All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird some people really love order, hierarchy, and authority.
@dr2chase @futurebird not just that, but uniformity. I want my site to be orderly in my particular way, but even other people who want orderly things should be free to make them their own way
Jul 1, 2026, 5:07 PM@futurebird they should piss off and create their own internet then.
@CarstenBoll
That's the bitch of it. We keep making our own spaces to create and share, but their worldview demands that not be allowed, so they invade and fuck it all up.
@futurebird
Jul 1, 2026, 7:51 PM@dpflug @futurebird well, we will have to keep going anyway 😊 Mastodon is nice like that. So is reticulum.
@futurebird Send these assholes back to cable television!
@futurebird you can still find cool old internet places on wiby.me
they weren't replaced so much as distracted away from with social media and google
@futurebird Who is “they”?
Facebook, Amazon, the people who promoted putting everything in the cloud.
@futurebird
The unwashed masses aren't supposed to produce content! They're supposed to consume it, and only from the giant media companies, and watch advertisements and pay subscription fees for the privilege!
What are you, some kind of commie?
@futurebird When ISPs started selling “consumer” plans with fast download and slow upload, a lot of old-school internet people were annoyed. Weren’t we all supposed to be equal online?
Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.
Until now, I figured the bandwidth asymmetry of DSL and cable was some kind of intentional “consume, don't produce” design decision, but…well, fiber ISPs would be throttling upstream if that were the case, so I guess bandwidth asymmetry was nothing more than a technical trade-off this whole time?
Happy to see it, at any rate. Uploading a software build now takes seconds instead of minutes.
@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird *Puts hand up*
Hi, I have worked in the ISP space before.
Cable's asymmetry wasn't an intentional choice. But a design vestige of its history. Originally these systems were designed as a one-to-many (and one way) network. Radio waves were blasted down the wire and into the back of TV sets
The lacking upload speed is because the networks were never *designed* with the idea of broadcasts coming back up the pipe. DOCSIS was grafted on to cable TV networks as an afterthought and required major cleanup of the design of the networks to accommodate them
Ah yeah. “Community Antenna Television”, I believe it was originally called.
What about ADSL?
@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird That one I'm surprisingly less familiar with why it's asymmetric, despite growing up with it in Australia
I'd defer to telco nerds on that ;-;
@CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird
It was asymmetric because they want to partition the frequency spectrum used into separate upward and downward bands, to avoid the computationally heavy need for full echo cancellation, and they both expected and wanted end users to be mostly consumers of content, not producers.
There was no _techincal_ reason it couldn't be reverse in the other direction, or fully symmetric (which existed: SDSL).
1/
@CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird
Making the frequency/direction control dynamically adjust was entirely possible, but would have made the DSLAM and modems a little more expensive, so they chose not to.
2/
@brouhaha @CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird Yep, symmetric DSL works fine if you need it. Some dedicated leased lines were SDSL and the some militaries use it to run megabit data over DON 10 field telephone wiring. Strange seeing binding posts and multiple 10G optical connections on the same router. I think power utilities are also using DSL to move data over pilot cables that previously carried tone signalling between substations
@CursedSilicon @argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird yep, I came here to explain this but you already covered the bases. It's a similar story with ADSL/VDSL as well - symmetric DSL variants DO exist, but they have significantly reduced downstream bandwidth compared to their asymmetric cousins. Given the general traffic mix of a residential connection, the asymmetric profiles were generally a sensible tradeoff.
Fun fact about DOCSIS: one of the side effects of grafting data service on top of cable TV networks is that all traffic is encapsulated in MPEG-2 transport stream frames - 188 byte (iirc?) chunks. Downstream traffic is also broadcast, so on early networks it was possible to see traffic destined for other customers. An encryption layer (BPI) was eventually added, giving each cable modem a separate encryption key
Residential fiber works the same way, according to Wikipedia, even though it's a new network specifically designed for full-duplex transmission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network
@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird
Of course it was - as it is for every medium. Thus total capacity (channels) have to be split for either direction depending on usage profile. This includes ofc fiber.
