alt Hacker NewsAOL is not the internet we lost. It's literally what bigtech is trying to turn the rest of the internet into. Online service as centralized marketing platform for bigcos. Remember "Visit us at www.blah.com or use AOL keyword 'Blah'"? The real internet was much more amorphous and chaotic.
Pretending that AOL represents the pre-enshittified internet is like pretending that Clippy represents the idealized past of desktop computing when he was a prototype of what Microsoft is building now.
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devin • today at 5:21 PM
It can be both. For many, AOL was their onboarding platform for the chaotic internet at large. It served that purpose well.
This. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.