{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://unnecessary.tech/posts/what_happened",
  "path": "/posts/what_happened",
  "publishedAt": "2019-08-24T13:45:12.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:jx54v4rmscfwzit7fmgz24ba/site.standard.publication/3mnrsqmzz3w2e",
  "tags": [
    "thoughts",
    "nostalgia",
    "small-web"
  ],
  "textContent": "It used to annoy me when people talked about going online as something\nseparate from the \"real world.\" I always thought of the Internet as part of\nthe real world, and as a college student in the early 90s and a graduate\nstudent in the late 90s, the Internet was a tool I used on a daily basis.\n\nI hadn't thought too much about the Internet of my youth until I saw the\ndocumentary Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts a few nights ago. It reminded me\nof a time when I used to frequent Ellis's Die Puny Humans website, and\nslashdot. Die Puny Humans is gone, though snapshots\nare still available on\nthe wayback machine.\nSlashdot is still around, but it seems to be a shadow\nof its former self.  These days, there are several replacements for these\ncultural aggregation sites. Places like BoingBoing,\nFark, Digg, and\nreddit. These sites seem to offer similar services,\naggregations, often by users, of cultural material for wider dissemination and\ndiscussion, but the results seem somewhat muted compared to the posts of 20 or\neven 10 years ago. The wonder of discovery replaced by a more cynical attempt\nto be the first to point to the latest dumpster fire. Part of it may be that\nthe destinations are always the same. Links go to\nFacebook, Twitter, major\nnews sites, Medium and few other major websites. The\npersonal blogs and small companies so often brought down by slashdotting* are\nnow very rare.\n\nSo now, the Internet is very much like the \"real world\" I always thought it\nwas a part of. Dominated by a few large corporate and news sites who control\nthe commons. Even relatively independent media sites link to these\nlarge players. Google once helped maintain a diverse\necosystem of websites between its now vestigial webmaster\ntools, which seems to focus completely\non SEO, and its once popular, but discontinued feed\nreader which helped users keep tabs on\ncontent from the blogs they follow.\n\nThe IndieWeb is working to recapture these older\ntimes. Encouraging people to eschew social media sites and instead publish\ntheir own blogs again. It's a lofty goal, but much of the tooling seems to be\nbased on the idea that your blog becomes a backup for posts syndicated into\nthe corporate social media landscape. Without such syndication how\nwould anyone find a blog these days? \n\nI miss the old days. I miss the transient communities we had. I miss the time\nwhen the Internet was cyberspace.",
  "title": "What Happened to Cyberspace?"
}