alt Hacker NewsThere's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.
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Perhaps we can make internet forums trendy again. Those are artisanal by nature. Only user generated content. Strict moderation.
It already happened. For a lot of people, social media has been replaced entirely by group chat.
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.
In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate.
Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar.
I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.
It definitely is a thing at least, to pine for the "small web" [0].
I think as well, dissatisfaction with major social networks is pretty widespread, I don't know how often it comes.alongside a pining for something more "artisinal" though.
[0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/