media account or a Telegram channel in 10 minutes but if you are buying a domain or starting a page on a free host you'll have to give yourself a few months of work to come up with a good page. The many artists I've seen lamenting about losing patience with socials would have no patience themselves for building an indie site.

I've suggested turning to smallweb so many times, I've written manifestos with starting resource links to share around, to everyone telling me "I want to leave!" I always reply "you can!" but when they hear how they can excape all the responses are vague and lukewarm.
To the "I don't know how to code" my obvious response is that starting to learn the basics is not hard, and that in the ages of early web the fansites I used to browse were made by kids of my same age: however, at this point I think the push to learn this skill was dictated by the fact that there really was no alternative if you wanted to post your own content, that one easy and quick account on a social will always be the lazy, but most instantly gratificating way to be on the web... unless they close :/

In short: if the smallweb is getting more and more popular in other countries, I'm glad! Maybe some echos will shake things up here too, because as far as I've seen way too many creatives only want to cry and yell without putting any solution in practice. XD

[CyborWaffolz (dizzy)]

@ThunderPerfectWitchcraft I think i agree more with @Tuffy!

Not to be rude but I think your explanation is kinda confusing. I get your principle, but in practice I think the web and the internet is better when its not gatekept to certain groups of people. Its just our method of letting people connect to one another in whichever which way they want to do so. I get that centralized ownership isnt as robust as P2P since the owner can weasel in things like algorithms and subscriptions; im all for p2p and decentralized ways of websites too, but as it stands I dont feel like Neocities is malicious and evil for having a paid tier.

[ArtificialAnima]

@DiffydaDude I think the point is more that centralized services are fragile -- if Neocities shuts down for any reason, then every site it hosts becomes accessible only through archival projects, and the same goes for if its payment processors decide they don't like something hosted on it (like how itch.io took down a ton of games recently due to pressure from stripe/mastercard/etc., and how, if I remember correctly, Cohost lost its major planned revenue source because Stripe didn't like it).

[CyborWaffolz (dizzy)]

@DiffydaDudeand how, if I remember correctly, Cohost lost its major planned revenue source because Stripe didn't like it).

Im pretty sure Cohost went down because of mismanaged funds and controversy
Anyways, I think I'd like the World Wide Web to be a mix of both P2P and server based stuff. I think that'd be the best way for the Internet to go. Theres uses for both of these things and I dont know when exactly being decentralized starts and being centralized ends because every piece of media on the web comes from someones computer.

[stephan_e_perez]

I'm not sure something as direct as the Forum Revival Movement will work, because, as @ThunderPerfectWitchcraft alludes, it's too focused on the medium in an a more general way. Humans are lazy and will choose what they perceive as more convenient.

I've suggested turning to smallweb so many times, I've written manifestos with starting resource links to share around, to everyone telling me "I want to leave!" I always reply "you can!" but when they hear how they can excape all the responses are vague and lukewarm.
To the "I don't know how to code" my obvious response is that starting to learn the basics is not hard, and that in the ages of early web the fansites I used to browse were made by kids of my same age: however, at this point I think the push to learn this skill was dictated by the fact that there really was no alternative if you wanted to post your own content, that one easy and quick account on a social will always be the lazy, but most instantly gratificating way to be on the web... unless they close :/

Yup. Learning to code is actually *not* that easy. After coding for years in other languages, it still took me a few months of learning html, css, js and php to make my first website. Most people are not going to want to make this effort when they can just make a profile and posts on an existing platform. Even "no-code" tools are frustrating because they either offer poor customization or else are so complicated that you might as well learn how to code - all that and there's still no built-in network like the mainstream platforms have.

I was talking with some artists today at a gallery opening and they said they use mostly IG and FB for networking and sharing their art because of their convenience. One person in the discussion said it's hard to look up websites because you might have to dig through pages of Google search results to find what you're looking for. I countered by demonstrating that, if you Google for "Stephan E Perez artist", my website is the first result. Another artist said that IG is great for networking, and if someone really wants to dig into her art, they will make the effort to look at her website, where her works are displayed in proper resolution and aspect ratio.

Of course, not all of the convenience is imagined- some of it is real. Of course it's easier to just log in and browse various subreddits for different topics in one place instead of jumping around a bunch of different forums. This is most obvious to me with video-games. Up into my early 20s I visited a forum for the Chrono-series, which amazingly still exists, but hardly sees any activity- you can find much more on r/chronotrigger or r/chronocross. For Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game with a big competitive scene, the community used to be focused on SmashBoards, but there is much more activity on r/SSBM nowadays and it looks like people only post in Smashboards forums about once a week now...

To focus for a moment on Reddit- its whole design is clearly intended to accommodate large amounts of users so that people can join a subreddit and think "This is *the* place to talk about [x-subject]". This has drawbacks, obviously. You can have a two-way dialogue with someone well enough, but talking with 2+ people at once or getting an overview of the whole discussion is much more difficult (because it's not really a discussion). They must have thought, probably correctly, that such a mainstream platform where it's so easy to join a new subreddit would have too much traffic to allow for linear forum discussion.

