The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. "If you build it, he/they will come."
The only thing that sucked about having my own PHPBB forum was the lack of actual users to communicate with.
But it looked and did everything just the way I wanted, so that was nice. 🥹
Haha not to mention the spam bots that would appear and ruin everything :/
The places I used to hang out with PHPBB or similar forums never really had problems with bots. And I'm at least pretty sure they were popular places. Penny-Arcade, Something Awful, NewGrounds, eBaums World...
They also weren't a problem for small users either. Not only was there no incentive, they didn't necessarily get discovered by web crawlers. I remember wondering why my websites never showed up on search engines when I first started fucking around with webpages, web hosting, networks, etc. I hosted the server, I had a domain name, I was online and could access my site from other computers solely through the internet; but it never came up on Yahoo or Dogpile and I didn't know why. The first time I ever found my own site on a search engine, it was using a hosting site like Geocities. And that was after Google came out and I was getting archived versions of the first website I ever made.
Sadly public self hosting comes with a lot of legalities. And sure, I can hide behind cloudflare ( and I do) but that still puts all of my eggs into Cloudflare's basket
it really does feel like a return to the older decentralized web
The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. "If you build it, he/they will come."
The only thing that sucked about having my own PHPBB forum was the lack of actual users to communicate with.
But it looked and did everything just the way I wanted, so that was nice. 🥹
Haha not to mention the spam bots that would appear and ruin everything :/
The places I used to hang out with PHPBB or similar forums never really had problems with bots. And I'm at least pretty sure they were popular places. Penny-Arcade, Something Awful, NewGrounds, eBaums World...
They also weren't a problem for small users either. Not only was there no incentive, they didn't necessarily get discovered by web crawlers. I remember wondering why my websites never showed up on search engines when I first started fucking around with webpages, web hosting, networks, etc. I hosted the server, I had a domain name, I was online and could access my site from other computers solely through the internet; but it never came up on Yahoo or Dogpile and I didn't know why. The first time I ever found my own site on a search engine, it was using a hosting site like Geocities. And that was after Google came out and I was getting archived versions of the first website I ever made.
Sadly public self hosting comes with a lot of legalities. And sure, I can hide behind cloudflare ( and I do) but that still puts all of my eggs into Cloudflare's basket
it really does feel like a return to the older decentralized web