Physics is the same with every medium, no matter if Air, Cable or Fiber (or Phone in ye olde days with 1200/75 :))
The huge difference between cable and fiber is the amount of total bandwidth available - which for cable is way smaller, so it makes sense to give more of those channels to downstream, as one downloads way more than uploads.
In fiber the bandwidth of a single channel (single colour of light) can already be way more than all channels (frequencies) that could fit in a cable. full bidirectional speed can be gained by using just two channels, one in each direction and both at the same bandwidth - at least for the few GBit we use nowadays at home.
If we reach the need for TBit connections at home, the need to split bandwidth will hit us again ... except I would not think very soon :))
@Raffzahn @argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird the nice(?) limiting factor on this sort of thing is that right around ~10Gbit we start slamming into the limits of what you can handle with ordinary programming techniques on home machines.
Back in the day it was more “doesn’t matter what you do on the cpu, the network is slow”, but at 10Gb/s merely parsing json you downloaded with a very fast parser requires more than half of a core on a fast cpu.
@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird I think some of the assymetry of fibre is time slotting to share a wavelength through time slotting. Up and down use different colours, so if you give fractional UL you can save "colours", which can then be used for more DL.
Jul 3, 2026, 8:15 AM@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird
> Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.
uhm.... nope.
“Fiber optic” does not mean “symmetric bandwidth.” In fact, consumer fiber connections are almost never offered as symmetric.
Most residential fiber plans still give you much higher download speed than upload speed, for example 1 Gbit/s down and 100 or 200 Mbit/s up. The word “fiber” only tells you about the access technology; it does not mean that the provider is giving you the same bandwidth in both directions.
When a connection is actually symmetric, providers usually advertise that explicitly.
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I'm on residential fiber and so are my parents. Upstream is slightly *faster* than downstream, presumably because there's less congestion in that direction.
It was not advertised as symmetric. For fiber it seems to be implied.
@futurebird yeah it really is astonishing. A classic social media example of this is the difference between MySpace profiles (which had a lot going on to begin with could be further customized with CSS so were all over the place) and the very limited and sparse Facebook profile.
@futurebird I've said for a while that the internet as we know it (or a lot of us from "the 90's/early 2000's internet" knew it) has been rotting for a very long time
Capitalism connected the overwhelming bulk of the planet to the internet and then ran headfirst into a problem: Nobody had any *money*
Those endless deluges of boner pills and pop up ads for "free money" were a capitalism "pioneer species". Eeking out fractions of pennies at a time. The name of the game was how much sludge you could fling and how many inboxes you could flood with it.
Then, after the turn of the century, they realized that malware could make money. Just turn peoples computers into email relays or DDoS vectors. Weigh the machine down with spyware and adware served up through garbage apps and P2P software (looking at you, KaZaA)
Meanwhile the capitalists looked at services like Geocities and thought "how can we inject ourselves in the middle and extract rent for this?" and we ended up with the "social media era" of "web 2.0". We moved off the free hosting of ISP's and into "the cloud" and started normalizing shovelling ads everywhere on MySpace/Twitter/Facebook.
Then the capitalists realized that they were leaving pennies (or fractions of pennies) on the table by not siphoning every single persons *data*. Surveillance capitalism became the name of the game to sell to advertisers.
Now we're at the final, nauseating junction with the AI slop machine. They've spent 20 years picking away at every shred of flesh, so it's a mad dash to scoop up the bones and dump them all into a giant pot and boil down the marrow and hope that the slop that oozes out of that brew is palatable to force feed to the populus
I feel like the bigger driver for ruining all that was less a hate for the creativity/individuality and more of the standard how do I make as much money as possible with the internet.
And the answer over time evolved into getting as many people to spend a much time on my corporate site so I can sell ads with all the data I collect from them.
Then big tech said, hold up, I can just track people everywhere they go, even better.
They hated the former because they could monetize it