The Network Is Still There. The People Aren’t.
There was a time when typing a message into a terminal actually meant something.
You hit enter, and it went somewhere real. Not into a queue. Not into a model. Not into a monetisation funnel dressed up as a timeline. It went to people. Actual people. In a room. Watching the same stream of text, in real time, with no gatekeeper standing between your signal and their eyes.
That wasn’t magic. That was just how the internet worked.
Or how it was supposed to work.
Back When the Network Was the Interface
Once upon a time, the stack was clean.
user → client → protocol → network → other users
No middlemen. No “boost this post.” No “unlock reach.” No opaque ranking system deciding whether your words were worth anyone’s time.
You joined a channel. You spoke. Everyone saw it.
If you were boring, you got ignored. If you were interesting, people replied. That was the algorithm. Brutal, human, immediate.
IRC didn’t care who you were. It didn’t care how much money you had. It didn’t care about your engagement metrics, your posting schedule, your brand voice, or your follower count.
It just delivered the message.
Thirty years ago, a kid with a dodgy connection and a half-broken client had the same broadcasting power as anyone else in the room.
That wasn’t a limitation.
That was the point.
The Great Trade: Convenience for Control
Then came the carrot.
Convenience.
No more remembering servers. No more weird clients. No more figuring out where your people were hanging out. Just sign up, log in, and we’ll handle the rest. We’ll show your content to people. We’ll connect you. We’ll grow your audience.
It worked.
People moved.
The old infrastructure didn’t break — it just got abandoned. Like a perfectly good city left to rot because someone built a shinier one down the road with better lighting and easier parking.
And once everyone moved in?
The terms changed.
What was once:
type → delivered → seen
became:
type → platform → algorithm → maybe seen
That “maybe” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The Illusion of Reach
Modern social media sells reach the way casinos sell luck.
The promise is scale. Massive, global, instant visibility. You’re not limited to a channel of a few hundred people anymore. You’ve got the whole world.
In theory.
In practice, most users are shouting into a void that looks busy from the outside and silent from within.
The timeline is full, but your post isn’t in it.
Not unless the system decides it should be.
Not unless you play the game.
Not unless you pay.
So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds:
No guaranteed delivery like IRC
No guaranteed reach like the marketing copy suggests
Just a probabilistic system where visibility is rationed, nudged, and increasingly sold back to you.
Managing Ten Platforms Instead of One Network
We were told this was simpler.
That we wouldn’t have to coordinate presence anymore. That we wouldn’t need to maintain identities across fragmented systems.
Absolute nonsense.
What we actually got was:
IRC: 1 protocol → many networks → 1 client Now: many platforms → many identities → no shared layer
Instead of managing a nick and a handful of channels, you’re now:
maintaining multiple accounts
adapting to multiple formats
chasing multiple algorithms
posting into multiple systems
All of which refuse to talk to each other.
Congratulations. You’re now manually federating closed systems like some kind of human middleware.
The Backbone Is Open. The World Isn’t There.
Here’s the part that stings.
The internet itself didn’t close.
The protocols are still there. HTTP still works. RSS still works. Email still works. You can still stand on the open backbone and broadcast your signal into the void.
The problem is:
No one’s there.
The settlements moved.
What used to be shared space is now empty infrastructure — perfectly functional, completely uninhabited. Meanwhile, the crowds live inside bright, sealed environments orbiting overhead, each one charging rent in money, data, or attention.
You can still build a website.
You can still publish a feed.
You can still speak.
But unless you plug yourself into one of the gated systems, your signal doesn’t land anywhere meaningful.
Not because the network is broken.
Because the people left.
Pay to Speak, Pay to Be Heard
Let’s not dance around it.
Distribution is no longer neutral.
Money doesn’t guarantee success, but it absolutely increases your odds of being seen. The system is tilted, and it’s tilted on purpose.
What used to be a flat plane is now a gradient.
At the top: those who can pay, optimise, and game the system.
At the bottom: everyone else, posting into a probabilistic void and hoping for a flicker of visibility.
The lie wasn’t that the system would be free forever.
The lie was that convenience wouldn’t come with a long-term cost.
What We Actually Lost
This isn’t just about APIs or interoperability.
What we lost is simpler, and more fundamental:
a shared space where messages were reliably seen
Not scaled. Not boosted. Not optimised.
Seen.
That certainty is gone.
In its place, we got:
massive scale with no guarantees
frictionless posting with conditional visibility
global networks with localised silence
Conclusion: The Signal Still Exists
Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud.
You can still broadcast.
You just can’t assume anyone will hear you.
That’s the real shift.
The network didn’t die. It got hollowed out, then wrapped in layers designed to extract value from the act of speaking and being heard.
What used to be a basic function is now a product.
What used to be a right of participation is now a managed experience.
And yeah, it’s bitter.
Because once you’ve seen the old model — once you’ve lived in a system where typing a message meant guaranteed delivery to real people — everything that came after feels like a downgrade wrapped in better UX.
The stack didn’t evolve.
It got enclosed.
And somewhere underneath all of it, still humming quietly, is the version of the internet that actually worked.