Before I begin, look at this thing I found while doing a bit of research for this post. Google "Geocities" - I haven't seen anybody post this google meme yet, but it turns the fonts Comic Sans. This is hilarious!

The Internet Is Dying

Or that's what they tell me. You know what, it's kinda true. With Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and other such social posting services closing their APIs, or being sold off to make a few billion, and the capitalist expansion marching ever outwards into the digital frontier: I can see it. Geocities is long dead. Free and open CMS providers do still exist, but they're not the same. Or at least they don't feel the same to me: I remember Geocities as just an open playground. You could upload files just to a directory, and then write all your HTML the old-school way (unless you had a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver), and there were no real rules or guardrails to keep you locked into a Wordpress/Bootstrap common format. I mean... you can't even use MySpace to learn basic HTML anymore. The sense of ownership of your own online identity/brand is locked behind sterile homogeneous pages (shout out to tumblr, though, who seems to have avoided that).

No shade to places like neocities, of course: I respect that they're keeping the idea alive in the modern era. But, if you couldn't tell just by looking, that's not really the vibe I'm after. I wish I had an index.html on my old Geocities page when the wayback machine scraped it: now all I can see when I search is a root directory with files that are long dead. But I remember: It was a black background, neon green text (in Courier New, of course - Gotta respect the terminal aesthetic), and it was just a place that I could post things. Random things, thoughts, some ideas for videogames that I was "totally going to develop, once I figure out how" and even at least 1 C&C Renegade custom map that I tried to make. It was called "Tiberi-Os" and it was supposed to be a bowl of Cheerio cereal with tiberium deposits growing on the rings. It wasn't great, and I didn't know how to use my (totally pirated) copy of 3DS Max 7 that my friend gave me.

Anyhow, I'm getting distracted. My point is: name the websites you go to most frequently. Hell, I'm guilty of it too, so I'll list mine here...

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Imgur
• Reddit

Each of them totally locked down corpo gardens. Each of them beholden to capitalist masters. Each of them steadily descending into Algorithm Moderated (after my rant on AI, I refuse to call it "AI Moderated") hell squashing anything that might upset the sacrosanct Ad Revenue dollar. Your "freedom" to carve a corner of the Net is becoming more and more limited, restricted to the people willing to learn the secret rituals and magick words that you need to negotiate cloud hosting, set up server environments, write HTML. I fully admit that I'm one of the "privileged few" who spent their formative years playing in this stuff so that it was relatively easy to learn... but I know not everybody had that. Certainly fewer people than the number who would like to learn. I mean, let's be real here: There's a reason that I wrote a framework that would let me make posts like this by writing Markdown and clicking "Save Post" -- Not even I want to spend the time necessary to write out an entire new page by hand, and then add it to the page elements for display... And yet I'm the one who does stuff like "writing a framework that would let me make posts like this by writing Markdown" for fun.

A Quick Aside About Tumblr

Since I mentioned it above, I want to touch on a few things that I've learned. I'm gunna be real with you, though: I was never a "tumblr kid" or anything. I'm a bit too old for it to have caught on with me, having only sort of recently started to look into it. By no means are they perfect, and they shoulder some of the guilt I mentioned above, but they do seem to be at least getting most of it right.

1. Created as a side-gig

Full disclosure, the company I work for recently got acquired. In order to smooth the transition, we were visited by some of the management of the new holding company that acquired us for a bit of a meet-and-greet, wherein I managed to get myself invited out to dinner/drinks with the management/leadership team of our company and the new upper management, including the... CTO? I think that's his official position, but I'm also not fluent in corpo-speak so I might be wrong. Either way, he's the new overseer above all dev teams across the sister companies, so it was sort of a big deal (to me, at least) that I got a chance to sit and talk to him. Firstly so that I could judge whether or not I felt like my position was at risk of being "streamlined" or anything (also: so I could judge whether I felt like he was just a "suit" or something). Secondly, it gave me a chance to just kind of be a nerd about things. I even showed him this site in an earlier version. And he asked me, straight up, "what are some of the side projects you work on? Got a side-gig or anything?"

I told him the truth, "No, no side-gig. Mostly just sort of art projects for fun and to see what I can make" (which is when I showed him Jackpoint-Alpha). But that's kind of key to why the story of tumblr feels "good" to me. Because it was sort of exactly what I would've done if I had the idea/opportunity. A break in work, so you just write some software that you want to see in the world. Which, according to wikipedia, is exactly what happened. David Karp wanted a "tumblelogging" platform, and when he couldn't find one, he sat down and wrote one... 2 weeks later, there were 75k users.

2. Not created as an ad revenue farm

This one I can't quite speak to, since I wasn't there at the time. But, relying on the wiki, it looks like it took 5 years before Tumblr moved towards paid advertising. According to the article, Tumblr was founded in 2007, and it wasn't until 2012 that they began running paid ads. Shortly thereafter, accepting a month long major brand deal from Adidas. But even then, just reading through the archived article about Adidas, it looks like they were making some clear steps towards differentiating "paid advertisement" content from organic user-created content. None of this "hiding Sponsored Ads" in and among Google results, or camouflaging them as Reddit posts. At least I can respect that (or the theory of it, once again having not been there to see for myself).

