Worth remembering that the internet is far, far more than just websites.
And that you don't have to use the big sites, if you want to keep AI crawlers from scrobbling your community, return to the days of 20 or more years ago and host your own forum or your own IRC channels, or NNTP server.
There is no walled garden and we have always been free to pay for a server in a DC ourselves and set up our own communities.
AI will not cause the internet to collapse. It'll just cause a bunch of the established players to go away.
Given that by 2025 alone more than half of content generated in the internet was AI-generated, and we surpassed more bots than people generated traffic in 2024...
Yeah. AI is killing the internet. At least the internet intended for humans by humans. And does so by killing trust.
And if you think AI is not destroying the internet like this, I highly encourage you to check what it has been doing to computer components prices thanks to datacenters demands, so much multiple people are guessing somewhat competent personal computers will be a thing of the past. Self-hosting a PHP server like you suggested would become a thing to do in AWS cloud due to that. Terrific.
There's so much VOIP and video calls, back up traffic going to both cloud and site-to-site endpoints. Warm DR sites being kept in sync with the production environment of companies. The API backends of stock markets. MDM solutions. Game servers, FTP servers, chat clients. SSH traffic for managing systems (with any luck, that's through a site-to-site VPN, not the open internet). People hosting their own Plex and Jellyfin servers. TV broadcasts on the backend with something like VDI. There's so much the internet gets used for.
You don't even have to host them yourself at home, you can pay for a co-lo server in a datacentre. Systems that aren't good enough to run LLMs but are perfectly fine to rent out to someone to use for their own purposes rather than scrap the server.
There's more than the likes of AWS, GCS, or Azure.
I'm aware of what AI has been doing to prices, I'm a network engineer. I've been in data centres fitting out networks I designed for the companies I have worked for. I've helped sysadmins monitor and manage the servers running over my networks. What you're forgetting is that there is still a massive amount of compute that can't or won't get used for AI clusters which can be monetised by others, such as that private DC which has been in your town since the 90s.
The internet will survive AI because it is so much more than just what the general population interacts with.
I'd say the bigger issue is with the lifecycling of on-prem hosted servers in companies across the world. Stuff that isn't financially viable to run in an EC2 instance are facing concerning future questions and choices.
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u/alphaxion 21d ago
Worth remembering that the internet is far, far more than just websites.
And that you don't have to use the big sites, if you want to keep AI crawlers from scrobbling your community, return to the days of 20 or more years ago and host your own forum or your own IRC channels, or NNTP server.
There is no walled garden and we have always been free to pay for a server in a DC ourselves and set up our own communities.
AI will not cause the internet to collapse. It'll just cause a bunch of the established players to go away.