Internet Shrinkage & Archiving

Certainly, it feels like some window of opportunity is closing. I don't feel (but I might be wrong) that there will be total censorship, but the ability to find a piece of information will be greatly reduced both by big tech platforms and by people's relation to technology. Big tech censoring is obvious these days, and there are big bucks behind shipping a browser or even an operating system with some of the offers integrated. But what's the biggest problem is that tech got integrated into people's lives in a such way, that they cede their knowledge to Google or Wikipedia. There are a lot of very cool projects to decentralize the internet via federation or even peer-to-peer swarm formation, but the user interfaces aren't snappy, videos aren't playing in an instant (or there are none), and there's no dopamine involved with constant timeline refreshing.

The current trajectory reminds me a bit of the famous "VISA" session:
Session 16 October 1994 said:
Q: (L) The transition will happen and we will all be standing around glazed in the eyes or whatever, wondering what to do with ourselves, because we are finding ourselves in a new estate we have not been in before, and then Christ comes?

A: More or less.

Q: (L) Now, what is going to happen after Christ comes back and everything is sort of straightening out and he is teaching... is everybody on the planet going to be gathered together in one place to receive these teachings?

A: No.

Q: (L) Is he going to travel around and teach?

A: Technology.

Q: (L) He will teach via the media?

A: Yes.

Q: (L) And we are still going to have access to our media, television and radio and so forth?

A: Some.

Q: (L) Are some people at that point in time or just prior to this transition, going to leave in large groups with the Lizzies?

A: Yes.

Q: (L) Are there going to be large groups of people moving into domed cities on the planet living in "cahoots" with the Lizzies?

A: Close.

Q: (L) In other words there may be areas of Lizzie control on the planet and areas under the control of Christ?

A: Christ does not control.

Q: (L) Will the Lizzie people come out of their cities from time to time and "molest" the followers of Christ from time to time?

A: Maybe.

Q: (L) So, in other words, we will have a greatly reduced population, people here and people there, none of whom are totally united on the planet?

A: Goodnight.
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Most of my daily FB posts don't go anywhere now. And I am not blacklisted or in FB prison atm - or at leasst no red notices lol. Visibility of other sites has been tampered with too so been no traction on FB Group or Twitter sites for years.

The browser searches state so many millions of pages on a search. But when you scroll down they stop after about 3 or more pages. So not accessible.
 
SlavaOn said:
AFAIk, Bastyon has no iOS app, so you will not find it in Apple store. You can get an Android app using a link from their site: Bastyon: First Fully Decentralized Social Network on Blockchain
Recently I saw a video with Bastyon founder. He looks like a normal Russian dude and talks sense :)
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I recently found out about him and the Bastyon platform from a video on the Studio Rubezh YouTube channel (Студия Рубеж).
His name is Daniel Sachkov. He gives useful information to think about. He calls himself an analyst. And it is noticeable that he pays attention to many signals. In the last interview he mentioned Game Theory. I immediately remembered Wave 8, where Laura talks about it in detail.
For example, here :

From a recent one I remember him advising all nations and families to take care to have a source or supply of food, water, energy and safe (uncontrollable) communication with each other.
I will try to test his Bastyon app with encrypted chat.

Here are all his videos and interviews in Russian. But I haven't watched them all myself yet.
Большое интервью с основателем БАСТИОНА / BASTYON
Шокирующий прогноз финансового аналитика: такого в истории еще не бывало / Даниэль Сачков
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Alejo said:
Yes, I have had the same experience, and it's a shame but I suppose it's also to be expected.

In recent years the big tech companies have made their agendas rather clear, and have not been shy about looking to maintain certain narrative as the believable one, so they use their power to conceal the truth and present information only in a way that validates whatever they want to be validated.

So I agree with you Cosmos, it's not that the internet is being deleted, it's that it is being veiled from the average user, so when someone has the inclination to research a topic, or even if they question any narrative, they will only find whatever is approved by the gate keepers, and that is that.

What strikes me as interesting is that it's not a new phenomenon, things like this have happened time and again throughout our history, book burning or simply re writing history after victory is the same exercise in power over people by controlling what they know.
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"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell
His dystopian novel '1984' reminds us that it is important to identify the sources of the information we receive. Awareness and Knowledge protects indeed.
 
brandon said:
This is sort of tangential, but.. I first noticed it in the late 2000s. Back in 1998-2000ish times, when I used to search (with search engines like Yahoo & AltaVista - I believe the search results on these were hand-entered by humans at the time!!) - eg searching for channelled material - I'd find a heap of personal, hand-made web sites, each one looking completely different, with different info on it, obviously uploaded by the actual person whose info it was.. Then for a few years I didn't much search for this kind of stuff. Then later, getting towards the end of the 2000s, I tried again, and most of those personal sites were nowhere to be found. Now it was instead, a handful of slick looking portal sites with reposted 2nd hand information, it felt like just the same few things posted over and over in different places (on boilerplate websites, with adverts attached). The sense of adventure, finding abundant weird and original information, people just putting their writing out there, was gone. Well that's how it seemed. But yeah, those sites were probably still there, it was just that the search engines stopped showing them.
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I saw this french movie: Effacer l'historique (Delete History).
Synopsis: Three social-media victims declare war on the tech giants.
Quite good movie IMHO

Related to this topic is something that happens near the end of tho movie.
So...
A hacker is ask to delete a video from the internet. A sex tape that a mother dont want her teen kid to find.
He can't find a way to delete the video. Is solution to the mother's problem is to release plenty of false news about the mother.
When the teen kid then do a search on his mother name he find plenty of articles on his mother, but doesn't find the video.

