Lately I've been thinking about the origins of the internet and how I used to search for forums, webs and all the content I wanted to see, finding new and interesting, sometimes horrible and unwelcoming, communities.

Slowly but surely the social network websites have absorbed all the traffic to themselves, and we, as internet users, are given the content we consume by an algorithm instead of looking for it ourselves.

I don't really remember when it happened, probably in one of the updates that started showing the recommended section first instead of your subscriptions, but I haven't been to my youtube subscription page in ages. I just refresh and refresh and refresh waiting for interesting content to be fed to me.
Not unlike the infinite scroll of sites like reddit, which I don't use anymore, or twitter, which the more time that passes, the more I think about deleting, in which they just start showing you things you might enjoy, so we grow contempt with that.

Artists rely on the algorithm instead of other things, and more niche websites lose their community.
After all, having a discord server, an official twitter, instagram, a subreddit, etc. Will just bring more eyes to your content, a website can be hard to find after all.

Another problem is that hosting your web is expensive, so having social networks as your main base of operations is just convenient.

So I often dream of a web in which everything is peer to peer, like torrenting. Something not unlike the Freenet project, in which you can host your website and it can be found and displayed to you through Freenets routing algorithm.

Not only would hosting become free, but you'd also get an unbreakable internet in which nothing can be truly taken down.

Ah, I really like to dream some times.

But those are just dreams, at least for now.

Thanks a lot for reading.
Much love.

Strelly.