Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I'd be looking at the media for labelling him that.

People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.

And the "World Wide Web" mostly means HTML - "hypertext" documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the "semantic web" - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.

You're thinking of the ARPANET. When people think of the Internet. They think of the network that Gore pushed hard to open to the public. And the interface Lee designed. Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists. But effectively what the average person sees as the Internet is their child philosophically.

I mean as a techy you aren't wrong. There's a lot of underlying things and technologies that sort of glosses over. But to the layperson at large we're just pedantically nitpicking.

Yeah, I thought it was Al Gore

Sadly most people don't understand the difference between www and the internet.

I came here to post this, everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.

God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:

And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.

We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.

that internet still exists and it works a lot better than back then

you're just not using it

People need to accept that if you build your house on the king's land, the king owns your house.

I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.

No you won't. You wouldn't survive a day.

I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.

You probably don't remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.

A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.

Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it's not important in most cases involving such.

For those that don’t know, he ultimately backed EME which was dumb.

How you do amazon nonprofit is easy. Its already a giant planned economy, just take the profit out and make every vendor pay the cost for using it, Servers delivery etc. The workers would get payed well and the incentive from the public to support it is there, people want this convience and are willing to spend for it.

how do you do Amazon non-commercially?

Several smaller alternatives rather than one giant go-to

If you have any highly-specific questions, especially about niche hobbies, it's hard to avoid Reddit. For example, there's no (useful) equivalent to r/mechanicadvice or r/airbrush on Lemmy yet. Forums often provide alternatives, but not always.

Meta I personally don't need at all, but I've managed to convince exactly zero of my irl friends to switch to, or even join, Pixelfed, which is the main alternative to Instagram. It's a little lonely using social media when you don't know a single person there lol. I can use it to meet people, but I prefer to have both.

Google can also be hard to avoid tbh. Other search providers just don't compete in my experience - people frequently name DuckDuckGo but it's just bad compared to Google in so many instances. I have DuckDuckGo set as my default browser, but I constantly end up going to Google's site manually anyway because DuckDuckGo gives subpar search results. Presearch is usually okay I guess.

I don't say any of that to be discouraging, but just to be realistic about the issues so they can be overcome and the alternative options can be true, full-fledged alternatives instead of compromises for the sake of morality. I think Lemmy and Mastodon in particular are doing a good job of developing into full-fledged alternatives.

...and all the streaming services are super easy to avoid 🏴‍☠️🦜

Sadly most people's eyes glaze over if I mention it, so I don't get too far. But I try!

Aside from the nonprofit makerspace that I'm a part of, which is filled with like-minded nerds, I've met ONE single person randomly in real life that wanted to learn more about self hosting. Sent him a brain dump of all the various services I run, topics for him to research, etc.

Wouldn't really help IMO. To most people (even here), "web" = "internet".

It's a shockingly (and relatively) small amount of people who understand that WWW ≠ TCP/IP.

Are you talking about Berners Lee? I'm surprised, sounds like he just wants to decentralize more

Yeah, that was Al Gore!

He never said he did in the article. Instead check on media for saying it.