You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.

    Telnet    1969, standardized 1983
    FTP       1971
    UUCP      1979
    SMTP      1981
    RSH       1983
    TCP/IP v4 1984
    NNTP      1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
    IRC       1988
    Archie    1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
    Gopher    1991
    WWW       1989 first published 1991
    Veronica  1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
    SSH       1995

And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.

Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.

There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.

In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.

It's Eternal September.

To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace).

As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account.

[1] I detail how this is a lie at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html

True, that's definitely an issue. As far as I can tell X/Twitter has less political censorship these days (as Musk promised), but they fired most of the human censors and largely replaced them with an automated system that makes a lot of mistakes. So in the end perfectly harmless users still get censored unfairly, for simply expressing opinions that trigger others into abusing the report button. The X leadership has done nothing to address this so far.

I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario where only images and video from approved software and devices (with deep tracking claws) will be allowed to be posted.

I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro". Because somehow it's only used to "filter out AI garbage". As if the AI companies with distribution platforms and intents and government contracts weren't the ones designing it.

The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open threads I posted in, and my posts have "disappeared". Shadow banned.

To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction. No one will ever be silly or afraid to make mistakes again if it can be rebroadcast for the internet to laugh at.

I hate this internet. It was cooler when it was anti-censorship hackers who wanted to embrace libertarianism and freedom. There were pockets of hate, but there was far more acceptance and positivity.

I want everyone in the world online and connected. But I blame the algorithm for encouraging people to act so mean to each other. And addictive teenage social media for getting the next generation used to being surveilled and having no expectation or appreciation of privacy.

I can't fully understand this mindset. If you despise AI watermarks, why not rent your own inference hardware and use open-weight models without watermarks? Or LORAs that remove them?

AI steganography exists because all customers are a liability. These AI companies don't really care if you get uncensored or use un-watermarked models, they just want to limit their personal liability when you use their service. If a criminal's chatbot logs get entered into a case as evidence, being able to exonerate your service could save hundreds of millions in legal fees. It's like Apple/Google/Microsoft's CSAM scanner on their cloud services, it's a measure that exists for the benefit of the court and the company.

The problem isn't the government, or the corporate relationship with the justice system; you can't change either of those without overriding Rule of Law. The problem is exactly what people said upthread; centralization. If you refuse to use anything but the most mainstream smartphone, mainstream social media and mainstream AI provider, you're probably opting in to a panopticon no different from Xkeyscore 20-odd years ago.

If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself. OpenAI and Anthropic were never going to be your savior, it's exhausting going through the motions of "oh no, they're a federal honeypot in disguise!" every time basic retention infrastructure is discovered. The writing has been on the wall for so long that I can't empathize with people that think this is the straw that will break the camel's back.

> If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself.

If you think this is a solution for 99.999% of the world, I've got a Linux on Desktop fantasy to sell you.

The world will never have distributed Facebook or Matrix or whatever pipe dream nerds think will work.

The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this madness. And unfortunately the political willpower is on the side of surveillance.

Local AI will never be a mainstream thing.

Well yeah, those first two lines have been true for the past 25 years and AI doesn't really change the shape of the problem.

> The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this

You can protest and legislate against it, only to have the ruling reversed in a sealed court decision or reactionary "Patriot Act"-style legislation. It doesn't really defend anyone.

The only surefire solution is to stop using remote services. You will never be able to control what a server serves you, so there is an inherent mistrust in demanding certain features be added or removed. When people make these sorts of high-and-mighty demands, that's when we see security theater, theoretical whitepapers and dishonest threat modelling from these businesses. For all of the effort they go through to ensure that you can trust them, you'll never get a copy of the program they run on their server. And that's by design.

Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)

> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.

Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.

Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.)

But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?