I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
Teenagers these days grow up with a phone instead of MSDOS or a C64 and how will they ever learn to tinker? How can we transition from play to programming, allowing people to create their own games, like in the old days you could play on a MUD or MUSH (I liked MUSHes better!) and from text adventure to community to programming it had everything. And I want the same thing for the web and messaging. People writing bots. People writing CGI scripts or whatever. I want it all! I want it now!
@kensanata there’s some fun stuff out there like the pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Separately: I think with phones, it’s hard because the hardware is all closed, integrated, proprietary. I remember part of the reason my friends and I used to tinker when we were kids was because we were pretty poor but trying to assemble the coolest machine we could from the parts we could scrounge. I imagine it would be a different world if you could build a phone out of components the way you can build a pc.
@brook Yeah. I just wonder how we could take advantage of that.
@kensanata I don’t know. I feel like it comes with open phone hardware and software. I don’t feel like we’re that far away anymore, what with component availability, things like the pi zero, and sort of experimental things like the pi-phone. But we’ve gone pretty far down the closed / proprietary rabbit hole, so it’s going to be difficult to dig back out. Guess it won’t happen until we make it happen. Meaning, I should put down this iphone, stop talking, and start building ...
@brook Maybe. Sadly, that seems like a thing of the future. A few years or a decade at least before phones reach the steady states laptops have reached, for example. Right now the fact that kids are acculturated using closed platforms like tablets and phones is a major problem, I think.
@kensanata that said I think phones are a crazy untapped potential for p2p in dense areas. My phone has some stupid storage on it, more than enough for it to be part of a bluetooth or WiFi p2p network as I go through my daily life...