Using the internet like it's 1999

If you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the internet has never been alive for you. That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what the internet could be.

For the vast majority of people, yes - the internet is dying: living inside an algorithmically controlled echochamber that they will never get out of, they live and die by what they are “supposed to see”. But, it does not have to be like this.

With the influx of slop that will be created (and already has been created) with LLMs, there is an ever increasing signal to noise on these platforms. This obviously means that we will see less depth of content, less interesting information, and less of the human - all of these are not positive things in any regard.

I had the displeasure of scrolling the tiktok feed on desktop for 30 seconds the other day, and it is a wonder to me how some of us have any attention span left at all. The content was designed to literally suck your soul from your body. AI generated “fruit love island” - It was too much for me. I shook my head and closed the browser tab.

We can use the internet as it was actually intended to be used: go to the protocol layer to interact with the data at it’s source. Throw off the facade of the modern social platform, and we start to see that freedom of information is within grasp.

The only way to actually use the internet in a way that is going to be beneficial to you is to disregard much of it. Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, LLM slop, distracting, pointless, attention-seeking, corporate hellscape that is the web.

I believe the time is now (and has always been) to use the internet like it’s 1999.

1999#

In 1999, the internet was figuring itself out. There was no social media, no algorithm, hell, Google was just starting up. Only about 4% of the world’s population was online (compared to almost 75% today). But, I am not going to suggest we all log off and touch grass (though we should be doing more of that!) My thesis is that we must return to being citizens of the web, instead of users in some database - we must reclaim agency over our attention, and the technologies presented in the 90s and early 2000s allow us to do just this.

This was by constraint more than by design, but the idea behind how the internet should be used is what we are looking to re-instill. The HTTP, XMPP/IRC, email (SMTP) etc. protocols are genuinely good, hence their staying power. The perversion of the protocol is what we are directly assaulting here, the frontend and platform portion of the upper layer 7. The browser used to work for you instead of actively subverting your security and privacy with hundreds of tracking cookies and scripts on every page load.

The internet was (and never stopped being) a series of tubes that transmits data. That data is accessible and transparent to anyone, and the way we ingest, manipulate, and work with said data is that which we can change to benefit the individual.

RSS Feeds#

I have largely embraced RSS feeds as the only way to follow blogs/news/video creators/etc. as I don’t want an algorithm to feed me content. I want to make the decision for myself as to what it is that I actually care to consume, and that should not be content that is meant to make the platform the most amount of ad revenue by emotionally manipulating the viewer into spending more time scrolling.

Nor should anything I look at be LLM generated slop. I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop. I have found no better way to “curate reality” better than this.

IRC and XMPP#

We have a budding community on IRC that I think is far more interesting than most online communities I have seen simply because of the (small) barrier to entry that is IRC. Internet Relay Chat has been around since the late 80s, and it is still a protocol which is simply plain text - meaning higher signal to noise than a platform that allows images, video, “upvotes”, and the like.

Search engines#

You can negate much of the slop du jour by using your own search engine. They are still powerful, they still get you the information you need, but you cannot use them how the 99% does. You have to actually search with intention, using them methodically and professionally. Ask better questions, get better results.

Archiving#

A large problem with the internet has always been link rot - where a bookmark or link that you liked is gone tomorrow. You can and should download useful information locally to keep for posterity. You can also use the Internet Archive’s link tool for creating backups that will live on their servers.

Email#

When people DM me on various platforms, I generally just tell them to email me. By chatting on platforms, you and I do not own the conversation. Worse, that conversation is likely being monitored and parsed so that we can be encouraged to consume product at a later date. I’d rather just talk to you directly.

Push only - POSSE method#

Most people consume feeds on social media, and while I would rather not use socials at all, the fact of the matter is that we can spread the good word via social media, using it as a push platform, not to pull. There is a tenant of the IndieWeb called POSSE - You own the content as it is on your own platform, and then you ship it to other locations to increase your reach.