RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116606460885131034
So we *really* need to come up with solutions to make the living Internet (the part with real people) navigable, huh?
This isn't just obnoxious. This is an effort to make sure you don't find anything on your own or stumble into anything unexpected.
I used to be an expert at using Google to find stuff, but it's been years since any of that worked.
I don't know that the solution is another search engine, at least not one that resembles what search engines are now.
I want to be able to find stuff put out by actual human beings, not AI slop or SEO garbage.
How do we make it possible to still find new connections & information in such a hostile space?
To me, it's not a search problem per se. We have to get out of the zombie-web. We have to be able to find & link together the real, living Internet.
I know that the non-corporate web exists, because here I am on Fedi.
Google searches mostly bring me results from what is effectively a different Internet: an empty corporate wasteland. Google doesn't want me to find anything else.
I guess in a sense I already use Fedi as my search engine.
If I'm not in a rush & don't need a result right now, it works pretty well to post & ask people "where can I find...?"
I will eventually get some people pointing me to real resources that they find valuable.
I see lots of people recommending curated lists of links to sites/resources, which I think is a great partial solution (there is a diversity of options, & the answer is almost certainly not one single approach).
A place to start would be looking at the resources we have in our own areas of expertise or interest & creating annotated lists with links.
Without hosting that somewhere, it's not much use, but if I started now, once I figure out how I want to share that info, I'd be ready to go.
The future is human.
There are a lot of things that seem like they should be automatable, but when there is such concerted effort being put toward keeping us ignorant & disconnected from each other, our solutions are going to be powered by people.
I think decentralized networks of people sharing & connecting are the only way that we maintain an Internet for Humans.
(Is IFH anything already that would make it confusing? "Internet for Humans" seems like a pretty good term/identifier)
If I weren't on Fedi, I think I would feel a lot more despair over the world right now, & it's not just the fact that there are a lot of like-minded folks here nor that in many corners of it we try to cultivate a culture of kindness, as great as those things are.
It's such a fucking relief in the age of AI & walled gardens & information control to have an Internet space created by & for human beings. Not for corporations. Not for bots. Not for data harvesting.
An Internet for Humans.
Well said!
@VANTABlack2000
I think that's at least part of the solution.
What are the hashtags you are thinking of?
@artemis #FediHire is one of them and I can't remember it off the top of my head, but I think there is one for stuff similar to what r/TipOfMyTongue is where you can't think of something if that makes sense. Of course you have stuff like #art and things like that that can help find things of a specific topic.
On that note I am someone you can ask about games and some types of tech since I try to look for FOSS tech where I can.
Edit: From some searching #TipOfMyTongue seems to be a thing.
I had a very brief look and it is surprising how few replies #tipofmytongue or #tomt get.
@artemis
I honestly think this might be the road to the right answer. Think about, pre-smart phones and Internet, how we found things when we were visiting a new town. I come up with two solutions: ask (hopefully helpful) strangers, or pay a bit for some expertise in the form of something like a guide book.
The search engine as we came to know it in earlier phases operated partially like a guide book, but... The worst kind. Like a guide book compiled by the Chamber of Commerce that's just wall to wall ads for whomever could most afford it. Now it's morphing into something else completely, but the point is; maybe we need trustworthy and accountable groups that can curate information for us in a more human-centered way, and probably we should expect to need to pay for this important work.
The other thing I feel like we need to return to, as people with individual web pages, is prominently offering links to other people's pages whom we think are relevant. Word-of-mouth'ing the web. If you're sharing information about some topic, include anyone else's pages on that topic that you think are interesting. Actively connect your sites with your peers'. Stop allowing search engines to gatekeep discoverablity. Bring back web rings, or something similar; little communities of like-minded sites.
@lumecolca @artemis The main tool for finding things on the early web was curated lists of links. For Yahoo, for instance, you had to fill out a form to get your website listed.
The webcrawler approach came later.
In retrospect, we should have been more dubious about establishing the idea that anything posted on the web was meant to be seen by everyone, unless you put layers of authentication in the way, or just used the barely-acknowledged opt-out mechanism of robots.txt.
It's been almost thirty years of Google making enormous amounts of money by undermining the concept of consent.
@artemis So I mean - I think we need to think deeply about how we want to manage web indexes.
marginalia-search.com/ - this is an opinionated index that tries to prioritize different things
searx.space/ - tries to use more indexes and indie indexes - and lets you admix your own engine
I think these two approaches are really important if we want to save the web!
Back in the day - everyone used to maintain a list of links on their website, places they loved, many people I knew had that linkdump *for themselves* but it was also published for others - and it meant you could rely on community and currators. Which I really love!
A bunch of years ago a bunch of Fedi-Types started to try to build their own web en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(… - I think Gemini isn't an amazing protocol for this - but it's also an important idea. The web is so enshittified I don't know if it's *worth* saving. I just don't know how to abandon it in a useful way.
I don't know - there's been so many projects to do it - and I don't know how to build an Anarchist Web which we can then bring more people into.
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
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