#WoodWideWeb nennen Forscher:innen das Mycel-Netz im Wald. Ein Netz ohne Zentrale. Was gebraucht wird, fließt. Was stirbt, nährt das Ganze.

Wir Menschen haben uns ein anderes Netz gebaut – das #WorldWideWeb. Es war als kooperatives Netzwerk gedacht, doch heute bestimmen ein paar wenige Konzerne darüber, wie wir uns informieren, verbinden, organisieren. Wer Reichweite bekommt, – und wer nicht. Das ist keine Kleinigkeit. Das ist eine Machtfrage.

👉 https://pioneersofchange.org/gemeinschaft-statt-algorithmen
#Demokratie #DIDay

in 1996 the university of alberta let departments manage their own homepages

mwah. 🤌

#smallWeb #1990s #worldwideWeb #webpreservation

#codicesorgente #worldwideweb Le Origini di Internet: Un’Idea di Condivisione

https://www.notizie.buzz/articles/2026/02/26/le-origini-di-internet-un-idea-di-condivisione.html

HK privacy watchdog, 60 overseas authorities sound alarm on AI deepfakes

#artificialintelligence #ai #internet #technology #aideepfakes #aigeneratedcontent #grok #chatbots #aitools #computersandtheinternet #worldwideweb
https://hongkongfp.com/2026/02/23/hong-kong-privacy-watchdog-joins-60-overseas-authorities-warning-of-ai-generated-intimate-images/

Drawing on it own experience in the last couple of weeks, @openDemocracy warn of the danger of data/information scrapers used by AI/LLMs to power their 'agents' which (as we know) increasingly get between the user & that actual website (or more accurately information) they are searching for.

The Q. is are they right that this will change the internet (or perhaps more accurately the World Wide Web) 'as we know it'?

#Internet #AI #WorldWideWeb

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ai-chatbots-scraper-bots-chatgpt-website-offline-change-internet/

#mrnrnw #makerockandrollnotwar #makerocknrollnotwar #love #peace #sunday #punk #art #blackandwhite #worldwideweb #mastodon @mylene_211 #rocks

found out that bruce damer's late-90s book on Virtual Worlds and VRML hadn't been properly archived. while the scanned book is on IA, the companion CD-ROM was nowhere to be found

ordered a beat up copy online, which mercifully had the CD intact. i imaged it with dd, and it now lives forever on IA here: https://archive.org/details/avatars_cdrom

it's a win+mac hybrid mode cd with a bunch of totally forgotten virtual worlds clients and servers. i hadn't realized that The Palace included a user-run server with a nice front end, but you had to pay for a registration# to let more than 3 chat clients connect. you could create your own little visual chat shard!

#worldWideWeb #1990s #retrocomputing #digiPres

Federation and decentralisation is how I want the “world wide web” to be.

#fediverse #activitypub #www #internet #worldwideweb #socialmedia #mastodon #toot

Ok, so #OpenAI finally made it very clear that #ChatGPT is soon to become complete trash. I guess the difference between the “before" and “after" images below pretty much says it. The #Internet and #WorldWideWeb has become more and more commercialized and unusable. There is no way that anyone gets around without massive #AdBlock​ing or #Tracking blockers these days.

What has this world turned into? 😔

#WWW

Wasted a year and hundreds of dollars on blogging mistakes 😅 Here's what not to do from day one 💡

Read more: https://flip.it/y1lglq

#tech #technology #blogging #blog #bloggingtips #digitalmarketing #marketing #digitalmarketingtips #wordpress #worldwideweb #marketingtips

banned at stanford and waterloo

edit: oh shit haha, that's actually the real brad templeton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Templeton

#usenet #internet #worldWideWeb

wayback.exe

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://fedi.directory/wayback-exe/

i love that bruce damer has kept his homepage for the Avatars! virtual worlds book online for 30 uninterrupted years.

https://damer.com/avatars/index.html

#vrml #webHistory #webPreservation #worldWideWeb

Metaplace Postmortem (2008): "Snow Crash is a Lie"

jussst after i wished there had been some kind of postmortem done on raph koster's Metaplace, i found out that he himself presented one at GDC 2008!

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/34/Metaplace-Postmortem-Reinventing

if you're not familiar with Metaplace, I don't blame you. It was an attempt at making a web-based graphical MUD/MUSH/MOO/MMO virtual world development system that could be played online in any browser. it disappeared almost as quickly as it was developed.

what i find most fascinating about it was that it had a Lua-based scripting system called Metascript. it featured some really hot runtime behaviours like being able to load/unload scripts on any object. (which means you never needed to recompile to test your world)

#mud #moo #worldWideweb #lua #gdc #mmo

so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.

back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.

snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home

Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.

both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.

we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.

what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?

#moo #mud #smallWeb #indieWeb #worldWideWeb #furcadia

am overcome with gratitude. after hours of searching usenet, ftp indexers, ftp sites, archive.org, discmaster and every archival tool i know of and coming up with zilch, i jusssst found the MacMOOSE software buried in a professor's apache open dir! he worked in the same research group as MacMOOSE (Epistemology & Learning Group @ MIT) and had the foresight to make a tarball of the lab's FTP server before it died years ago

this is the kind of archival once in a million thing - that someone self-archived an incredibly important and obscure piece of software by accident, and left a copy on the web. thank you prof fred g. martin 🙏

this archive of the MIT ELG ftp server is going straight to archive.org.

update: WinMOOSE has also been found thanks to https://mas.to/@justinto/115990209538195283

#archival #digiPres #worldWideWeb

just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.

MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996

"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.

Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."

(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)

while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.

i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity

this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/

Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/

#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres

Day 3 in #mastodon No pervs, no homophobes, no #incels no mysoginity, no adverts. Lots of different languages, intersting stuff from #worldwideweb Welcome to me. I must improve my english.

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor #TimBernersLee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the #internet
Founder of #worldwideweb says commercialisation means net is ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail
It wasn't until polarization of 2016 election that he had enough with Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges #socialmedia does not represent entire web, but is "optimized for nastiness"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web

Ein sehr interessanter Vortrag zur Geschichte des frühen Webs, den die Kolleg*innen vom @ZZF gehalten haben. Unbedingt einmal reinschauen! #DigitalHistoryOFK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNv8YPO0T4

#WebHistory #DigitalHumanities #WorldWideWeb