…smaller communities
So like it was before the dawn of Reddit and social media?
Sign me the fuck up. I miss my dumb little websites with a dodgy layout full of terribly cropped gifs.
But how will we find any of these small sites with the dogshit search is lately.
Webrings, index pages, pure chance
Basically forums
Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.
God I hate discord.
The thing is that many people, myself included assumed most were dead and cannibalised by Reddit and Facebook groups. Turns out those specialised places have been running continuously on their own pace. Yeah, threads can still span hundreds of pages but in the end going through them makes you an expert on things overnight ;)
So the past of the internet?
The future of internet is you have to ask your government for permission before you can visit foreign websites.
There is no longer “Internet”
It will be suceeded by:
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Freedom Net (where “Antifa” is Banned, and you need a swastica armband to get access)
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Euronet (where UK just left, again)
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United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland(they noped out of the UK, and re-re-joined the EU) -
Putin’s #1 Digital Fan Club
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中华人民解放互联网 (People’s Liberated Internet)
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And that’s it, Canada and Mexico got Invaded by the US; while UK, EU, Russia, China all fought over the remaining of the world
(okay maybe my worldbuilding is ridiculous, but the world is collapsing and I want to write a story about my predictions of the future mm’kay? 😉)
You think the current US would stop at Canada and Mexico?
They wouldn’t.
EU would have to defend Greenland from the USA (and given the already huge amount of US miliary presense, they would probably fail). South America would be a warzone between US and resistance forces funded by EU, but since they also have to fund the defence against Russia, they don’t have the fund to fight two fronts, so they focus more on the EU-Russia front. UK will have to also defend itself from the US military that can launch an attack from Greenland at any moment (good luck, they left the EU lmfao). Russia and China relationship doesn’t do so well and they fight over Mongolia and the “Middle East” (for lack of a better term). Australia joins China as a Special Administrative region because USA gone fascist, and EU is already fighting two fronts, so they eventually got absorbed in China’s sphere of influence. Japan is now a warzone between Vanguardist “Socialist” China, and Fascist USA.
And Taiwan is… wait what’s a “Taiwan”? Oh that boring island that has totally always been under PLA control and totally never had any de facto autonomy under the name ROC, like ever, that Taiwan? Long live CCP! (/s 😉)
(Actually, maybe I should write a story about all this… 👀)
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I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he’s still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don’t need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.
Maybe the idea behind those smaller communities is that they’d be focused on things like fishing and kite surfing. Social media that are even remotely popular have become football stadiums where people constantly need to pledge allegiance to their teams and that’s just really boring now.
