95
Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
95 points (93.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36134 readers
990 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It's somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
I moan about it regularly but this..
Is just tragic isn't it? We really had it. A global free flow of hobbies, interests, research, debate, exploration.
I don't know what's so fundamentally flawed about human nature a) that something that started so well like facebook gets enshitified to the extent that it has and b) why people flock to it like flies round a steaming turd
The answer to your second point is simple.
Meta's properties (FB, Insta) have something that most other social networks are lacking: A network of real-world family and friends.
Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, Tiktok, and the rest all tend to have communities built from the platform's population, based on shared interests. Meanwhile, FB is the platform that you use to connect with your oddball uncle and high school friends from way back. That's the sunk cost that makes it so much harder to leave than the strangers on reddit who share your love of lime jello.
That's a big part of the appeal of the fediverse for me. Setting up a personal site used to be fairly easy, but was largely isolated and unidirectional. With the AP protocol, and frankly a lot of self-hostable apps in general these days, you can make something to converse with the whole globe and you don't even need to make a big effort to help people find it.
Webrings still exist, but finding them is less than trivial when they get drowned out by the noise of corporate sites. I've used IRC within the last year, but had to look up the proper use of nicserve commands. The old web mentality is still out there, but for the major part people want simplicity. Few want to go through the learning curve to deal with some of the more esoteric parts of it when they can just auth into a site and do a thing.
It's a truism in writing; villains act and heroes react. If someone looks at the internet and sees a way to exploit it they will. They don't care that it's working fine for everyone else; they want the money.
As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.
This has the advantages that it doesn't require traffic inspection and doesn't slow traffic at all.
But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can't be used to bock specific pages.
It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.