I think the internet will get worse in the future; someone gets offended by everything, nobody lives without being criticized here.
I’m starting to see this amongst my techie friends: invite only enclaves. Like, using matrix or signal chats that are only by invite; Jellyfin servers for streaming, again, among friends. Group cloud services like nextcloud, mail servers cut off from email at large… Internet-like services, but for small groups.
we’re already seeing a division, between pubnet, darknet, tor, and I2P. I think we’re going to see tor support drop for I2P and it become the new freenet that doesn’t have all the corpo bullshit on it.
Stratification between the corporate and the free world.
On one side, you have bots, bots, and more bots. Enshittification running rampant. AOL-style locked-down platforms, but worse, because they steal your data and your soul to fuel their profits.
On the other side of the fence is the side of freedom. The fediverse will have more users. Also, old-style personal websites/blogs could make a comeback.
It will be horrible.
There will be more and more people (like me) searching for things like lemmy and Gophernet and IRC to avoid corponet. Normies will wallow on the 3 corporate websites like they’ve been doing for 10 years.
Its already borderline unusable even with proper tools (waterfox, ublock, searxng/kagi are a MUST)
Truly, the good days of the internet are gone and will only come back in underground form.
Everyone will have to reveal their true identity with selfies and photo ID uploads.
VPNs will be outlawed.
Just look at the stuff the UK and Australian governments, as well as many states in the USA, are doing.
I can see me using TailsOS more frequently than I do now and giving up my smartphone for more analog methods.
It’ll be the same but the enshittification will just be amplified. I mean, we’re already here where people are talking to AI bots.
The Dead Internet Theory is real.
Regions will be walled off by censorship / content laws, freely accessible information will be a thing of the past, you’ll have to pay a subscription for anything you want to do, and you will own nothing.
Nah you’ll still get free information, it’ll just be misinformation.
So no change, then?
I think it will be a self-referential medium in which machines bombard each other with propaganda messages. Creativity and innovation will become increasingly rare, as people will hardly produce any content anymore because they can neither make a living from it nor gain recognition for their contribution. Hate speech and misinformation will be omnipresent.
In short, I expect the internet as a whole to develop similarly to Reddit or Twitter: away from free discussion and the exchange of information, toward a hellhole full of hate, disinformation and slop.
