Using the internet like its 1999

If you only use social media and video hosting frontends – getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the internet has never been alive for you. That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what the internet could be.

For the vast majority of people, yes – the internet is dying: living inside an algorithmically controlled echochamber that they will never get out of, they live and die by what they are “supposed to see”. But, it does not have to be like this.

With the influx of slop that will be created (and already has been created) with LLMs, there is an ever increasing signal to noise on these platforms. This obviously means that we will see less depth of content, less interesting information, and less of the human – all of these are not positive things in any regard.

I had the displeasure of scrolling the tiktok feed on desktop for 30 seconds the other day, and it is a wonder to me how some of us have any attention span left at all. The content was designed to literally suck your soul from your body. AI generated “fruit love island” – It was too much for me. I shook my head and closed the browser tab.

We can use the internet as it was actually intended to be used: go to the protocol layer to interact with the data at it’s source. Throw off the facade of the modern social platform, and we start to see that freedom of information is within grasp.

The only way to actually use the internet in a way that is going to be beneficial to you is to disregard much of it. Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, LLM slop, distracting, pointless, attention-seeking, corporate hellscape that is the web.

I believe the time is now (and has always been) to use the internet like it’s 1999.

1999

In 1999, the internet was figuring itself out. There was no social media, no algorithm, hell, Google was just starting up. Only about 4% of the world’s population was online (compared to almost 75% today). But, I am not going to suggest we all log off and touch grass (though we should be doing more of that!) My thesis is that we must return to being citizens of the web, instead of users in some database – we must reclaim agency over our attention, and the technologies presented in the 90s and early 2000s allow us to do just this.

This was by constraint more than by design, but the idea behind how the internet should be used is what we are looking to re-instill. The HTTP, XMPP/IRC, email (SMTP) etc. protocols are genuinely good, hence their staying power. The perversion of the protocol is what we are directly assaulting here, the frontend and platform portion of the upper layer 7 (ironic Cloudflare link, as their monopoly is also against the principles we will discuss). The browser used to work for you instead of actively subverting your security and privacy with hundreds of tracking cookies and scripts on every page load.

The internet was (and never stopped being) a series of tubes that transmits data. That data is accessible and transparent to anyone, and the way we ingest, manipulate, and work with said data is that which we can change to benefit the individual. Let’s discuss.

I have largely embraced RSS feeds as the only way to follow blogs/news/video creators/etc. as I don’t want an algorithm to feed me content. I want to make the decision for myself as to what it is that I actually care to consume, and that should not be content that is meant to make the platform the most amount of ad revenue by emotionally manipulating the viewer into spending more time scrolling.

Nor should anything I look at be LLM generated slop: the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on. I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop. I have found no better way to “curate reality” better than this.

If you only take one suggestion from this article, this would be it: Setup miniflux, find feeds of creators and persons you enjoy following, add their feeds to miniflux, and sit back and relax as the content now comes to you.

IRC and XMPP

We have a budding community on IRC that I think is far more interesting than most online communities I have seen simply because of the (small) barrier to entry that is IRC. Internet Relay Chat has been around since the late 80s, and it is still a protocol which is simply plain text – meaning higher signal to noise (see the pattern?) than a platform that allows images, video, “upvotes”, and the like.

XMPP is an enhancement on IRC in more modern ways, and is the protocol on which many of the major chat applications are built. But, it is best when you host it yourself for you and your friends to participate in group chats and direct peer to peer conversation. Using OMEMO encryption (support now in jabber.el in emacs!) allows you to have end-to-end encryption between parties, and encryption lives on the server, so even hosts can’t really see the conversation. Nice.

Note on Element/Matrix: I don’t recommend using the Matrix protocol. It doesn’t solve anything over and beyond XMPP/IRC and I don’t personally trust it. Plus electron app – no thanks

Search engines

You can negate much of the slop du jour by using your own search engine, as well as using my small guide on how to use search engines. They are still powerful, they still get you the information you need, but you cannot use them how the 99% does. You have to actually search with intention, using them methodically and professionally. You will not get good results from “learn go programming” but will get much better results from “before<2025>2025> net/http go language”. Ask better questions, get better results.

