Some time ago I read an article that compared the internet to a forest, and how it thrives on diversity in a plural and complex ecosystem instead of being a monoculture, like it is today. It’s a very interesting analogy and very well worth reading.
I like this idea a lot. I’m not that old (I think?): I was born before the internet was a thing but I grew up with it. Reading articles like this reminds me of how things were before social networks became the norm of interaction online. I’m too young to have used the BBS system, but I did use IRC and forums and chat systems on websites. It was a wildly different landscape compared to today, so the comparison with forestry, silos, and “rewilding” has its merits.
It’s sad, though, that I, who lived through the “internet revolution”, had to be reminded of how things were. I can’t even begin to imagine how the contemporary social dynamics online must be for people who were born after the internet was already a thing and social networks controlled everything. The term “silo” seems adequate because, unlike the web of old, these sites don’t talk to each other. There’s no cross-conversation. More than that, every interaction is ruled by an algorithmic feed, something that could’ve been beneficial to some extent, but it was hijacked to extract as much engagement as possible while keeping people infinitely scrolling on their feeds.
All of this means the internet is currently in a sad state, where it went from a thing you had to connect to and use with intent to something that’s on 24/7 on your pocket, blasting notifications that, most of the time, you don’t want to hear about.
Molly White wrote a nice article about her own experience with the web, and I think a lot of 30-year-olds who had access to the internet when young might relate to.
I was never into building websites, even though I tried it for a while, and I think that’s the thing: we had freedom and limitless possibilities, but now we can just post content for engagement and nothing else. Even worse, this can only be done on “silos”, so they can extract as much profit as possible for their own interests, instead of focusing their services on their users. “Free” stuff is never truly free, right? And that’s true for the web. While some services, like NeoCities and Nekoweb do offer free tiers for hosting websites, they are only possible because paying users help finance it. And even “truly free” social networks like Mastodon rely a lot on unpaid labor to keep things running.
In the end, though, we don’t do stuff online anymore because we like it, we do it because it’s expected, and what’s expected is shaped by what the “silos” want or need. Just check Twitter/X (or, like I call it nowadays, Xitter): it’s there to fulfill some fantasy from its owner, and that’s it. We’ve seen this on Facebook, on LiveJournal (after it was sold), and so on. And I’m not arguing against social networks here, I do enjoy (sometimes) using them, but the problem is when this is the only way to interact with the web.
Anyway, I don’t really have a point here, I just like the idea of “rewilding the internet” with self-creations and trying to escape a bit from the “siloed content”. This is one of the reasons I made this blog, for example.[1] I also don’t like the fact that my friends are all over the internet and it’s annoying to not have a place where I can reach everyone easily, having to create accounts of different services to able to do so….
Man, I miss forums.
- While my blog is made and maintained using WordPress, it’s a self-hosted version which I have access to all of my content any time I want. If the WordPress owner (both of the .com and the open-source software) continues to be an asshole, it won’t affect me personally. And if it does — like some plugins losing support because people are tired of dealing with him — I can grab my backup posts, all in Markdown, and host them somewhere else. I’ll lose a blog with a design I like and with automatic integration to the IndieWeb but, well, the posts are my own. I can’t do this with Facebook, Xitter, or Threads. ↩︎