Comment by Flere-Imsaho

13 hours ago

The internet is not supposed to work like this. The network was designed for robustness and fault tolerance, which allows it to reroute data if parts of the network fail.

Why are we all depending on one entity for it all to work? Makes me mad.

The System economically rewards those who successfully build Room-641A-as-a-Service

Because more fasterer and more cheaperer.

I hope Reticulum gains traction.

  • It's also easier to understand. For the internet to be fault tolerant you have to get rid of CDNs and assume everyone needs the same thing. That's more expensive than a centralized "internet" which relies on CDNs and fiber paths exclusive to the regions with most demand. Everything has been optimized for throughput for what is determined to be important, not rare fault tolerance

    • Quite frankly, CDNs are a scam. I will not elaborate because I don't feel like doing free labor for the folks who don't already understand this to their core.

Because by re-centralizing everything you're not at a competitive disadvantage if you're down since everyone else is down, too.

Oh boy, the internet is anything but what it was supposed to be. I can't really bring myself to remember without feeling bad about it. The centralization, the power of certain businesses, the surveillance, dark patterns everywhere. Hell, you catch people simping for billionaires and asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news. So yeah. Depressing.

  • > asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news.

    The capital letters don't make this astonishing. The padmapper vs. craigslist debate was nearly 15 years ago, most people were on craigslist's side (including me) and it was about somebody who was running a site in a less optimal but more human way vs. some startup looking for hockey-sticks.

    But I was literally simping for the billionaire (maybe not quite yet then, don't know for sure if he managed it since) against scrapers. They were very much for-profit scrapers, unlike nitter, but the truth is the truth.

    The only reason I support scraping Twitter is because it's yet another communications monopoly that was endlessly pushed on us by governments and massive corporations, even though it never made money, and once it finally got traction its priorities were to trash interop and manipulate content. The government should be dictating an interop protocol and expecting everyone to follow it, and instead it is encouraging media monopolies because they are an end run around the first amendment.

    If the government created interop protocols for rental property, I'd have been against craigslist. Instead, it seemed very much like some startup play to steal craigslist's content to hopefully bury them, then sell on a valuation that included abusing their new monopoly and making us very much miss craigslist.

    Sadly, facebook corralled and trained so many people for so long that their marketplace eventually killed craigslist for most things anyway (didn't have to buy padmapper after all.)