So traditional forums still have a niche: Sometimes in tandem with Discord servers, but they serve a clear purpose: facilitating linear discussions where the entire discussion can be seen by everyone and documented coherently. Notable examples of this are forums for softwares or frameworks like openFrameworks or TouchDesigner. A place where serious people can learn from each other and discuss things in depth.

This is the kind of value, the kind of depth that can draw people away from centralized platforms like Reddit into more diverse and focused platforms. But it's hard to force it onto them just by telling them how cool forums are. Rather, people will usually seek out something when they need it, the same way we've all found our way to Melonland.

One of the best things we can do to help decentralize the internet is to create and advertise spaces that offer some kind of value to people in a way they can understand. Ie. making specialized platforms and spaces that offer features and tools of expression more taylored to a specific field of interest.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

@DiffydaDude I wasn't making a moral judgement of Neocities (I addressed some of the political concerns I have about them here). My point - to sum it up in a hopefully easier to understand way - is that the overall tendency of "our" system leads towards centralization, and that Neocities and the Webrevival - opposed to the appearance - are no exception. Isn't it somewhat odd that a scene concerned with escaping social media and decentralization is willing to pay a surcharge for a heavily centralized service with social media features? I tried to point this out and explain this with my post, and attempted to offer a still positive perspective for movements like the web-revival.

I find P2P-attempts interesting, but I'm not aware of any attempts that overcome the technical limitations. But spreading the internet to more servers would already increase the resilience against censorship and control - we go, however, in the opposite direction.

@ArtificialAnima They are more fragile, but - and this is important - they are also more attractive. And these factors are interconnected.

Humans are lazy and will choose what they perceive as more convenient.

This isn't directly a question of laziness. Technology has a certain power to perpetuate a social selection - if you stick too much to an outdated technology, you will disappear along with it. And this proves true to individuals and societies alike (imagine somebody or a collective of people not adapting to the wheel, the combustion engine, or the internet - it might work out for a while (especially if you also ban contraception), but you will be isolated, and eventually forgotten - it is a thing very graspable for me as a dumb-phone-user). German philosopher Friedrich Kittler made many interesting analysis about this.

The people who don't follow @ValyceNegative advice don't do so because what is offered as an alternative won't work for them and what they want. I can decide to barely use social media to promote my creative output, because I don't intend to make a living out of it - but if you do so, you are forced to use effective means, or you'll be "selected out by the invisible hand of the market" sooner or later - not because this is a law of nature, but because we haven't managed to overcome this yet.

[ArtificialAnima]

The Spritely Institute has been doing interesting work on P2P protocols, etc., but they're still pretty early on. I'm not sure they'll ever overcome the inefficiency inherent to fully distributed protocols with many users.

[crazyroostereye]

I want to believe we are heading to a more Decentralized Internet in spite of Capitalism, as we can see Governments slowly and more effectively go against the wider Tech Industries and its Monopoly. This will cause Legislation and Court Cases that are going to force these Major Companies to strip down and open the Market for Competitors.

Tho I don't think we are going to return something like the 90s/2000s Internet, but more of Medium where we are going to Decentralize more but with Federation. As people like the Convenience of Central Services, and with the end of such Services we still want to retain aspects of it. So I think we will see a rise In Federated and Interconnected Services operated by different Parties. We already see with the Newer Socials on the block, that they are starting to Adopt certain Federated Capabilities, like Bluesky, Mastodon, Meta Threads and others. Of course, they're success is mixed, but that's the Issue when competing with a Monopoly.

So I think we are Decentralizing but less into everyone has their own Website kind of Decentralization.

[Melooon]

I think if I have one conclusion from my time in the web-o-sphere its that the best we can hope for is crafty moments of transition. There will always be centers, big ones and small ones, and ones on the way out and ones about to begin. Somewhere between the morphing of place to place and center to center though; things happen, and we get sparks of craft and newness. Life is not about finding your center, its about moving; and the web is more about the motion of information than its temporary home. Like CDs and forums and social networks, these centers come and go, they disperse and gather, and each time reflect something slightly different

There would be no web revival without facebook, there would be no facebook without geocities, there would be no melonland without neocities, and there would be no thread to discuss centers without this board - they are all just morphs of each other - that doesn't diminish the fight or the value in pushing to try alternate things (in fact it gives it more weight) but there will never be an end or an answer

[grubbyfox]

Honestly I dont really foresee anything getting better online for the most part. Probably, most people will continue to use the "central hubs" and just go about their life, giving up their ID and all when the time comes. Because nothing beats scrolling those addicive apps over and over until their brain it melted.

And there will always be a niche community that wants to hang on forums and make websites. But I cant really imagine that becoming the main thing again. People have tasted the convenience now and they dont want to give that up.