Archiving

A large problem with the internet has always been link rot – where a bookmark or link that you liked is gone tomorrow because of one of various reasons. You can and should download useful information locally to keep for posterity. I have a function in my emacs configuration to do just this, shipping content to a syncthing controlled directory, to push content across my devices, including my phone (which doesn’t have a browser). You can also use the Internet Archive’s link tool for creating backups that will live on their servers.

Email

When people DM me on various platforms, I generally just tell them to email me. I know it is annoying for most, but the reason is well merited: by chatting on platforms, you and I do not own the conversation. Worse, that conversation is likely being monitored and parsed so that we can be encouraged to consoom product at a later date. I’d rather just talk to you directly.

Email is a point of contact that is not being farmed for keywords by platforms to then serve us ads (you’re not using gmail, right?). Those that know me, have my email or phone number, those that don’t, could very easily. But – the friction point of writing an email and sending it is too much for many people, and is a natural filter.

PGP is a great way to make sure your email is read only by those that you intend to read it. Use it.

You can find my public key here.

Push only – POSSE method

Most people consume feeds on social media, and while I would rather not use socials at all, the fact of the matter is that we can spread the good word via social media, using it as a push platform, not to pull. So, I use APIs and tools to get content out on social media platforms. I don’t consume social media, nor do I spend more than ~5 minutes per week on it (only answering DMs by giving out my email/phone mostly).

There is a tenant of the IndieWeb called POSSE – You own the content as it is on your own platform, and then you ship it to other locations to increase your reach. I would recommend doing this.

Gopher/Gemini

In addition to the IndieWeb, we can look to the SmolWeb for some inspiration as to how to use the internet. Both protocols are tremendously light and focus on text as the primitive for all communication. Gemini is newer and a bit of a middle finger to the modern web, whereas Gopher is the old guard. While I would agree with some of the sentiment that Gemini is solutionism, it is still interesting to see what can be done when we take text and make it the focus of a platform.

However, I think that http is not the villain, not by a long shot – it is just how we treat it. Instead of bloating up Chrome tabs to hundreds of megs (that is more than some linux distributions), we could be expanding upon it and building out something that focuses on the good that the web can do. So, while a fun aside, I don’t spend a ton of time on Gopher or Gemini these days.

General internet tips

On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.

I recommend using a text only browser, but if you do use a regular browser, then disabling javascript and using ublock origin are both recommended mitigations.

Don’t use social media as a consumer, don’t argue with people online, and generally seek out information and interesting people which leads us to…

Embrace the Human

Finally, I only want to promote, consume, and talk with real humans. Using the internet as if it were the 90s or early 00s means focusing on the human, because nowadays the internet is not real, it is a figment of our collective imaginations as to what we think is real. It is an ugly place if we are not careful to be deeply intentional with that which we watch, read, and listen to.

But, I am still a bloomer when it comes to the internet at large, but we have been doing our very best collectively to make it worse since the inception (give or take) of Facebook.

Authenticity is in short supply and seems to be the only way forward, for so much of what we see is manufactured, tailored, and designed to show something that doesn’t exist. Imperfection is the mark of the human, the spelling mistakes, the last minute word addition because you misspoke on a video, it’s all more real because of this. We can strive to glorify the Creator with creation, and that will always be more enjoyable than the sterile veil over what could be authentic.

Conclusion

The internet as it was conceived was perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement and has created so much good. It has taken people out of poverty, it has given us information on topics of any and all kinds. I would not be the person I am today without it, as I have made great friendships and seen what community can do, and helped to (hopefully) create value for thousands of people that read these words daily or watch my videos.

That doesn’t negate the fact that the internet is also a great double edged sword: while you can learn anything, you can also be taken over by meaningless, infinite distraction, manipulated into seeing the world in certain ways, and lose your humanity if you are not careful. We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty. As we continue in this perpetual lockstep to making the internet a worse place, I will be, hopefully with a few of you, using the internet as if it were 1999.

How are you using the internet as if it were a more sane time in history? Post a comment or send me an email.

As always, God bless, and until next time.

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