I think the internet will get worse in the future; someone gets offended by everything, nobody lives without being criticized here.
Stratification between the corporate and the free world.
On one side, you have bots, bots, and more bots. Enshittification running rampant. AOL-style locked-down platforms, but worse, because they steal your data and your soul to fuel their profits.
On the other side of the fence is the side of freedom. The fediverse will have more users. Also, old-style personal websites/blogs could make a comeback.
we’re already seeing a division, between pubnet, darknet, tor, and I2P. I think we’re going to see tor support drop for I2P and it become the new freenet that doesn’t have all the corpo bullshit on it.
More and more apps messing things up. Companies want you to use an app so they have more access to data and better ability to control your habits driving more money into their coffers.
More radicalization and sensationalization of everything. Use the news as an example. It used to be straight reporting of what happened, now it’s about ratings and how many descriptive words you can use to make the news more dramatic.
Advertising will get worse, more ads, larger ads, more annoying ads.
There will be a bigger divide between the corporate conglomerate internet and the decentralized internet. People who feel marginalized will begin to break away and and the rest of the internet will look at them like they are crazy.
It will be horrible.
There will be more and more people (like me) searching for things like lemmy and Gophernet and IRC to avoid corponet. Normies will wallow on the 3 corporate websites like they’ve been doing for 10 years.
Its already borderline unusable even with proper tools (waterfox, ublock, searxng/kagi are a MUST)
Truly, the good days of the internet are gone and will only come back in underground form.
Can you tell me what Waterfox is? I’m not informed :(
Better version of firefox!
I have not actually made the switch yet but its supposed to be a fork of firefox thats not controlled by Mozilla. Someone correct me if wrong.
It’ll be the same but the enshittification will just be amplified. I mean, we’re already here where people are talking to AI bots.
The Dead Internet Theory is real.
To think that there are AIs that can automatically upload content
I can see a generational shift where one of the next few gens just breaks off and goes back to analog tech, libraries, in-person communities, hand written content, etc. Some will go hardcore offline, most will only use the internet as the need arises (GPS, work/legal documents, weather app level things.)
But for the vast majority… the internet is devolving into Idiocracy. The next centuries will be the AI stupid/dark ages with wars started over disinformation.
Or maybe climate change shrekts us in the next 50 years.
We’ll get web of trust on top of the “main” internet and smaller Tor-style networks will pop up.
Also people will go analog and local, use systems like Meshtastic or good old Amateur Radio
I agree with you, you’re absolutely right, and what tires me most about AI is that. I don’t want it to disappear, but I do want it to be sidelined a bit.
It’ll be more corporate than it is now, and the real community, art, culture, connections will happen offline for the relative minority of us that aren’t on board.
Everyone will have to reveal their true identity with selfies and photo ID uploads.
VPNs will be outlawed.
Just look at the stuff the UK and Australian governments, as well as many states in the USA, are doing.
I can see me using TailsOS more frequently than I do now and giving up my smartphone for more analog methods.
I’m hoping some trusted organisation like EFF will come up with a web of trust system people can use to tag sites and content as reliable and not AI generated/ “enhanced”
I’m starting to see this amongst my techie friends: invite only enclaves. Like, using matrix or signal chats that are only by invite; Jellyfin servers for streaming, again, among friends. Group cloud services like nextcloud, mail servers cut off from email at large… Internet-like services, but for small groups.
Kinda sounds great. I was on a city-based discord server for about a year before I got bored and sick of arguing. I guess I’m technically still on it.
I made some friends. Almost had a couple face to face meets with the idea of exploring actual friendships, but he was more conservative-leaning than I (but very reachable) and kept getting into fights and leaving discord for bouts. He took the “suburbs are evil” crowd a little too seriously.
Not utopian, but having the geographical focus in common and knowing we could meet these folks face to face as we go about our days I think added an honesty and restraint to the interactions.
It also gives it sort of a community extension vibe without the douchebaggery of HOA Facebook groups or corporate bullshit of Ring neighborhoods.
Yes, but I don’t think the majority of users will adopt these kinds of enclaves.
They will be more popular over time, but still a vanishingly small portion of the web.
Like mortal engines. Islands of small functional communities amidst a wasteland of AI generated content, occasionally having to scatter and reform elsewhere when the corps find them and attempt to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (or just DOS with content scrapers) them.
I think it will be fully controlled by Shitler and the turd Reich and it will spin extremist far right propaganda that is approved by the party. It will be the only information allowed. Palantir is currently creating a file on every citizen. By then Everyone that steps out of line will already have been thrown into a concentration camp or killed.
Two internets, the regular one taken over by companies like what is happening now, and wider adoption of tor or something like it.
Then lots of local and community networks air gapped from the internet.
we will live in a content rich p2p utopia once effective distributed administration has evolved sufficiently
it will be an alternate internet run from our homes
it’s gonna be beautiful
Is this what smoking weed does to ones thinking?
Maybe I should try
Regions will be walled off by censorship / content laws, freely accessible information will be a thing of the past, you’ll have to pay a subscription for anything you want to do, and you will own nothing.
Nah you’ll still get free information, it’ll just be misinformation.
So no change, then?
Example: CNN. Anything not a headline requires a subscription plan.
That’s how newspapers used to work. You were able to read the front page for free at the news stand, for the rest of the thing you had to buy it.
You’re not thinking nearly dystopian enough. Want to play a game? Need a cloud gaming subscription. Want to send an email? Add Gmail to your Google subscription for $5.99 a month. Want enough speed to stream higher than 720p video? Gotta pay your ISP for the bandwidth and YouTube (Google again!) for the access. You will rent everything from the system.
