What do you think the internet will be like in a few years? Why?

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.

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.

It won’t be global anymore, the USA will have its own local-version, china, Europe, Russia too. The pressure on manipulative social media will increase, meta, alphabet etc will be banned more and more. As part of this WWW3, sea cables will be cut, causing outages.

Two internets, the regular one taken over by companies like what is happening now, and wider adoption of tor or something like it.

Then lots of local and community networks air gapped from the internet.

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.

Great Firewall of America

Great Firewall of EU

Going to a dark alleyway to pay a hooded man for a VPN access code he writes on a crumbled sheet of paper

A bit like this, unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

LLMs have made that conspiracy theory quite realistic...

I feel like it's possible that there will be a shift away from the internet. It feels like we're racing to enshittifying the internet as much as possible and eventually that will just be the assumption people have at every corner and it just won't be something people turn to unless they have a task to complete that requires it. Even when the reason for enshittification isn't corporate greed it's to propaganda bots or the miraculous ability of one person to ruin everything for surprisingly large groups.

That's honestly my most hopeful take. I've got a lot of books on raising goats. Might get some donkeys.

• There will one Internet for us and one for the powerful people.

Theirs will be what they want it to be, while ours will be:

• Without any right to privacy (no pseudonym like mine, no VPN, no email aliases and obviously no true cryptography or fully encrypted whatever service: they will legally own the keys and the know the ID of all of us), and with constant tracking of our every moves and words. All of that because 'think of the children' and, like you rightfully mentioned, in the name of protecting every single individual so-called right to not 'feel offended'. While in reality they just want us to remain silent.
• That Web will be the online version of what Malls used to be, just a lot worse. It will be a place to consume, not a place where we are allowed to think and discuss. With little room left to personal websites/blogs, or amateur content because...
• Like with access to VPN that is now being questioned, I doubt It will remain legal for a mere people like us to even own a personal website and a domain name. Businesses, sure. People? Nope (see the "think of the children" and the "don't offend anyone" in the 1st point). Instead we will all be pushed toward using 'social media', those owned by a few well known-corporations not any Libre ones.
• Saturated with ads, obviously it's the main use of that Web: to sell us stuff. With laws and regulations (like we already have against copying and removing DRM from what is supposedly ours since we purchased it) that will make it a crime to obfuscate or not watch said ads (making it a crime to use an adblocker, or at least one that really works). They may even manage to make it impossible to not display ads on one's 'own' online space whether they want it or not.
• Filled with garbage content that will be deemed good enough for most of us which, coincidentally, will be made a lot easier since most educative systems, here in the West, have decided it was not useful to teach kids how to properly read and write, or how to properly use critical thinking anymore. So, stupid content for a stu... uneducated population, perfect world.
• Content written and made by AI, undoubtedly. Good enoughn much cheaper and with zero risk of letting escape any unwanted data or piece of information that would allow some of us to realize maybe things are not right the way they are.
• A lot of 'amusing' content, to keep us entertained (and not thinking).
• Probably a lot of (carefully selected) porn too, since lifelong celibacy seems it could become a real issue while people will still have 'natural urges' to satisfy even without a partner.

One day, while playing in their great-grandparents attic, a kid living in that society will find an object long forgotten. It will be all dusty and they will brush it to realize it has a shiny cover with bright colors. They will open it and gasp in surprise. The interior looks like if a pile of sheets of paper were glued together. They will flip those sheets and will wonder what use was there for all those black squiggly lines running all over them. What was it used for? And then, already bored with that odd object without a screen, with multimedia, that kid will put it back with all the other dusty objects not knowing this object used to be called a book and that those odd squiggly lines were called print. And that people were able to read books and they were used to help people learn and think better, or just have fun all by themselves. That kid will swiftly move back to the living room because the next episode of some series is soon to begin and, with everyone else in the family watching their very own content in silent, while they all wait for the meal to be delivered by some Uber drone. At one moment, that little kid will realize their fingers are all dirty from the dust in the attic, they will shrug and quickly move their attention back to their screen because its the ads playing, every 3 minutes, and they're always the most exciting content of the show!

A perfect world.

We will enter a period where you aren't allowed online unless you present a government issued identification as proof of age and/or national origin.

I can see a generational shift where one of the next few gens just breaks off and goes back to analog tech, libraries, in-person communities, hand written content, etc. Some will go hardcore offline, most will only use the internet as the need arises (GPS, work/legal documents, weather app level things.)

But for the vast majority... the internet is devolving into Idiocracy. The next centuries will be the AI stupid/dark ages with wars started over disinformation.

Or maybe climate change shrekts us in the next 50 years.

we will live in a content rich p2p utopia once effective distributed administration has evolved sufficiently

it will be an alternate internet run from our homes

it's gonna be beautiful

Hopefully still here. With a possible war on the horizon it may get disconnected and/or walled off.

Our local community is thinking of making a mesh net.

Like mortal engines. Islands of small functional communities amidst a wasteland of AI generated content, occasionally having to scatter and reform elsewhere when the corps find them and attempt to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (or just DOS with content scrapers) them.

• More IPv6 deployment.

• Whack-a-mole with automated bots on social media. The war with spam email was a long one. This one may be too. My guess is that in the end, the bots will lose out, maybe via some kind of zero-knowledge proof of identity stuff.

