A new internet is forming (& Meta wants to control it)
A new internet is forming (& Meta wants to control it)
19 comments
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My favorite part in this video, was the ending:
maston's CEO told me that for now these there basically no plans for native monetization either. As a content creator I of course have to have monetization. I mean, I spent over a month on this video alone and also thousands of Euros on equipment, rent, people editing the videos, etc., etc. And so until the fediverse figures out monetization, you can support my work by watching my stuff over on nebula
...said on a video on YouTube.
Wait a moment, doesn't YouTube have "native monetization"? Wonder why he's not using that... maybe "native monetization" isn't all that great a thing after all? 🧐
19 comments
This is misleading bordering on revisionist. The internet AOL had made available to everyone (e.g. their famous email being delivered over SMTP to anyone, whether or not in that handful of companies) was already something created by "idealistic nerds" to be fully open and decentralized. It's weird to present the web as some "idealistic" new way of doing things, when the AOL model was by far the outlier, and HTTP/HTML was more of a continuation of the model that had already been humming along for decades (which AOL had hopped onto and done such a wonderful business by capitalizing.)
God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.
It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).
Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser -- literally any other browser -- while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. "AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don't need to use it to go to infoseek.com" or whatever.
Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they'd close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.
I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.
Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I'd be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don't really remember too many people using AIM.
I think my mom still thinks that she has to open Firefox to connect to the internet as she did with AOL. She has broadband so of course she is always connected.
They actually said that? I'm not even going to bother watching that nonsense.
Actually CompuServe was before AOL. AOL was just a rewarming of it with flash sessions because the connect costs were so high. AOL was also faster to embrace actual internet connection and the web. Before this no one except universities, the military, and select few at large companies had internet access. For the general public dialup and BBS was the the thing.
Only point is how you experienced all this depended on who you were and what access you had.
Yeah, absolutely. I experienced BBS culture, and the pre-web internet, and Compuserve, and 100% agree with you. The big revolutionary thing about AOL in those days that distinguished it from something like Compuserve was exactly that it opened up the masses to the cooperative internet, which had previously been a very niche world, and was my opinion vastly superior to anything available on Compuserve or pre-internet AOL.
(What happened to the niche world because of the influx of AOL users and their fellow travelers is a whole different discussion.)
The point that I'm making is that the niche world was already cooperative and decentralized, whereas the guy in the video is making it sound like Tim Berners-Lee was some idealistic nerd who was coming up with something new. HTTP was actually more centralized relatively speaking than what came before it, because your web site could only be served by your own hardware, which wasn't true of e.g. Usenet.
AOL is the PC-centric version of QuantumLink (Q-Link), the online service made for the Commodore 64. Much more vast reach of services and then gave their customers access to the web and internet.
That quote gave me nausea.