The article site itself is a good example of what's wrong with the internet.
The guardian used a "pay or ok" model for cookie acceptance.
Archive link to avoid that nonsense: https://archive.ph/pHNdt
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Please correct the post title: it says "internet inventor" (which is incorrect) and "soul of the web", while the article name says "web inventor" and "soul of the internet"
Fits thing that jumped at me.
The fact that no one is challenging "internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee" is making me want to blow up my desktop
I came here to post this, everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.
Sadly most people don't understand the difference between www and the internet.
Yeah, I thought it was Al Gore
Al Gore invented trucks in tubes.
I have a simple fix but that which is difficult by virtue of momentum of the people. Don't visit corporate websites. Avoid google, microsoft, meta, reddit, youtube. Its much more difficult to avoid: whatsapp and maybe messenger if your family is on it. I would argue for photos and online drive, proton is good but i guess the CEO is trying to become/has become a tech bro like the others. so you have to figure out if alternatives like immich (self hosting) or other hosting providers are not fascist.
We should talk about these alternatives all the time to get them into everyday lingo such that people recommend those to others.
If you have any highly-specific questions, especially about niche hobbies, it's hard to avoid Reddit. For example, there's no (useful) equivalent to r/mechanicadvice or r/airbrush on Lemmy yet. Forums often provide alternatives, but not always.
Meta I personally don't need at all, but I've managed to convince exactly zero of my irl friends to switch to, or even join, Pixelfed, which is the main alternative to Instagram. It's a little lonely using social media when you don't know a single person there lol. I can use it to meet people, but I prefer to have both.
Google can also be hard to avoid tbh. Other search providers just don't compete in my experience - people frequently name DuckDuckGo but it's just bad compared to Google in so many instances. I have DuckDuckGo set as my default browser, but I constantly end up going to Google's site manually anyway because DuckDuckGo gives subpar search results. Presearch is usually okay I guess.
I don't say any of that to be discouraging, but just to be realistic about the issues so they can be overcome and the alternative options can be true, full-fledged alternatives instead of compromises for the sake of morality. I think Lemmy and Mastodon in particular are doing a good job of developing into full-fledged alternatives.
...and all the streaming services are super easy to avoid 🏴☠️🦜
Sadly most people's eyes glaze over if I mention it, so I don't get too far. But I try!
Aside from the nonprofit makerspace that I'm a part of, which is filled with like-minded nerds, I've met ONE single person randomly in real life that wanted to learn more about self hosting. Sent him a brain dump of all the various services I run, topics for him to research, etc.
I'd give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
Back before it was corporatized, monetized and before all the gardens started building their walls.
that internet still exists and it works a lot better than back then
you're just not using it
Yeah, a lot of rose colored glasses. I'd rather not have to give up BitTorrent thank you very much
God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:
And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.
We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.
back when the internet was just a curiousity for weirdos and geeks.
There was no advertising
Every website was a passion project (or a mental illness coughtimecubecough)
There were no search engines. Just "internet yellowpages" that listed links to every known website.
Websites spread via word of mouth and webrings.
Websites had guest books and visitor counters.
your counter hitting 1000 was an actual big deal.
animated gifs and tables were bleeding edge technologies.
There was no advertising
Oh yes there was. Flashing banners "ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!!!11!!1!!" that launched 1,000 popups simultaneously and installed malware if you even dared to hover your mouse over it.
No, that happened once the corporate interests began to invade the internet.
That shit didnt exist in the early days of the internet.
I used a counter to fight a business competitor. I had built an ice cream business, and once it got successful, the landlord locked us out, installed his daughter as the manager, and stole our entire business. He knew we didn't have the money to fight it civilly, and he had relatives on the police force, so they refused to deal with it criminally. They told all of our customers that we had sold it to them, which we had NOT.
But I still had control of the website, so I changed it to tell the entire story, with names. Every single thing I said could be backed up with documents and/or witness testimony, so I just laughed when he demanded I remove it or he'd sue me. I reminded him that it was ALL true, he knew it, and I could prove it. My primary objective at that point was to force them to stop using the name, MY company's name.
What made my web page really powerful was the counter at the bottom. As that number rose, it meant more locals were reading it, and spreading the word. It also showed a correlation - as the number rose, their customers dropped, and their business tanked. Eventually they changed the name, but that didn't help, and they ended up selling the business.
15 years later and I'm still in business, using the name they tried to steal. Last week I was at an event and a young woman asked if I was the same guy who used to own that ice cream shop, and she was excited to find out it was me. She went often as a kid, and missed it when I was gone. She also said they stopped going when they heard it had been stolen, and said the place that replaced mine "sucks."
That counter was a powerful weapon in my battle.
People need to accept that if you build your house on the king's land, the king owns your house.
I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
No you won't. You wouldn't survive a day.
I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.
You probably don't remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.
You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC
And I'd suffer it all again to be able to send people the Rick Roll link that moved around your screen and popped up with the next lyrics every time you tried to close it.
Ok, you win that one.
that shit came in the late 90s, once the normies started getting on the internet.
My dad worked at Novell, so we had the internet in our house well before most people had it. I remember my mom telling my dad "this internet thing is just a fad". We laugh about it now, but I was exposed to it very early on.
Ads and popups and shitware were absolutely present then, too. Maybe not as common as they got in the late 90s, but they were there.
AI slop and the legions of uncritical adoring emoji-filled all caps comments under every garbage video is already the end of humanity. We're done.
So I was tuning into ~~this guy~~ another person testifying to Congress the other day by the name of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Supposed neuroscientist, etc. Testifying to the effects of digital learning, pads, etc.
Something just rubbed me the wrong way about him. Especially when you see the likes of Ted Cruz talking him up.
Dude is heavily pushed by Moms for Liberty and "The Free Press" which we all know is a right-wing propaganda wing that gave us none other than Bari Weiss.
I think the play here may be that they want to isolate children from the broader world and being exposed to other viewpoints. My gut instinct is that they're trying to construct the framework to justify isolationism and promote a Christo-Fascist society.
I say this as someone who thanks the internet (especially in earlier decades) for changing multiple generations of my family from rural conservative Republican to progressive-left. The same reason they attack publicly-funded news like NPR or PBS, or Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
These things teach critical-thinking and kindness and make fearmongering less effective.
Are you talking about Berners Lee? I'm surprised, sounds like he just wants to decentralize more
No this guy.
You might want to edit your original comment to note that
I see what you mean, my bad, corrected.
Can we change the title to web inventor? I am guilty of using them interchangeably as well, but he did not invent the internet. And I used the internet before the web existed lol.
Yes PLEASE! The Internet is so, so much more than the Web, it existed before it and it will exist long after the Web has been gone.
The INTERNET as a whole also has still many places that are still healthy and far away from enshittification.
Wouldn't really help IMO. To most people (even here), "web" = "internet".
It's a shockingly (and relatively) small amount of people who understand that WWW ≠ TCP/IP.
"The internet should be for everyone, except the people I don't like." - average modern internet user
Glad he's able to call out the domain name system for the crock of shit that it is.
It's always the fucking DNS. .__.
“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.
A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.
Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it's not important in most cases involving such.
They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.
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I don't know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.
There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web
Arguably, that's not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.
A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it's not evil, exactly.
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