I’m really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

@grue@lemmy.world has whored his karma already, he isn’t answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.

This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

These are not businesses.

What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?

That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

I noticed my main VPN and backup VPN failing to connect the other day, but that was 3-4 days ago. Haven’t tried since, because I switched to Pop!_OS in that time.

At the time I thought it was just my ISP being my ISP.

E: Both with Wireguard and OpenVPN, across multiple servers.

And when they add 3 feet of plastic, use archive.ph

AIM/MSN/Yahoo chatrooms. GeoCities. Neopets. Limewire, KaZaa, listening to Art Bell on the radio next to you while you search for the latest alien news and read ancient texts. Webrings. Message boards. NSA hadn’t partnered with Microsoft for the first version of PRISM.

It was more decentralized, but even in the centralized parts there weren’t yet entire industries dedicated to stealing every last bit of dopamine from you to sell to the highest bidder.

It was an amazing time. RIP 1985-2010

I give you a B+ for General_Effort.

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Cloudflare will only forward DMCA reports to you and your provider, although for more serious things (ransomware for example) they may get more involved, but usually just pass the information to the relevant authorities. But they have become less ‘free’ over the years, so who knows how long that holds true. They are an American company after all, and the DMCA is an American IP framework.

https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/assisting-copyright-holders/

They can, but it would reason they chose a DMCA-ignoring (offshore) host.

No logical fallacy buzzwords to falsely throw around? Just a downvote because someone has shared a non-genocidal point of view?

Sad but not surprised.

What’s the strawman I’m sniping at?

ETA: yes it’s as old as human nature and organized religion, yes, and you’re continuing it. Everyone with different beliefs is “the other” and “the enemy” and “must be removed from existence to ensure peace for our people.” I’m trying to point out that you’re being taken advantage of, and the truth seems to be evoking strong emotions.

If you say down and had an honest conversation without yelling and turns were allowed to be finished, you’d find you have much more in common with these individuals than “the enemy” as the group you see them as.

But ideological warfare prevents class warfare, so it continues being spoonfed to you, and you happily latch on to every bite so you continue to feel a sense of purpose.

Okay, now what are the rationalizations that progressives/liberals/Democrats/leftists/whatever the preferred term that’s the opposite of ‘conservative’ tell themselves?

Keep in mind, you’re including the entire group here, as you did with ‘conservatives’, so anything any [preferred leftist term] does means it’s representative of the entire group.

Aye, reverse it and replace godless with god-fearing, and hippies with rednecks, and you nailed it!

Dehumanize “the other” and you can say and do whatever you want, as long as it’s against the other team. Populace Control 101.

Sad to see so many people falling for it so rampantly, but inevitable. It’s just the Internet during American election season at this point.

You clearly don’t understand the beliefs and motives of your political opponents.

You lost me at

Doesn’t matter, because in this thought experiment you’re not the conservative who believes abortion is murder.

Good luck with your sports team ideological shitposts political memes, I guess.