My reasonning is that "they" must have done that "in reverse". At some point when the internet was young. Since then, they found more and more tricks.
 
This may be off-topic, but back in the days (~20 or so years ago), if memory serves, there was something like 'web crawler' search engines. I used some of them to search 'unlisted', or non-indexed sites just to see what kind of results there are outside of general search engines.

I took a quick look, what's the situation today. According to wikipedia, there still seems to be web crawler search engines: Web crawler - Wikipedia

As it says: "A vast amount of web pages lie in the deep or invisible web"

Also: "A Web crawler starts with a list of URLs to visit. Those first URLs are called the seeds."

That could be or not one option to rake through the net.
 
brandon said:
This is sort of tangential, but.. I first noticed it in the late 2000s. Back in 1998-2000ish times, when I used to search (with search engines like Yahoo & AltaVista - I believe the search results on these were hand-entered by humans at the time!!) - eg searching for channelled material - I'd find a heap of personal, hand-made web sites, each one looking completely different, with different info on it, obviously uploaded by the actual person whose info it was.. Then for a few years I didn't much search for this kind of stuff. Then later, getting towards the end of the 2000s, I tried again, and most of those personal sites were nowhere to be found. Now it was instead, a handful of slick looking portal sites with reposted 2nd hand information, it felt like just the same few things posted over and over in different places (on boilerplate websites, with adverts attached). The sense of adventure, finding abundant weird and original information, people just putting their writing out there, was gone. Well that's how it seemed. But yeah, those sites were probably still there, it was just that the search engines stopped showing them.
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yeah, and I suppose part of it was inevitable, with the internet and search engines becoming so powerful a brand new industry of SEO was born, and like any other service industry, the ones who pay the most get the better results. But they realized eventually that it could be weaponed.

Then there's the aesthetic of the internet, I have a design background and I was taking classes when websites were still a fairly new thing, I remember the ideas that we were encourage to think about to make our creations unique, and have something different that would capture the users, while still delivering the information in a concise manner. It seems like today, most of that is gone and a lot of websites look pretty much the same.

Again, this could be a natural organic evolution of things, and people feel more comfortable with a certain presentation or layout depending on the information they're reading, "finances looks better like this, news looks better like this, medicine...etc", and the birth of tools that attempt to scale "web design", but there's also the pushing away of creativity to replace it with structured information sharing.
 
Alejo said:
yeah, and I suppose part of it was inevitable, with the internet and search engines becoming so powerful a brand new industry of SEO was born, and like any other service industry, the ones who pay the most get the better results. But they realized eventually that it could be weaponed.

Then there's the aesthetic of the internet, I have a design background and I was taking classes when websites were still a fairly new thing, I remember the ideas that we were encourage to think about to make our creations unique, and have something different that would capture the users, while still delivering the information in a concise manner. It seems like today, most of that is gone and a lot of websites look pretty much the same.

Again, this could be a natural organic evolution of things, and people feel more comfortable with a certain presentation or layout depending on the information they're reading, "finances looks better like this, news looks better like this, medicine...etc", and the birth of tools that attempt to scale "web design", but there's also the pushing away of creativity to replace it with structured information sharing.
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Yes, part of it for sure was simply the commercialization. Once people figured out that they can earn money by doing SEO and putting ads on their sites, many people were doing it and so for a while all you got were shady sites which tried to get all the traffic for all kinds of keywords, until Google found ways to limit such things. But this alone killed the "personal websites", because people couldn't find them so easily anymore.

For a while, at least the various forums still ranked high, but Social Media kind of killed that, and Google started not listing them as much anymore.

Lastly, when Google became more important than the mainstream media for shaping the narrative, all-out censorship and careful "curation" of search results for important topics became a thing. Plus algorithmic downgrading of all things considered fringe/conspiracy, which is very easy to determine algorithmically (just look at what people click who also click other conspiracy sites for example).

In hindsight, as is so often the case, it seems as if it could have been a natural progression/development, but then again the "coincidences" kind of add up, and so a "hidden hand" becomes apparent.

