📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet

[tg@indieweb.social]

@gjaevert go nuts! I’ll join you 🫡

[hakona@im.alstadheim.no]

@tg Seems his radio-station got "slashdotted" (remember that?) . #MastoDowned ?

[tg@indieweb.social]

@hakona fixed

[hinnerk@mastodon.social]

@tg @johl The internet I grew up on was ftp, finger, gopher, usenet and telnet. No one sane would allow someone to use any of that to access something in 2026.

[fds@mastodon.social]

@tg those protocols did provide experiences that could be rough but having full control over the data on the client side is what made them great, imo.

The finger protocol is a favourite of mine. I’m glad happy net box is around for that and it means on the Vision Pro I can display random people’s updates on the wall beside my desk.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@fds oh that’s fancy! I have an AVP. Gonna have to set this up

[fds@mastodon.social]

@tg you can use any finger address. To be slightly more clear, the AVP software is my own (Plan Poke) but happy net box service has a nice random handle I use configure my widgets to point to and until I setup a server it’s a great way to have an account to update on the go.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@fds yep, I found your site and happynetbox. Gonna write a post about this tomorrow. So awesome!

[tg@indieweb.social]

@Robalex that’s the spirit!

[gosha@merveilles.town]

@tg Super inspiring, thank you!

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg I hate to do this because the content of the article is excellent.

But the shape of it, or at least some parts of it, is very similar to ChatGPT's preferred prose style.

Did you get assistance from an LLM? If you did, no shade because you used it for something good. But you should disclose it. If you did not, well, it's proof that some rhetorical patterns are hopelessly tainted now.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska no ai on this one, and my preferred AI is claude, when I do use it

if i do use ai on writing I will 100% disclose it

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Thanks for clarifying. If you like, I can point you to the few elements that made me question. If not, feel free to ignore me.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska i don't find that useful, i'm going to write how i write. i write differently on an essay than a blog post. it doesn't bother me much if people think it's ai, the point is the movement and the meaning. if you have advice on that, i'd like to hear it.

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Unfortunately, I don't. On a good day, the quality of the prose I am able to output when creative writing is roughly equivalent to an LLM's, so I have writing lessons to give to no one.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska I've done some general reading on how they write. you can't do reversals (not this, that!) and you can't use triads (this, other, thing). And we all know you can't use em-dashes even though my natural style is to use all of those because I think they're effective. sigh

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Yeah. Fast-paced enumerations, too. Word. Word. Word. Word.

I really hate that they took good patterns and apply them everywhere without discrimination, which now make them sus when humans apply it where they belong.

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

fwiw, I had the exact same sense while reading that fantastic post. Not to an excessive degree - I just thought there was a tasteful amount of it used to tidy up what had been hand written.

I'm glad no Ai was used, yet perhaps even more disappointed that some manners of writing are now forever tainted

I just subscribed to your rss feeds, via feedly which I've recently revived and am cleaning up. Sad that Current is apple-only. A PWA would be ideal, and aligned with your ethos...

[multisn8@mastodon.catgirl.cloud]

@tg Brilliant, thank you: You once again manage to crystallize distinctions (here: services vs. protocols) and draw hopeful observations from them; Reading this makes me cry.

One comment: Using the boring internet sometimes depends on privilege at the moment. Learning how to set up servers and interact with less-explored protocols often requires a huge time + energy investment. I find that easy to forget.
(I don't think that privilege dependency is fundamental: Software improvements can reduce failure modes and increase compatibility; I've also been thinking about self-updating small server boxes to physically hand out to friends who want their own file storage and fediverse instances. Though those would be instances of social privilege. Hm.)

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

On a related note, I've found myself wanting to double down on my preferred writing style in response to LLM style taking over.

I tend to be very long-winded, and surely flirt with the line of run-on sentences/comma splices. But, to me, that's better than all of the 3-6 word "punchy" sentences that llms prefer. I'm allergic to it now

Likewise, Ive always used hyphens in place of em dashes. Cant be bothered to figure out how to insert one of those, and certainly won't going forward