I say the day Mozilla bends the knee to advertisers and do what Chrome did by phasing out ad-blockers with Firefox. That’ll be the day when I look around my apartment and realize “man, I need to start getting into some hobbies now.”
We could argue for months about what qualifies as “the internet”.
Anyway, you’ll have to pry my cup-on-a-string from my cold dead hands
The Internet is too useful. Email, online banking, and the ability to find reasearch materials are essential to me.
However, i have abandoned all social media except the fediverse. I only use youtube for specific instructional videos - not for entertainment. If i am looking for fun, i look somewhere else. One exception: Qobuz for music (they are a French streaming platform).
how’d you land on qobuz? what do you like about it?
Probably when something better replaces it, unfortunately. I depend on the Internet for my job as well as all my socializing, so it would be pretty hard for me to live without it.
If the internet were to completely collapse. I will use the Internet until I cannot use it anymore.
After which it’s time to run some cables and connect to my neighbors. Then the rest of the town. And with some help I can run a fiber to the next city over.
I already have the hardware required due to an obscene amount scavenger from work, and I have enough rack space at home to function as a local ISP so that at least my extended neighborhood is covered.
The day internet truly dies, the only reasonable thing to do is to create a new one.
The internet as a network is too useful. It would take the enshitification of the fundamental protocols to make a dent (udp/tcp). Maybe dns too.
Well… that would be hard. Maintaining, upgrading and extending a corner of the Internet is my day-job.
So I guess the minimum would be that some other international communications network takes over and Swiss tertiary education institutes would all like to be connected to that instead of the Internet.
Then all the multiplayer games I host for my international friend group would also have to support this new stack of protocols, same for my communications channels, most of all chat apps and email. Then I could also move my personal use cases off the Internet.
Then I could be done with it.
The real question is why would we ever do that, it sounds insanely costly, and not that much is wrong with IPv4 and IPv6.
I think the moment it becomes impossible to be annonymous on the internet. I wouldn’t want all of my internet traffic to be directly associated with my IRL identity. For me the internet has always been a way to explore oneself without having to worry about your school or job learning what you do in your free time.
I have been using the internet less and less because of this, but there are still cool places left, like the Fediverse.
At some point, the internet will take a back seat in most people’s lives. The younger generations are already disconnecting from many of the once very popular platforms. They really don’t like where this AI agenda is headed. Just like booze is now more and more unpopular with them, so will all things tech take a very serious and irrevocable dive.
The younger generations are already disconnecting from many of the once very popular platforms
Source? The kids are still nuts about TikTok. If they’re leaving popular platforms, are they leaving them to read books and join bands, or to join another platform?
Source : Pay very close attention to the younger generations. Listen to what they have to say, and observe what they’re doing. Times are a changin’, and tech is dying out . . . 😊✌😎
Since they closed the local malt shop, I haven’t had much contact with the younger generation.
Fortunately, there’s the internet: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/07/young-people-quiet-revolution-social-media.html
I can’t wait to “retire” and work offline and be away from the screens a lot more.
EMP or a Coronal Mass Ejection.
Gamma ray bursts are a good, terrifying, black swan event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
These extreme electromagnetic emissions are second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic and luminous phenomena known.
A gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way pointed directly at Earth would likely sterilize the planet or cause a mass extinction.[13]
Since GRBs are thought to involve beamed emission along two jets in opposing directions, only planets in the path of these jets would be subjected to the high energy gamma radiation.[145] A GRB could potentially vaporize anything in its beams’ paths within a range of around 200 light-years.[146][147]
Oh cool, a new one we can do nothing about… And people worry abut the silliest things these days when this is out there.
I would say never because banking and such is to convenient but man companies keep making their sites interfaces worse and worse.
I’m not sure you can. Most forms are emailed or filled out directly on a site. No job application is submitted on paper, security would likely escort you out of most businesses if you tried to deliver a resume in person.
Filling out benefits “paper”work for a job, also purely digital.
What’s your plan for streaming? A smart tv? That’s just as bad as any browser without ublock.
I could just memorize it, then I wouldn’t need it.
You already know all the letters and all the different colours. I’d say you can just improvise most of it.
probably when I have to show ID. at that point, I’m just going to read books and work on hobbies. I mostly use the internet at work anyway. when I’m at home, I’m usually working on something else.
Depends on what in using it for. There is no way to fully avoid the Internet anymore. You can’t interact with businesses or government without it. So, for that, we’re stuck with it.
I work in IT so I’ll be stuck with it there. I already have no expectation of privacy at work, though.
For entertainment and engaging with communities like Lemmy, I think losing anonymity through mandatory online id would be the nail in the coffin.
I already moderate myself on social media, but I have an outlet in these communities. I would simply stop using them if I lost that.
I would guess underground networks would rise up to replace them, but I would not want to put myself at risk. I don’t trust VPNs enough for that.
