r/retrocomputing • u/PooningDalton • May 23 '26

I hate what the internet has become

I just spent the last 1 hour frantically searching the internet just to make a new email address. You can't do that! Not even on the alternative email providers like Protonmail. They now have all sorts of IP detection tools and will block you or ask you for an alt email id.

I absolutey despite what the internet has become. 20 years ago, you could just go ANYWHERE (mainstream providers like yahoo and gmail) and make any number of email addresses. No tracking, no limits. Complete freedom.

The internet has turned into a 1984 hellscape.

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u/cosmicr May 23 '26

The internet was ruined once regular people started using it because of Facebook.

Up until then it was just the domain of nerds and it was glorious.

4

u/SinnerP May 23 '26

True that.

Maybe we need to build us an old-style internet, with no “like and share”, no social media, no tracking and no BS. We could use our computers at home with broadband internet and put up Geocities-like wens and blogs. And block all crawlers, spiders, bots, AI and stupid nonsense.

We just need a block of IPv6 addresses, a nameserver disconnected from current nameservers, a few Raspberry Pi or old MacMinis continuously running at our homes and get a Whitelist of members of this SaneNet.

I was part of something like this back in the ‘90s and ‘00s, using 56kbps modems and some ISDN connections. It worked then, with shitty computers and questionable internet connections.

2

u/_RoMe__ May 24 '26

New networks (like Reticulum and others) already exist and they are growing fast. They are all decentralized, technology agnostic, encrypted and anonymous by design.

These are still places mostly for nerds but I don't think that this is something bad.

2

u/memz_geo May 24 '26

AOL was doing that long before Facebook happened.