We Need To Rewild The Internet

If you ever wondered how to explain to others, why to use services such as /e/OS, you could simply say: It is part of a much needed approach to rewild the Internet.

I recently found a beautify analogy between the virtual world and nature. The article explains well to tekkies as well to those loving nature, why monocultures first of all make systems fragile and why we need to move away from them.

If you have some time, I’d like to invite you to read the following essay (or even easier: just listen to it). Its pretty long, but really worth:

It’s a good essay, and though I like the thought, I do believe it has a few fundamental flaws when one attempts to apply it to a tech landscape.

The article seems to miss some of the necessary distinctions, though. The most fundamental and foundational one is that the internet requires authentication, food chains/webs do not. On this forum, I’m Voyager529, and this is enforced by me typing in my password. This, in turn, ensures that anyone who reads what I write, knows that I wrote it. There could be a Voyager529 on 101 other forums, and while some of them could be me, others may not. At the very least, on this forum, I am Voyager529.

One of the fundamental issues of decentralization is identification. Usenet, functionally speaking, used the honor system - everyone agreed to correctly identify who they were, but there was nothing stopping someone from fraudulently posting as someone else. This meant that I could say “I’m ralxx”, and everyone would believe me, so if I posted something and said it was you, readers had to decide who was lying. This, similarly, made it difficult to block spammers.

The evolution of Usenet, in my opinion, were the different dedicated forums of the 90’s and 2000s, usually running on vBulletin or phpBB or something to that effect. Most had authentication, topics, moderators, and some precursor to Facebook Likes (the ‘thanks’ button was pretty common; others had ‘reputation’ and similar variants)…but they solved the authentication problem, and largely the spam problem, and one could bounce from forum to forum based on topics. Obviously, this still exists in some form (we’re presently interacting with a later iteration of this), but dedicated forums seem to have been relegated to a support niche.

How did the internet go from a large swath of forums with small-ish communities, to Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter/X/BlueSky? Well, for all the complaints about The Algorithms getting things wrong…they do occassionally get things right, too. Prior to these community hubs, I’d have to go out of my way to find an online community, then figure out that particular community’s culture (and in turn, let the community determine whether my rookie mistakes were acceptable or not), and then start posting and investing there. I might join a large forum of pet lovers worldwide, and enjoy the large volume of posts, and seeing pets from around the world, despite the fact that there’s another forum dedicated to my particular breed of bird, as well as a ‘bird lovers of Delaware’ forum that is less active relative to the larger ones, but have meet-ups local to me that I could actually interact with people in person, rather than being limited to digital interactions. While such forums existed in the ‘wild Internet’, it was somewhat difficult to find them, then keep usernames and passwords straight, and then keep up with the forums themselves as an active member. The large social media networks solve all of these issues, plus handled photo storage (some forums prohibited photo posts entirely, others had strict limits that required scaling and compressing, etc…). Add in the mobile element (Tapatalk was amazing, but too little, too late), along with the fact that Facebook and Reddit weren’t as massive and ethically-questionable as they are now, and it’s of no wonder that discussion forums centralized.

The real question lies in whether we’ll find actual-people, willing to invest their time and resources, into re-wilding the internet. The article discusses this exact problem, when an attempt to re-wild a particular section of nature was unsuccessful, because there was a lack of interest in spending the time and money needed to see the process through, making the net result a change in the ecological troubles, rather than reducing them. Going back to traditional forums won’t be helpful if nobody is adding content to them. Even if newer forum software is enough to keep the bots and spammers at bay, it won’t reduce the urge to use ChatGPT and friends to game whatever metrics are used to incentivize engagement.

Even if that were to miraculously happen, forums get ‘checked’. Users open the forum in a browser (or app like Tapatalk), they read what’s in there, they respond if they want, and they leave. Nobody ‘checks’ Facebook or Twitter/X or Tiktok, they get push notifications about it. This increases impulse-laden engagement, but also incentivizes impulse-based responses, rather than thought-out, long-form discussion. If the re-wilded sections of the internet lack a push-notification system paradigm, they risk losing out users and engagement to the systems that do. If the re-wilded sections implement some sort of push notification system, it’ll end up way too similar to the systems it seeks to uproot, complete with the real-time shouting matches everyone agrees are bad, but also inevitably participate in.

