I don’t know who first said it, and I could look it up (and I did it’s Tom Eastman), but I’ve heard it a lot since Corey Doctorow published his enshittifcation book…
the internet has become five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four – Tom Eastman
That is the truth. Then there’s the dead internet theory which states that the internet is nothing but bots now and every interaction you have with anyone online is actually a bot. Every post online, every email, all the perceived visitors coming to your blog… It is all bots.
When I want to communicate with someone or a group of someones I have found the best way to cut through the shit is doing it with texts. Text messaging is the cleanest form of online communication we have at the moment. While it’s internet adjacent it still works as a communication form. I currently participate in three “group texts” with family and with friends. Have been doing so for a couple of years now and not once have I seen an advertisement or has there been a spammer or has there been a post which has absolutely nothing to do with anything that’s going on in the chatter. This is how it used to be 30 years ago with BBS culture.
The whole idea behind a Bulletin Board System (BBS) was people would login and create an account. This account would be your alias or your real name (yeah right). BBSes were the realm of the computer nerds and geeks at the time since it required a lot of tech knowledge, a modem for your computer, and a hell of a lot of abstract commands and setup to just get your modem to connect to the PHONE line and all this would have to be done with DOS. The modem would to another modem which would be connected and running the BBS. This was before caller ID but for the most part users knew who everybody else was. There was still privacy, but there wasn’t the rampant bullshit and spam and cyber salking, bullying etc that you see on all the other five websites today. Conversation would be with other like-minded people, or unlike-minded people, and there was no advertising. Absolutely no advertising.
BBSes was set up by somebody for the love of setting up a BBS and doing tech rather than trying to advertise and sell you something. Very few were ever profitable. Look at the internet today…and it’s nothing but a advertisement selling your attention to the highest bidder. The big five websites that are out there put you into a bucket to segment an audience, stretch the demographic and pass you on to the highest bidder even before the page has finished loading. Text messages don’t. BBS’s didn’t do that.
I believe it’s high time to take the conversation off the five big time sucks and take it back to the BBS. Sure Grandma and Grandpa won’t be able to get in let alone anyone without any idea of what a terminal and or telnet is, but do we really want those people?
So I think I’m kind of spin up a proxmox box (say that five times fast) and install some sort of Linux compatible BBS.
