The Internet is not designed or set up to support a useful social network.
Consider the origins, what the Internet is actually designed for: Sites connecting to sites. Historically you would have a site that was basically one computer, maybe a PDP-11 for a smaller site up to a CDC 6600 supercomputer - the early arpanet maps were basically shitloads of DEC machines and a smaller number of Control Data and UNIVACs with a handful of IBMs for good measure - with a bunch of Honeywell 316s functioning as gateways and routers. Each site was its own network, its own community. Everyone worked from terminals on the big box. And that's what the Internet was designed for. Email is an obvious example of how that works in practice, and in that environment all this shit makes sense. Your local social network was mainly the people on the same site and you might just talk to them via a local bulletin board or in class or at the coffee shop.
Look at the Fediverse, it is designed on exactly those lines. Each Masto instance models an arpanet site. But until and unless there's more physical and meaningful community both per site and between sites - until there is some cost to defederation in the same way there would have been if, say, Stanford decided they were mad at BBN and didn't want to talk to them, which would have been horrendously damaging to both sites - trying to build new services along this model isn't going to work. Conversely, a pure peer-to-peer system like the telephone network isn't how the Internet is structured. Building something like that without any server or centralized infrastructure is basically infeasible because it violates a ton of basic assumptions the Internet is built around.
Forums were a good compromise. So are sites like Cohost. The Fediverse in a different and more well-thought-out form could be a good way of bridging that history with what people want but only if we as a civilization were willing to change the way we think about these things.
...isn't this a problem with "The Web" and not "The Internet"?
remember NNTP? that was a better scheme for hosting communities than web pages, surely?
~Chara
It's very much a problem with the Internet and not the Web alone. Usenet did face a lot of the same problems and there were many familiar consequences:
- When Usenet moved away from UUCP to TCP/IP, a lot of small sites disappeared and major backbones became larger and gained more control because fatter pipes and the niceties of Internet routing meant that they could and it made Usenet run better.
- Governance for the whole network was effectively in the hands of the admins if the backbone sites.
- Individual users were at the mercy of their site admins; usually this was fine, sometimes it meant people could lose their news access because the sysadmin was in a bad mood.
- Which newsgroups you could access was entirely at the mercy of the admins, there were plenty of sites that didn't carry alt.* and some groups in the more "reputable" hierarchies regularly got censored by assholes (soc.motss being a regular victim)
- Spam sites were common and had to be handled with a variety of methods, some heavy handed.
A lot of very familiar issues the Fediverse is facing right now.
Edit: oh yeah don't get me wrong piggybacking on HTTP for distributed L7 systems sucks, it's just not the proximate cause of these issues.