As for aesthetics, I miss the nerdy hand-hacked personal websites. Background music, visitor counter, dodgy animated gifs and all :)
 
I must say that this discussion here really got me thinking. There's a really big push toward the peer-to-peer model of network service right now, especially since it become clear that federation could also be subverted and centralized (with GMail as a prime example). One of the most promising in the context of social networks is Scuttlebutt. It's a protocol that's based on authenticated append-only log structure which serves as a message feed. Your feed is replicated by the device of the person that is following you, but also on the devices that follow your follower up to the n-th hop. Every entry on the log is cryptographically signed, so the only way to add some malicious entries to the log is by stealing the author's private key. What is cool is that participants exchange the information via a federated internet server (called "room"), WiFi (when they met in a local cafe), or Bluetooth. There is even an article that tries to bring this technology (and the idea of a more sane approach to social media) closer to a normal person:

The Nomad Who’s Exploding the Internet Into Pieces​

Dominic Tarr is a computer programmer who grew up on a remote farm in New Zealand. Down in the antipodes, isolation is even more isolating. Getting goods, people, and information to and from Australasia for families like Tarr’s has always been difficult. Bad, unreliable internet service is a particular challenge. Australia and New Zealand are first-world countries with third-world latency.

Today, Tarr lives on a sailboat—another Kiwi staple, alongside sheep and distance. Connectivity is worse on the boat than on the farm, and even less reliable. But that’s by design rather than by misfortune. Tarr started living on the boat after burning out at a previous job and discovering that the peripatetic lifestyle suited him. Unreliable and sporadic internet connectivity became an interesting engineering challenge. What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?

He built something called Secure Scuttlebutt, or SSB. It’s a decentralized system for sending messages to a specific community, rather than the global internet. It works by word of mouth. Instead of posting to an online service like Facebook or Twitter, Scuttlebutt applications hold onto their data locally. When a user runs into a friend, the system automatically synchronizes its stored updates with them via local-network transfer—or even by USB stick. Then the friend does likewise, and word spreads, slowly and deliberately.

For the contemporary internet user, it sounds like a bizarre proposition. Why make communication slower, inefficient, and reliant on random interactions between other people? But Tarr and others building SSB applications think it might solve many of the problems of today’s internet, giving people better and more granular control of their lives online and off.

The term “Scuttlebutt” comes from the original water-cooler gossip. Named for a water cask (a butt) that had been cut (or scuttled), early 19th-century sailors would dish dirt while drawing from it. Being a sailor, Tarr adopted the name thanks to its nautical provenance, an apt description of its behavior. On first blush, that might sound no different from Twitter and Facebook, where gossip reigns. Isn’t the internet decentralized already, for that matter: a network of servers distributed all around the globe?

Sort of. It has always been concentrated in some ways and dispersed in others. The internet’s precursor, ARPANET, was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe. Geographically distributed servers could communicate with one another absent a central hub, thanks to the communication protocol TCP/IP. The ARPANET’s infrastructure was decentralized, but that design served a central authority: U.S. national defense.

(...) Tarr’s Secure Scuttlebutt isn’t a social network like Twitter or Facebook, nor is it an email client like Gmail. Instead, it’s a platform for encrypted, automated, and local replication of information. Atop this information, new, decentralized versions of services like Twitter—or anything else—can be built.

The key to Scuttlebutt’s operation is a simple approach to copying information between computer systems—a tricky problem due to ever-changing files across many systems. Instead of separate documents and images and other files, like the ones a computer might synchronize via Dropbox, Scuttlebutt treats all data as chunks of content added to the end of a list—like a new entry in a diary. A cryptographic key validates each new entry in the diary, and connects it with its author. This is a bit like how the Bitcoin blockchain works—a list of linked records in a chain of transactions, verified by their cryptographic relationship to the last item in the chain.

But Scuttlebutt doesn’t carry monetary transactions; it carries a payload of, well, gossip content. As it happens, most popular online services are just lists with new content appended. Twitter and Facebook are like that. So are Instagram and Soundcloud. A magazine like The Atlantic could be understood as an append-only list of articles and videos. Even email is, at base, just a pile of content.

So far, the SSB community has made social-network, messaging, music-sharing, and source-control management software that communicate by Scuttlebutt. But unlike Dropbox, Facebook, or every other Cloud service, Scuttlebutt doesn’t synchronize information by connecting to a central server. Instead, it distributes that data to the subscribers a user happens across. There’s no one Scuttlebutt, but as many as there are users.

Scuttlebutt-driven systems synchronize with one another via local networks—say, when a boat docks at port or a mountaineer descends to base camp. For more deliberate sharing, users can connect to an SSB island on the internet called a pub—as in public house; a virtual tavern where gossip can be shared more rapidly. Since no central server is required, no internet access is required either; a local network or data saved to a USB stick and handed to another user are both sufficient. It’s like having a series of private internets that still work like the online services popular on the commercial internet.
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www.theatlantic.com

The Nomad Who’s Exploding the Internet Into Pieces

Could decentralizing online life make it more compatible with human life?
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

Currently, there are two notable applications. For iOS, Android, and also desktops there's Manyverse, exclusively for iOS is also Planetary, which aims for more widespread adaptation. Overall it does not feel so polished as big tech offerings (the content is basically just simple text with images), but for the coming times, it looks like an interesting option. I've been using it for a while, but the mainstream community consists mainly of hackers, "solarpunks", and nomads. I've also tried to pitch Manyverse to the local anti-system crowd, but they found it too clunky, so beware!
 
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