I like the idea. /e/OS, and even these support forums, are examples of this. However, we are a very select few, and even if we like having a close-knit community, i don’t know that a “re-wilded internet” will do any better against the next Google or Facebook that wants to run things. We can barely keep e-mail open at this stage in the game.

I would love to see a re-wilded internet…but it sounds like these researchers have had trouble implementing such a system at scale in nature. I have my doubts we’ll be more successful convincing people to leave the easy, instant gratification that these systems provide.

You make some good points. I think regulation is the key, both in the natural world and the virtual.

In terms of the virtual world, the consolidation of services, infrastructure and applications was not driven solely by user choice.

Look at the aggressive tech take overs and mergers, removing choice and creating monopolies. Monopolies that are not run for the general good but for individual/ corporate profit.

Regulation and antitrust policies should of stopped this, but the big tech companies gaind too much power too quickly and they were able to avoid or beat the majority of attempts to curb their power grabs. We are now living in the age of oligarchs.

Europe still has a chance a regulating these behemoths, but this chance along with its democracy is fading. JD Vance directly threatened Europe about attempts at trying to regulate “US tech” companies.

This is true in at least some of the cases, but there are some glaring exceptions as well.

I’ve been working on this response on-and-off for a few days, largely centered around e-mail, but it kept turning into a tangent well beyond both the original topic and the statement made here.

To be overly reductive, the consolidation of the internet was as much choice as not-choice. People did not, en masse, gravitate toward their own servers and services. Communities are heavily influenced by network effects. WhatsApp is so dominant now due to a number of early choices that gave it a lead over Viber or Line, but those apps still exist and can be used, and an industrious friend can spin up a RocketChat or Mattermost server and get nearly all the benefits of WhatsApp in an open source, self-hosted capacity…except it’s exceedingly rare for that to happen, even here in /e/ community or its XDA counterpart.

Now, in terms of mergers and acquisitions, that’s where things get rather political, and I’m not sure that the rules are the same in our two regions of the world, which would further muddy the waters even if we were to go down that path. I will say, however, that while I agree that M&A at a certain scale starts becoming counterproductive in the long term, I don’t think that the fundamental problems faced by attempts to re-wild the internet would be solved even if Google and Facebook and Amazon and Oracle were all forced to split into a dozen companies each.

The fundamental problem with attempting to re-wild the internet in 2025 is that we have to deal with more troublemakers with smarter spammers along with a general public that has experienced the benefits of centralization (the sort of subforum discovery and linking done by Facebook and Reddit, along with a single-pane-of-glass for content submission and consumption), makes it nearly impossible for the sort of vBulletin forums and Geocities/Angelfire communities that existed decades ago to re-emerge with any meaningful amount of utilization. Any attempt to resuscitate an ‘oasis of connection’ would likely require Cloudflare, or something like it, to mitigate DDoS attacks that would inevitably happen.

…And once again, even if such a community were to spring up, with a group of thousands of dedicated volunteers who all brought a meaningful amount of content to the community with a willingness to invest and make it grow…it would require a sustained commitment from those people to go out of their way to be part of the “re-wilding”. It’s the ‘sustained commitment’ part that tends to be the breaking point. There will certainly be a number of people who join to begin with, but how many will stay for the long haul, and how many will commit to weeding out the spammers and AI slop in order to help sustain that growth?

I’m sorry, I don’t have that much faith in such a group existing and sustaining. Then again, “The Scene” still exists, despite all of the legal threats to its existence, so…maybe there is a glimmer of hope.

I think the authentication issue simply has to be something we accept as part of life. In the real world, humans often pretend to be someone else, for many reasons. This also occurs in wild nature, with many species mimicking others in order to evade predators or catch prey.

Perfection is like equality: a manmade myth. That isn’t at all to say that ideas like perfection and equality are to be dismissed. They are an unreachable end on our eternal path to self improvement, in terms of both the personal self and the collective self.