On the State of the Internet - Present and Future
Over the last two decades, the Internet has become much more centralized than ever before. Small forums have died for Subreddits,
IRCs and mumble servers have made way for Discord. Facebook, Google, and Amazon own half the Internet, and Cloudflare is the Arbiter of who gets to stay
online and who gets thrown off the Internet by DDOS from gargantuan botnets made up of unsecured IoT hardware.
With their power growing, the large corporations that increasingly control the Internet have become bolder. Cloudflare has started to throw off sites they do not
like, like 8chan and the Daily Stormer, while keeping ISIS recruitment sites. DNS registrars are stealing domains from their customers.
Some might say that these are just bad sites spreading evil things, but to defend freedom we cannot allow a de-facto banning of certain opinions, let alone
having megacorps being the arbitrators of who is evil and who isn't.
Due to these developments, a move to a more distributed web will, in the long term, likely be necessary. There are already various models in development, some older than others. None of them is quite ready for the average person yet, but I'll include a couple links below for the more adventurous. Neocities itself already has some integration with one of the more advanced solutions. There are still many problems with such an approach, not the least of them being that moderation of distributed sites is nearly impossible. But still, these problems will be solved, in time, and when that time comes, the megacorps that rule supreme now, will become irrelevant, at least to those who wish for a free Internet where people can do as they wish. The Wild West of the good old days will make a return, eventually. And this time, with a distributed model, there will be no corrupting it.
Link collection:
I2Pd: A network similar to the Tor .onion domains, along with an improved model that ensures that the network grows stronger, not weaker, with increased traffic. Anonymous, which most P2P applications really aren't.
GNUnet: Still in early development after many years, this is a way to develop distributed applications. Easy filesharing and chatting. Anonymous.
IPFS: A distributed way to store and serve files/websites. They have integration with many things like the Brave Browser and Neocities. Most likely of all of these to be a big success.
ZeroNet: Currently the easiest to use and quite populated with a variety of sites and users. Suffers from some awkwardness in use and from a lack of integration with I2P. The attempt to solve the anonymity problem with the use of Tor
is only partially successful due to Tor not being built for P2P applications.
FreeNet: One of the truly old distributed web experiments. Not that as active as IPFS and ZeroNet, but it is still being developed. Be aware that using this means the storing and sharing of encrypted snippets of random files. If you are not comfortable with that, do not use it. Anonymous.