Suppose the internet was still a major success and was sustainable without compromising for commercial interests. How do you think societies around the world may have changed, or not?

Consider the optimistic angles of such an unencumbered space extended out from the internet’s earlier days to the present. What if some of those possibilities had been realized?

    • @[email protected]
      9•1 year ago

      There were books : “the best 500 Web sites!” filled with links you had to type yourself.

      Half of them didn’t work of course.

      • @ExtraMedicatedEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        Shit, I remember having one of those. Way back when we used that free dialup service from K-Mart where they had an ad banner at the top of the browser.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•1 year ago

      but the truth is that without the ability to sell ideas on/about/using the internet, it wouldnt have been widely adopted except in educational settings, and only for information storage/retrieval.

      fwiw I don’t think you’re wrong given the circumstances the internet came about in, and that persist in a different form today, however the idea behind the question was to try to encourage one to try to imagine different circumstances. If the internet/the web had managed to develop and be widely adopted despite the circumstances around it and commercial pressures that have arguably warped it into something rather different than what it could have been, how might that have influenced society in turn?

      It’s less about looking back with rose-tinted glasses, and more about trying to re-envision how it might have developed differently. One could very much say that the whole pitch of stuff like lemmy and federated software is an attempt at doing just that, but I think it’s even more interesting to consider on a broader scope.