"I want to tell you a thing that I think is true, and that I think will make you feel better.

The internet is not dying.

A commercial veneer glued on top of it is dying.

The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.

Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.

It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.

But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination.

No one owns it."

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet

#OpenProtocols #OpenWeb #Decentralization #SocialMedia

The Boring Internet

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about what actually persists.

Terry Godier

"Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.

We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future."

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/10/beneath-the-enshittification-something-amazing-is-growing/

#OpenWeb #OpenSocial #ATProto #BlueSky #OpenProtocols #ActivityPub #Decentralization

Beneath The Enshittification, Something Amazing Is Growing

Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting…

Techdirt

AT Protocol Overview

Learn what AT Protocol is, how Bluesky uses it, and why it matters for identity, portability, moderation, and the open social web.

https://beitmenotyou.online/at-protocol-overview/

ActivityPub Federation Guide

Learn what ActivityPub is, how federation works, and why this open social protocol matters for privacy, publishing, and digital sovereignty.

https://beitmenotyou.online/activitypub-federation-guide/

Nostr: Decentralised Social Protocol

Learn what Nostr is, how relays and public keys work, why it matters for free speech, and where it fits in the decentralised web.

https://beitmenotyou.online/nostr-decentralised-social-protocol/

@marcuwekling wünscht sich auf dem #2mr mehr Brücken zwischen offenen Netzwerken. #Interoperabilität zwischen #openprotocols

mit @fed.brid.gy von @anewsocial oder @fedisky sind diese Brücken möglich

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #ATproto #Mastodon #Eurosky

Help! I've been thinking so much about decentralized platforms and open protocols lately that my brain has become completely decentralized itself. 🙃
Time to go touch some grass.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #ActivityPub #FediDevs #OpenProtocols #DecentralizedPlatforms

"On #openprotocols, individual providers may address threats within their own systems, but lack the network-wide capacity to address coordinated activity across infrastructures or protocols. This is a gap that commercial actors have little incentive to address…
This points to the safety and integrity of the #publicsquare being coordinated as a critical #publicfunction, backed by #publicfunding. The practical implication is a core of publicly provisioned infrastructure."
https://openfuture.eu/blog/public-money-public-platforms/
Public Money, Public Platforms? – Open Future

A European Citizens' Initiative calls for publicly funded social media. But copying the same centralized, surveillance-based model would repeat the harms. Public money deserves a more ambitious target.

Open Future
#MustRead: "Stronger #communities could be built on traditional #socialmedia platforms, too. But those have proven themselves to be unreliable partners: remember that referrals are down, links are being suppressed, and trusting a tech company means letting tech happen to you, like an asteroid. #Openprotocols are permissionless; building on them means building real ownership, as long as the #protocols are built with #publishers in mind."
@ben
#journalism
https://werd.io/building-trust-in-the-open/
Building trust in the open

How Protocols for Publishers points to the future of journalism – and the web

Ben Werdmuller

“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,”

Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-trials-european-open-source-communications-software/

#matrix #eu #foss #openprotocols #digitalsovereignty