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[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 330 points 1 year ago

That's gonna result in a massive amount of dead links. The internet really is dying...

[-] varjen@lemmy.world 139 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.

[-] Seasons@lemmy.world 134 points 1 year ago

I’m 100% down to go back to Wild West.

The feeling and freedom of playing runescape on the early 2000s unfiltered internet was something I’ve missed. Maybe it’s coming back.

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml 74 points 1 year ago

100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.

While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.

I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.

I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.

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[-] obinice@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago

The problem is, you won't get the sort of compatibility you enjoy now any more. So many different applications, phone keyboards etc support gfycat and that's where all the content is.

They won't support dozens of disparate led popular services spread across the internet.

Those services are also likely to be less reliable, less well moderated for offensive/illegal content and such, and more likely to randomly disappear.

Like why Reddit was such a success, I want stability. I want one, reliable, centralised place I can go for everything.

Another concern I have, considering Lemmy specifically, is hacking of their infrastructure. Is my Lemmy account data as secure as my Reddit account? No. The software isn't as secure, and the security teams are non existent, it's just a guy (a wonderful guy!) hosting this as a hobby.

And even if one server does get a proper tech security team, that's just one server.

There's also the question of WHO is hosting a Lemmy instance being used, are they trustworthy? Are they being independently audited? Have they been found in compliance with GDPR? Are they secretly selling our data? Could be, who knows.

For all the awful things that come with a big company like Reddit, there's more scrutiny, accountability, etc.

I don't mean to diss Lemmy, I'm really really hopeful for it. I just have a lot of early concerns, things they'll have to solve before I can really see it being the trustworthy, solid cornerstone of the internet I'd like it to be.

[-] Gold_ghost057@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's wrong to keep questions like these in mind, it's great for information security and your privacy!

I'm with ya - no hate and no ill will to the hosts of any of these instances, but a cautious or informed user is a safe user. And safe users tend to mean user longevity on a platform! So it's kind of cyclical, the "safety> accountability> user" relationship.

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[-] overzeetop@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Search engines will just have to get better at scrubbing their databases. Most of this stuff is ephemeral so it's usually a deep search that leads to these old threads...and future dead links. Distributed services isn't bad, it's just different. Pre-web it was archie, gopher, veronica, usenet, etc. Now all those things - or their equivalent data - run on top of the web. It's just an evolution.

[-] teft@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

I say we all go back to browsing the web via Lynx and chatting it up on IRC. Who's with me?

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

Reject modernity, return to bbs

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[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago
[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.

It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.

[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

The tech knowledge was its own gatekeeping and filter. I also miss slapping people with a wet trout... Actually, it's mostly the trout nostalgia for me...

LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large trout

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[-] Dewa@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Three or four huge companies sounds terrible

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[-] fermuch@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 year ago

Is this how a recession feels?

[-] coldv@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

Honestly didn't expect it to be THIS kind of recession

[-] PoppinKREAM@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago

An internet/social media recession, we're truly living in the 21st century.

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, either. Sometimes a recession is a necessary reset, and maybe it's time for social media to have one.

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[-] boonhet@lemm.ee 37 points 1 year ago

We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.

Before reddit, imgur, etc got big, the Internet was FULL of dead links. Image links in particular. Small image hosts cleared their storage after a while because, y'know, kinda expensive to host a bunch of content for free.

But you know what? We ran everything. And discovery was hella different. Personal websites, bulletin boards... Clicking links from one place to end up at another, and then you find another link to another website... It was something different entirely. Of course, Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit all were originally just websites where you could share what you'd discovered and other people could comment on it, but reddit ended up becoming THE place to hang out, and then nobody bothered going to all these small websites anymore.

I see the fediverse as being something in-between. The content doesn't all belong to a massive corporation, but it's also still MORE centralized than the Internet of old. We all hang out in a shared, federated space, rather than having a bunch of different spaces. Communities aren't as insular, which is both good and bad - and I guess everyone has different preferences anyway. But while on a big network like the fediverse or reddit, you tend to feel like part of a very big community (unless you subscribe exclusively to tiny communities/subs), on the forums of old, you'd have a small community and most people were fairly active participants, so it really felt like a close-knit community if you know what I mean.

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[-] 1st@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago

I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?

Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.

[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

I think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the "make product, get users, ???, Profit".

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago

TFW Calico Cut Pants has a better business model than 90% of websites in the world. It's 100% user funded. You gotta give!

