The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.

https://reticulum.network/

And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.

1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy.

2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to.

3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control.

4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators.

5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop.

What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users.

Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear.

[1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...

Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.

Yandex is Russian.

I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian.

Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences, so I dislike idea of even very indirectly funding them.

And I support actions that are harmful to Russian economy, also when they are harmful to me - as long as it is not too badly balanced. As this is much cheaper than directly participating in war.

(I am from Poland)

PS

Yes, I understand that at some point there are some indirect effects that you cannot avoid.

I also understand if for some people paying Kagi that pays tiny fraction of that to Yandex that is paying taxes in Russia which funds their wars is too tenuous connection to care.