@oluOnline I've been in the web for 23 years (!) and my biggest lesson is : almost nothing lasts except Wikimedia projects and what you build yourself.

Everything for-profit has an expiration date

@oluOnline the default atom on the amateur internet was, at one point, a project rather than a profile. even when these projects sprawl and cannot help but reflect the self, I think it’s a healthier approach.

@oluOnline Biggest lesson: The Internet, by itself, is neither good or bad. It's a tool. Our use of it to accomplish good or evil reflects who we choose to be as individuals and groups.
What I miss: The weirdly comforting, musical Grrrroooonksqueeeeeeeeeeebooshbooshbooshbonk of connecting over dial-up.
What I wish would come back: Don't know. Never think about it.
The future: I just hope we have one, things are getting so real and scary out there.

@oluOnline i think websites should just be html+css, and simple enough that people can learn from each others websites, and if there is a need to execute code there should be a dedicated app that one can install for that purpose.

the tendency to add complexity to make things more appealing/accessible is self-defeating and exhausting (for me at least).

and i'd hope that browsers would come with pretty default styling, so people wouldn't reinvent the wheel there, too.

@oluOnline dominant players in any market are bad for everyone.

Dominating search leads to every webpage hyper optimising to get clicks.

Dominating social leads to misinformation and violence.

Etc.

And while these effects are accentuated due to profit motives their genesis is in market dominance not capitalism.

Decentralised technologies are the answer.

@oluOnline Another huge fan of RSS/Atom here! It never went away, but I wish browsers would promote this superb web feature again!

I think I recall there used to be a bigger emphasis on sharing interesting information, building sites for particular topics the author was interested in. I love when I still find that!

@oluOnline my biggest lesson is that so much of it is owed to QTBIPOC folx, yet it is dominated by cishet abled white folx who are just looking to profit. If they weren't the decision makers who forced their way into power, the internet would look so much different in terms of ownership, sharing information, or the languages we use. Marginalized folx do make spaces for people like us on small pockets of the web, but the mainstream infrastructure isn't designed for us.

@oluOnline I hope that one day communities beat SEO junk articles and big data

@oluOnline

Lesson:
Misaligned incentives wreck everything

Hope:
I like the @dweb principles

https://getdweb.net/principles/

@oluOnline Private control of public community is terrible.

@oluOnline My biggest one is the community memory project.

Public terminals, with anonymous access. But also local fora full of local gossuip. Accessible late at night at a bus stop / phone booth type setup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

@oluOnline

It is tempting to assume that distributed architectures are inherently democratic, egalitarian, even liberatory.

They are not.

@oluOnline such a good question. I think the main thing of it is I would love for it to have more smaller makers, things made for ourselves - the amazing fediverse! Using DDG instead of Google, etc. Firefox instead of Chrome. More open source and self-run stuff over corporate walled off stuff. A lot of it I wrote in my top pinned post- I make things so infrequently but I do love and I adore simple/small web.

@oluOnline I agree with every comment to this post so far. Simple HTML! Homepages! Webrings! Blogs! Non-commercial sites! People displaying their interests! Sites that are a trove of information! A relative absence of enshittification!

I'd like there to be more of a way for sites to survive beyond the interests and even lives of their founders. I hope someday the Internet Archive gets to saving pages in ways a bit deeper than just recording how they looked on specific dates.

@oluOnline Yes, things were fun in the 1990s, exploring all the centered text and <BLINK> sites, then hating Java and the moving water, then Flash...
But I think the biggest change that came was the smartphone. Once the Internet was in the car, on the train, in classrooms and waiting rooms and ballrooms and meeting rooms and restaurants and next to beds, shit got real.
As someone says above, a tool and a weapon.

@oluOnline
I miss animated GIF torches :redghost: :pmghost:

@oluOnline That linkbacks ala tumblr did not automatically solve information organization and curation, which will always require a human touch to emerge new knowledge. There is no auto-zettelkasten.

@oluOnline i'm gonna wait and read some of the other replies before saying anything, except to say now this is the kinda question that has the potential to get the whole fedi worked up and not let your notifications rest for days

@oluOnline Peopke will flock to proprietary systems because they offer something new and flashy, but only open standards will still be there a decade or more later.