@ryo Pirated GOG games on the darknet is nothing new.
@ryo
>Which is why I'm rather worried about bringing DNS to I2P (I talked about it earlier this year I think)
Yeah you have.
http://asc7ewkcvat2wsoi5yuwkej5ukyrqqnpnzpj4u34r2jxnoxhnbx6yqad.onion/blog/gatekeep-i2p/
I'm actually kind of mixed on the issue. I understand people wanting to preserve the culture and the darknet is probably the closest thing we have to Web 1.0, but the fact of the matter is that if normies are still using shit like Facebook, Discord, Google whatever, etc then that only ensures the power that those companies have and it affects ALL of us.
I actually do want normies to become more tech-savy and actually use software and services that actually respect them, including darknet software, for their own benefit. If you can't stand the mainstream culture, there will always be some darknet that would be obscure.
@ryo Well, I don't see I2P going mainstream. Tor, maybe, but from a normie mindset, there is no need to use I2P when Tor already exists. Even sites like Facebook and Twitter have onion domains. Which goes with my point earlier in that there are plenty of darknets out there. There will always be an obscure one.
And I'd say that the internet was already mainstream by the 90s. Except that, normies only used it for taxes and stock trading.
@ryo But you still have to add it to your address book. It's pretty cumbersome.
Back then we all thought "let's bring normies to the internet, that would be awesome, finally our hobbies will gain attention!", then we finally let normies in, and soon after that shit like Fakebook, Discuck, Goolag whatever etc started accumulating as much power as possible.
Now we have a new case study in the making for those who missed the early 2000s train, which is right here on ActivityPub of all places.
More and more corporations, governments, big name people, and so on are joining in, and already there have been plans to bribe Gargeon (which has fortunately failed so far, but then again it took quite a few tries for WhatsApp to be sold out too), already we saw people mass-reporting like if it were Shitter, which fortunately some instance owners managed to push back against, and we'll likely see way more attempts at a hostile takeover as the protocol continues to gain more media attention.
And I should add, none of the Fedi protocols had these problems when it was still a niche network that all the big tech users and media still made fun of.
Same with the clearnet even; back in the 1990s to mid-2000s the internet got attacked for being "a hub of criminals" or "literally drugs" or "a place for total losers to cope", then the normies came in, and all of the sudden it became "the place to be for everyone".
The one difference between then and now however is that now we have a past example of how it ended up if we failed at gatekeeping, there was no knowledge on that yet 2 decades ago.