Ah, I see. Basically what would’ve happened had Google and Yahoo not become dominant. But to get there, you’d need to go back ~30 years, or maybe more, because Yahoo was serving ads in the 90s.
I also long for the days of the early Internet where most sites were made by enthusiasts and there really wasn’t much commercial presence. However, back then, the Internet was the domain of universities, so unless you worked at or attended a university, you just didn’t have access to the Internet. Things change a lot when you go from a relatively small set of users to a large set of users.
So instead of thinking about what could’ve been, I like to think about what unique opportunities we have. People are connected 24/7 these days, which means distributed systems are actually feasible. So instead of paying some central search service, you’d donate some CPU, memory, and disk to a distributed search platform and you’d be able to make searches without any central servers. I’m actually building a Reddit/Lemmy-like service in exactly this way where everyone stores a certain amount of data on their machines and serves it as needed to their peers. This way there’s no revenue model needed because there’s no infrastructure costs, so it can be run by volunteers or with a small amount of donations.
Ah, I see. Basically what would’ve happened had Google and Yahoo not become dominant. But to get there, you’d need to go back ~30 years, or maybe more, because Yahoo was serving ads in the 90s.
I also long for the days of the early Internet where most sites were made by enthusiasts and there really wasn’t much commercial presence. However, back then, the Internet was the domain of universities, so unless you worked at or attended a university, you just didn’t have access to the Internet. Things change a lot when you go from a relatively small set of users to a large set of users.
So instead of thinking about what could’ve been, I like to think about what unique opportunities we have. People are connected 24/7 these days, which means distributed systems are actually feasible. So instead of paying some central search service, you’d donate some CPU, memory, and disk to a distributed search platform and you’d be able to make searches without any central servers. I’m actually building a Reddit/Lemmy-like service in exactly this way where everyone stores a certain amount of data on their machines and serves it as needed to their peers. This way there’s no revenue model needed because there’s no infrastructure costs, so it can be run by volunteers or with a small amount of donations.