• YouTube cracking down on ad-blocking.

• Continued rise of dark-mode interfaces.

• Either a general acceptance of least-common-denominator stuff (e.g. accepting that one can't restrict what content is visible that might come from some other country) or an increasing number of countries mandating that their ISPs block stuff that they want blocked. If the blocking happens, probably an increase in use of software that seeks to evade such blocking.

I do wonder a bit what the impact will be from the shift we've seen from PCs being the primary way to access the Internet to mobile devices. Like, for example:

https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/touch-typing-learn-practice-gen-z-speed-rjhlvrb00

In 2000, 44% of American high school students had taken a keyboard skills course, but by 2019 this had fallen to 2.5%.

In the US, teachers say that they have often assumed that young people can type because they spend so long with their devices. But students say they often use tablet devices or their phones instead, making them proficient at scrolling and tapping, but less skilled at typing.

If the ability to touch-type goes into serious decline, the ability to enter text rapidly will as well, and I'd expect that to have various knock-on effects in UI; brevity of input text may become more important.

• Images and video becoming less proof-of-truth. We can synthesize pretty good photograph-looking images of things now. Probably going to get there with video, too. My bet is that the advantage is and will be on the side of synthesizing content, not of detecting that an image is synthesized. We might need to go back to the era before we had recording devices, when we relied upon specialized, trustworthy people putting their reputation on the line to attest to things. Maybe that, rather than photographs or video, will be what we see on Web pages to show that something is true.

Some things that I don't expect to see:

• The rise of VR as the primary mechanism to navigate the Internet, a la the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the probably-named-after-it Metaverse that Facebook's banged on. Various people have tried various implementations, and it hasn't caught on. I am skeptical that it makes a lot of sense --- working in 2D works pretty well for most things.

• Voice interaction becoming the primary mode of communication or computer control, not unless we get some sort of sensors and systems that can pick up subvocalization or something. You can't control software near other people via voice without being obnoxious.

People being critisized is the least of the internets' problems at the moment. Hopefully there'll be a sucessful backlash against all the ai and the algorithms and the corporatization and the censorship (actual censorship, not "people getting offended") soon or else all that will be left is advertising.

More and more apps messing things up. Companies want you to use an app so they have more access to data and better ability to control your habits driving more money into their coffers.

More radicalization and sensationalization of everything. Use the news as an example. It used to be straight reporting of what happened, now it's about ratings and how many descriptive words you can use to make the news more dramatic.

Advertising will get worse, more ads, larger ads, more annoying ads.

There will be a bigger divide between the corporate conglomerate internet and the decentralized internet. People who feel marginalized will begin to break away and and the rest of the internet will look at them like they are crazy.

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.

Pay-to-win.

And I'm not even joking. Digital marketing doesn't work and the model where yub "paiy with your data" is simply not sustainable anymore. You probably see allredy how many of free apps and services became unusable in their free plans. Change your sytem language and you'll have bigger exposer to foreign language from Duolingo ads than from Duolingo courses. And it'll only get worse because the last people who click ads outside awareness phase are dying out of old age. Get ready for paying for email again. Days where free services could have a similar quality to paid ones (if you are willing to sacrifice some privacy and honor) are over. People who can afford that will have unparalleled quality of life to those who can't.

AI bubble adds to this problem. The powerful models that kind-of-can-do-somethig-useful-sometimes are tremendously expensive. Burning money like madman expensive. Simply not sustainable for even medium-cheep plans, not to mention a free one.

So the AI arms-race are acctualy two arms-races.

1. who can train better model.
2. who can produce a shittier, cheaper, dumer model that kind-of-sort-of-looks-like a good one. Often psudo-AI. You like when AI answers your querry after deep thought but you dont like to pay for credits required to do it? Google will run it using their 20 year old search engine. Than it'll take the first 3 results and use the cheapest model the earth can find to slap some almost cohesive sentences on top. Problem solved.

Thay simply have to do it so they can bundle those in various plans and say "no, no, AI is amazing you are just using the wrong model every time you dumb dummy". Otherwhise they woukd be doomed to forever go under every time you ask chat what was the name of that big yellow bird from seasamy street.

Some people will usualy face the AI that can be (maybe, sorta) helpful (sometimes) and some will be in a constant battle with lying, dumb, misleading, biased, useless AI that they are forced to deal with because the CEO's are unable to tell the difrerence between those two, and are looking for any excuses to cut costs.

Even more shit because very very few people are actively trying to improve anything

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'll be more corporate than it is now, and the real community, art, culture, connections will happen offline for the relative minority of us that aren't on board.

As long as we can connect to the outside world, it can't be catastrophically restricted. We'll just be more like viewers of social advancements instead of participants.

I’m hoping some trusted organisation like EFF will come up with a web of trust system people can use to tag sites and content as reliable and not AI generated/ “enhanced”

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.

People will be anti-internet and build communities again. Then we take down the fascist regime.

I think it will be fully controlled by Shitler and the turd Reich and it will spin extremist far right propaganda that is approved by the party. It will be the only information allowed. Palantir is currently creating a file on every citizen. By then Everyone that steps out of line will already have been thrown into a concentration camp or killed.

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.