I think a lot of Normal People (TM) think that the internet is social media. Recreationally, I don't think a lot of people move far from Meta's Facebook or Instagram, ByteDance's TikTok, Alphabet's YouTube, or X's… X (?).
I don't think that's changing. I think that most people will continue to use the internet like that. People like me (and you, if you're reading one guy's self-rolled markdown blog) are getting tired and quietly leaving. I've not checked Facebook since 2019, and in the last six months I've seriously limited my intake from Reddit or Instagram.
I quit for the reason I hear some people quit drinking: I just didn't like it. I didn't like the way it made me feel, and I didn't like the way it made me see the world.
I didn't like that the cost of "connection" was participating in an ecosystem that facilitates what I consider to be intolerable hate speech and unreality.
I didn't like that companies hoarded huge wealth by establishing themselves in the early 2000s and pushed the foundations of the modern internet, attracted all the people (which is to say: suffocated all competition), and started selling those peoples' attention to advertisers. This is "Senator, we run ads"-level controversial and I think most people are mostly fine with it. They were fine when newspapers, billboards, and radio did it. But now you can only run a newspaper or billboard or radio station if you can compete with the largest advertising companies in the world. And I don't like that.
The pressure's just kept going. You notice it. It's the five-minute ad breaks in podcasts. It's the incremental increases in your streaming services, and the introduction of ads (non-exclusive changes.) It's the increasingly less obvious "paid-for content" watermarks on videos (ads). It's click bait or rage bait or engagement bait.
Maybe it's because those companies invested billions of dollars into virtual reality that nobody wants. Or maybe they spent billions building Large Language Models off the back of all the content they own (and a lot they don't), and they want to tell you you need it even though people don't seem to.
This has pushed me closer to two things: books and the small web.
You know what books are. I dare say you've read one with your eyes or ears. They're great. They're sustained thoughts that I can read. They're things I can buy to support (directly) people who want to sustain thoughts to that degree. You know your nearest town or city probably has a building full of them and you can borrow basically any one of them for free, and it's staffed by people who would love to help you find a book you would enjoy.
The small web isn't really a thing like books are a single thing. It's "people making stuff and sharing it". Here is a more useful introduction with a bunch of links to follow. If you want to discover the small web, try:
- Kagi's small web search - just keep hitting "refresh" and discover some weirdness. Sort of like Digg or Stumble Upon back in the day.
- Bear Blog's "Discover" page - I don't know what this little Indie platform for small Blogs is doing to moderate its content and keep the web personal, but it feels well curated and approachable.
- Indieblog.page has a button that says "open random blog post" - go and click it and just discover people's voices.