There’s fake black licorice, and there’s the real stuff. Two very different experiences!

Thank you for sharing. It’s painful to realize in hindsight that those websites were peak internet.

They lack polish, but they were all a labour of love. No enshittification, no selling things, no corporate influence, no shit posting.

Everything had a purpose, every post took effort, and it was all about sharing experiences or knowledge.

I really miss that internet.

EDIT: correcting gibberish 🤭

You don’t even have to be old. Death or serious illness/injury can affect us at any age, and it would suck if your family lost access to all the self-hosted photos and videos, for example.

“Make it usable” is a great idea.

Simplify as much as you can.

And remember, if you’re also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you’re gone.

I’ve been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.

Bookmarking “headscale”!

I only recently started using Tailscale because it makes connecting to my local network through a Windows VM running in Boxes on Linux a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to set up a networked bridge.

This sounds like a great alternative, and it looks like it can even work on a Synology NAS.

Yes!! That would be really helpful, too.

According to the dev, Play Services is only needed for casting:

“…you only need play services for Chromecast.” SOURCE, replying to a GrapheneOS user

He even offers an option to install without the play store (via Aurora) and to contact him for the license. SOURCE

The only feature I want (because it really does feel all my other needs perfectly) is the ability to DELETE articles.

Some of the stuff that gets by RSS before it’s moderated out from the source, can be awful. Since I keep an archive of my feeds, this becomes problematic.

The sad reality is … there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project.

This is why we can’t have nice things. I wish the shittiest day upon those people.

Symfonium

What didn’t you like about it?

That’s what I’m using after looking at a bunch of other options based on my requirements, and while I didn’t want to go with a closed source, paid app, it does everything.

AI LLMs have been pretty shit, but the advancement in voice, image generation, and video generation in the last two years has been unbelievable.

We went from the infamous Will Smith eating spaghetti to videos that are convincing enough to fool most people… and it only took 2-3 years to get there.

But LLMs will have a long way to go because of how they create content. It’s very easy to poison LLM datasets, and they get worse learning from other generated content.

One of my bike’s is 30 years old, and I use it all the time.

But as far as oldest stuff I still use, probably things like certain furniture, tools, and kitchen stuff, which would have been inherited from grandparents who have long passed.

I think it would be impossible to fight back when there will come a time when you won’t even know what is real and what is not.

It would be impossible to filter through all the content that you’ll be exposed to in the future.

We can obviously try, but the vast majority of the population simply won’t have the skills to defend against this new reality.

So even if it was all just fake content, misinformation, bots, and ads that will never be able to filtered out, you’d continue using it the same?

For me, I’d have no incentive whatsoever to visit a site like Lemmy or check the news if there was a good chance it was just bots making stuff up to fill space. There would be no value at that point, so I’d at least quit that.

I don’t think we’ll ever fully quit the internet, as it’s connected to everything we touch. But the internet as it was will continue to be enshittified until it becomes unbearable to use.

I miss the 90s. 😞

I’d just have to ignore most “user-generated” content.

Dead Internet hypothesis is only applicable to user-generated content platforms.

AI will affect far more than just social media shit posts, though.

All news (local, national, global). Educational sites. Medical information. Historical data. Almanacs/encyclopedias. Political information. Information about local services (i.e. outages). Interviews. Documentaries.

I mean, all of these can be easily manipulated now in any medium. It’s only a matter of how quickly AI saturates these spaces.

Trustworthy sources will few and far between, drowned out by content that can be generated thousands of times faster than real humans can.

What then?

I even worry about things like printed encyclopedias being manipulated, too. We stand to lose real human knowledge if AI content continues to accelerate.

There really aren’t viable alternatives to those things, unless they are created (again), like before the internet was used for everything.

Gen ai has been around for a while. It’s made things worse, but it’s not like there aren’t real users anymore. I don’t see why that would suddenly change now

For context, we went from AI generated images and videos (i.e. Will Smith eating spaghetti) being laughably bad and only good for memes, to essentially video content that is convincing in every way - in under two years!

The accessibility, scale, quality, and power of AI has changed things, and RAPIDLY be improved even further in a much shorter period of time.

That’s the difference. AI from 2023 couldn’t fool your grandma. AI from 2025 and beyond will fool entire populations.

I think there are going to be tools to identify networks of people and content you don’t want to interact with. This website is pushed by that social media account, which is boosted by these 2000 account that all exhibit bot-like behavior? Well let’s block the website, of course, but also let’s see who else those 2000 bots promote; let’s see who else promotes that website.

In an ethical, human-first world, that would be the case.

Do you think that social media platforms, who run on stealing attention from users so they can steal their private data and behaviour history, would want to block content that’s doing exactly that? No way. Not ever.

And the incentive to make easy money drives users, who otherwise wouldn’t have the skill or talent to be able to create and present content, to type in a prompt and send it as a post… over and over, automated so no effort at all needs to be made. Do this a million times over, and there’s no way to avoid it.

And once we get to the point where AI content can be generated on-the-fly for each doom-scrolling user based on their behaviour on the platform, it’s game over. It’ll be like digital meth, but disguised to look funny/sexy/informant/cute/trustworthy.

I’m using tools to blacklist AI sites in search, but the lists aren’t keeping up, and they don’t extend beyond search.

There will come a point, probably very soon, where companies will figure out how to deliver ads and AI content as if it were from the original source content, which will make it impossible to block or filter out. It’s a horrific thought, TBH.

Not talking “now”, but in the near future. When online AI content becomes indistinguishable from human-created content.

It will happen. My question is at what point will it have a real impact on how you use the internet?

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I grew up when the internet was still dial-up, so I think I could adapt to going back to the “old way” of doing things.

But unless society moves in that same direction, it would seem that things would become more and more difficult. We can’t rely on old books and already-created content to move us forward.

I’ve been finding more value in IRL contact with other people these days. But I don’t think everyone has that luxury, I’m afraid.