[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

If you don't give, it could go dark

[-] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

I think the beauty of decentralization is that in many ways monetization doesn't have to be necessary. Or it can be necessary on a much smaller scale. A big company like Twitter or Reddit or Facebook needs to make money on a massive scale. A small company, like somebody running a big Lemmy instance, doesn't need to answer to investors who expect a 10x return. They just have to cover their costs and maybe make a buck. So we go back to the old days like when we had independent forums, half of them were just free as a labor of love, the other half had a banner ad or two and maybe some way to support the site by donating. I think we were better off that way.

[-] tburkhol@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

The utility of twitter, facebook and reddit is their ubiquity. They each, in their own way, became the place you go to find [thing], and federated services will never have that. Discovering mastodon users who aren't already followed on your instance is hard. Discovering lemmy communities that aren't already followed on your instance is slightly easier. They're never going to show up in Local if they're not local, and they're never going to show up in All if no local subscribes. Decentralization, even with federation, works against virality, and if there's not a steady flow of content, then few people bother to sign up.

The instances get exponentially more useful as they get larger, but the costs of operation also get exponentially larger. If lemmy catches on, instances will absolutely grow beyond donations.

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[-] obinice@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Thankfully we won't need to find out, there's no evidence that we're in a post globalist world, or entering one any time soon.

The EU and friendly ties via NATO are a great example, nations are realising more than ever that they must come together and work together to survive, and the Internet continues to make the world smaller, our communities closer.

Not to mention the ever growing essential economic links between nations.

There's the occasional missteps of course, some xenophobes and fascists in various nations want to close their borders and essentially become North Korea, but that'll never happen, it would be far, far too damaging for those nations if they actually listened to that vocal minority.

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[-] NoPants@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I'm a bit surprised they lasted this long to he honest. How did they make money? Ads?

[-] varjen@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

They make money by selling information about you.

[-] sab@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not a lot of information to sell from a single GET request when an image is embedded on a third party website or app.

Edit: come to think of it, maybe you're right, and this is in response to 3rd party cookies being phased out pretty much everywhere.

[-] NoPants@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I think you probably nailed it. Firefox and Safari already block 3rd party cookies by default. I think chrome is supposed to sometime this year, and that will cover 95% of most internet users.

[-] varjen@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

And when they combine traffic from you with traffic from others they can infer more info.

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[-] CoderKat@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.

I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:

  1. It will reduce how many places link to an image, since where forums and social media are concerned, so that if the host of the image goes down, so does the place that links to it, avoid the quite frustrating issue of dead links (which can clutter search results in an unhelpful way -- search results generally will never be able to find the image without the page that references it, anyway).
  2. The forum is best able to monetize. Direct links to images on different hosts can't really be monetized, but if it's the same host, then it's just one, obvious host to pay for (and so far, the Fediverse seems to be getting a sustainable amount of donations -- heck, I've donated $20 to my original host so far myself).
  3. It ensures that the users of the image are the ones that feel the pain of hosting. When it's a separate image host, it's removed from you. But if it's your Fediverse instance (or reddit or whatever social media), the sustainability is closer to you and thus you're more likely to donate to help it run or be understanding of things like ads.

That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.

As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?

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[-] Korkki@lemmy.world 110 points 1 year ago

I guess it's just impossible to make these types of large media storage sites profitable. The business model itself is inherently unprofitable despite there being a need for these sites. Like youtube will never bring a cent back to google, but they keep running it because it locks people into their ecosystem for data harvesting.

Could also be that snap bought gfycat just to kill it.

[-] MaybeItWorks@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 year ago

Storage is just the loss leader of the internet, really. Companies will take the loss for access to the data.

[-] cerevant@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Free storage. Backblaze is doing just fine.

[-] MaybeItWorks@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago

That is why I called it a loss leader. It is meant to attract people to the ecosystem (hence free), not be the product itself. Of course if you are appropriately creating, pricing, and selling low cost storage as a business model, you will nail it.

[-] Nittick@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago
[-] MaybeItWorks@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Eh, your average bear isn’t doing a bunch of hosting. Sure there are folks who do, but the vast majority of the population does not give a shit about hosting. They do care when you interrupt their photo/video storage, though.

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[-] SomeOtherUsername@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 1 year ago

YouTube is very profitable now. MEGA is probably profitable.

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[-] TheWorstNL@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I'm not surprised. How can this be sustainable? Images are embedded in the websites with no way for Gfycat to make any revenue.

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[-] thenicnet@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Man, I really feel like the internet is under a major shake up at the moment. Feels weird.

edit: spelling

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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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