Where have all the websites gone?
Where have all the websites gone?
It feels like all the cool websites from the late 2000s are gone. But maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it is us who vanished.
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It's right here.
It is. The web was eventually corporatized and the corporations sucked all the air out of the room suffocating anything too small to compete. The fediverse is, if not taking it back, at least opening a space for those who don't want to consume from a fully corporatized web. These include many of the people who used to make "websites" instead of "apps" or "platforms". When people complain that it doesn't have as much content as say, Reddit, I look at that as a benefit, it's helping solve the (massive) discovery problem by self-curating thoughtful people who can curate content intelligently and provide real opinions and meaningful thoughts. The signal to noise ratio is much higher, and it's refreshing.
My feelings exactly. As far as I'm concerned this is what Web 2.0 should have been about - taking the energy and excitement of blogs and forums and federating them together into a collectively owned Fediverse that would have made corporate takeover almost impossible (they would have been forced into the half-assed federating some of them are now promising). Instead, the tech companies moved hard into the territory saying "if you liked that then you'll love this even more as it's convenient." Unfortunately, they have now built the size and momentum that makes it difficult to stop or kill them entirely but that also means they reached the level the level where they felt confident to start enshittification and we'll be waiting when people can't take any more and leave. The bonus is it should help filter out a lot of the idiots who are happy in their walled garden.
I tried the various Web 2.0 offerings and it didn't feel right. I jumped on dyaspora but it felt like it's time had yet to come. Web 3.0 turned out to be a grift. So, as I have argued before, I think this is the start of Web 4.0 which will be about openness, collaboration and collectivity.
I'll always want new services (I'm waiting on a federated IMDb replacement) and improvements to existing ones (we could really do with a wiki integrated into Lemmy) but I am already enthusiastic about the Fediverse (borderline evangelical sometimes) and I feel like we are building the next phase of the Web providing all the necessary tools for people to build the next great websites.
As another comment has said, the issue currently seems to be search engines not returning great links and the Fediverse isn't ranking high in search engine results, yet. Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to...
Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…
Well, something that can be done is having search engines that grab from a wide variety of sources. The go-to FOSS example of this would be SearXNG, so if someone is interested in a project like that, then this would be a good starting point.
Oh yes, just like that. I imagine there's a lot you could do to with that as they've got the core engine looking solid.