3. Selling Out

This one... Well, I'm not about it. This is what got us into the mess in the first place: major corps coming in and waving dollars at a startup to seduce the product away from them. Not that I blame them for selling: if Yahoo approached me with $1.1 billion dollars in cash and said "I want to own this thing" I would sign. And maybe that makes me a sell-out or a hypocrite, but even a fraction of that would be hard to turn down, you know? Personally, I'm not interested in running a business, or climbing my way to the top of a ladder anywhere. I want some simple things in life: to be able to live comfortably, to have a place to keep my things, and to continue writing code. Being a business owner, managing a company, policing a product... None of that interests me! So, if some suit came up to me and said "here's enough money that you can comfortably live on the interest alone for the rest of your life" then: yes. I would take it, put it somewhere to create that interest, and continue to write code for fun. But still... they sold to Yahoo in 2013, only a year after introducing paid ads. I guess that might inform us on the how/why of the "paid ad" move in the first place: Megacorps only want to buy something that'll make their number go up... Gotta demonstrate that sort of ad revenue viability to make yourself a tasty treat for the board of directors.

Then the users said "fuck the corpos" and advertising goals weren't hit, and Yahoo started hemorrhaging money... until Verizon bought them in 2017. A few months later, David announced that he would be leaving by the end of the year. I guess what I said about "only wanting to buy something profitable" isn't exactly true... You also have megacorps who want to act as house flippers: Buy something that used to be valuable while they're weak, and try to polish it back up. Worst case scenario, you poach their customers and slowly absorb the brand, feasting on their corpse for nutrients. Maybe Yahoo shouldn't have shuttered Geocities? But that's just a theory... Either way, the users continued to say "fuck the corpos" and Verizon continued the struggles with pumping Tumblr for money (shout out to the users: ya'll the true MVPs here).

4. Fuck The Corpos

In 2019, Tumblr was again sold, this time to Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Now, hear me out: they're still a corp but they seem more aligned with "the good old days" than the other owners since the Yahoo acquisition. Wikipedia lists among their products: WordPress, Akismet (anti-spam system), Gravatar (those blocky generated avatars), Atavist (multimedia publishing platform), Simplenote (note-taking service), and Beeper (messaging bridging app). They may be in it for the money, but at least their portfolio seems to be more aligned with giving people the tools to make things, rather than giving people to ad partners. It'd be too utopian to expect a corporation to operate without expecting a profit, as much as I'd like to see it. So, in the terms of "the lesser of evils" I can at least (for now) respect Automattic over the others. Even if their acquisition was just a way to tempt people into the WordPress ecosystem. "The first hit is always free" after all.

5. Adoption of Open Standards

In November 2022, Automattic announced that Tumblr would add support for the decentralized ActivityPub protocol, the same protocol that powers Mastodon and other open source social networking platforms in the fediverse. Actually, something that I myself have considered baking into Jackpoint, though I'm not sure why exactly, or if I'm just trying to familiarize myself with "the new hotness" (which isn't a bad reason to do it anyway). I'm not sure what their end goal is, if they're looking to expand Tumblr into a decentralized platform, though given how they offer WordPress as a bundled install package for servers this might not be out of the question. You can go, purchase a server or rent one on the cloud, and spin up an environment with WordPress pre-installed, giving you your own blogging/CMS presence. Imagine you could do that, but spin up your own Tumblr node for just you and some friends, but then have it federated into the larger network and able to interact with all the other nodes as a part of a decentralized network. That'd actually be pretty cool, and I'd be interested to see if that happens. Not to mention, from a business perspective, Automattic could then port some of their WordPress plugins to the new framework and start opening a plugin marketplace for Tumblr nodes the same way they do for their flagship. Anyway...

6. A Silver Lining (aka Fuck The Corpos pt. 2)

This one starts worrisome. In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data to OpenAI and Midjourney. If you saw my last post, you already know where I stand on this. This is a bad move, and a bad decision. I know why they are doing it, but this should worry more people. At least they announced it, and at least they (according to Wiki again) are offering "an option to opt out" of this, and a staff post seems to indicate that at least they recognize a lot of the issues/worries with this. In fact, this entire post seems to indicate that they are at least attempting to lead the industry as far as "controlling your data" goes. Zucc would just roll it out quietly with a corpo-speak press release to the shareholders that the users wouldn't hear about until it got translated down into a tech blog. So... Still a resounding "fuck the corpos" but with the silver lining of "at least they're trying to meet us in the middle"

Ok, you caught me. That wasn't really a "quick aside" about anything. But anyhow, it just goes to show that the doors are slamming shut around us as far as "the old internet" is concerned. The digital landscape is being relentlessly gentrified by these walled gardens. But... that doesn't mean you need to believe the hype.

The bloggers/vloggers/etc. would have you believe that we're running out of space... But space is near infinite out here in Hertzian space. They can pave over our playgrounds, they can section off entire subnets behind their services and gateways and paywalls, but we can buy a new hard drive. We can rent/buy new servers. We can host ourselves and build our own software, and we can provide those services again to those people who don't have the time to learn what we know. Yes: it's tragic to lose the spaces we once knew. Yes: it's traumatic to watch another service close its borders to us, but why are we all sitting around and bemoaning it? We can give the newcomers, the ones late to the party, the same opportunities that we were afforded: Not because someone gave us them, but because they were freely accessible. But, if they demolish the fields we used to play in, then it's up to us to till the new soil and cultivate those fields for the children who come behind us.

It's sort of a continuation of The Hacker Manifesto. They played freely in this world before I came up in it, and they played dangerously and got burnt. Caught. Arrested. By the time I started to "get it" they had laid the foundation that let me mimic their games. Playing freely, but safely. Safe enough to learn, to grow, and to be challenged... But with enough of a fence between me and the truly dangerous shit out there that I would have to actually try if I was going to get burnt.

Now our playgrounds are being locked down, and a city has grown up around us, but we feel entitled to sit and wax poetic about it? No, it's time to get boots back on the ground. We take our games, and we move out further. We make our own spaces, we write our own APIs, we author our own protocols, and we keep this freedom free. Ignore the dollar signs in our eyes, we carve spaces for ourselves and build new gardens for ourselves, divorced from the dataforts of those above us.

The internet is not dying, they just want us to think that it is.