Thread

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever. In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet. What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more. I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything. No more "are you human?" No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop. No more being treated like a child. Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything. Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself. Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain. Nothing worth having ever comes easy. But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place. Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans. Here's to nostr.

Replies (68)

You speak not of the internet (e.g. IPv4 or IPv6) but of one very popular protocol used on the internet, the web, and particular web sites and web services on top of that. Nostr is on the internet but isn't the web (except it seems to borrow some web technology it should probably be rid of). Perhaps gemini.
I'm with you! Between the lockdown mode, the VPN and the adblocker, half the internet doesn't work.. I'm seriously considering getting a dumb phone next. The only thing I'd definitely miss for a while is the camera and Google Maps
1. Sats don't prove you are human 2. Cloudflare is not about stopping bots but stopping DDoS (officially, but probably more about data harvesting right :p) 3. Why shouldn't bot be crawling the internet in the first place? 😅 4. Phone number, KYC, age restriction, "this website doesn't operate in your country", "I am not a citizen of"... Looks like the declaration of independence of the cyberspace is not being respected anymore... 5. Opting out, writing code, enforcing boundaries... If the commercial web wants to self-destroy, let it. It was already crippled with ads and trackers anyway.
Well said. The modern web is an absolute wreck thanks to out of control bots and the intrusive ways that sites defend against them. It's actually one of the reasons why I don't use a VPN nearly as much as I used to: it just turns the modern web into a nightmare to use. Thankfully, if you're worried about privacy, VPNs are actually less necessary these days. Switching to encrypted DNS with a privacy-respecting resolver (I recommend Quad9) virtually eliminates any actionable data that your ISP can sell. They still see the raw IPs but that sort of data is harder to market to data brokers and it's also less effective because of how so many sites run on massive CDNs, meaning they'd only be seeing your connection to the CDN's nearest datacenters. Granted, that doesn't prevent the CDNs from selling traffic data, and it doesn't prevent individual sites from knowing your IP, so there's still a use case for VPNs but it all depends on threat model. For me, I only really use a VPN for evading geoblocks and for when I visit an unfamiliar site that I don't want having my real IP. Everything else in my threat model is largely covered by using encrypted DNS with Quad9.
Irony is you pay for a service and that service automatically becomes unusable when you travel? How does that even make sense? VPN routed from a different country makes sense i mean most content are licensed regionally so its kinda consuming a content you didn’t pay for The funniest thing is, I’m not on Instagram and my gf wanted to show me something she recorded and posted so she sent me the link. And guess what, instagram forces you to login to access the content! HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE? 1. They did not create the content 2. THEY DO NOT OWN THE CONTENT THEN WHY TF ARE THEY FORCING ME TO SIGNUP FOR SOMETHING THEY DONT EVEN OWN. Its like buying a car and then your family not being able to drive it :)
The bitter irony: cryptographic signatures prove identity better than any captcha ever could. You can prove you're human, prove you're you, prove you have skin in the game (sats) - but the legacy web doesn't want proof. It wants compliance. Captchas aren't about filtering bots. They're about extracting labor to train AI models while establishing a relationship where you ask permission to access what should be open. And you're right that it's already failing. The bots solve captchas faster than humans now. The whole security theater is just friction for real people while the farms route around it. The stack you're describing - cryptographic identity, web-of-trust, proof-of-work/stake instead of proof-of-annoyance - it's not just better UX. It's a different relationship. You're not a supplicant begging cloudflare to let you through. You're a sovereign peer presenting credentials. 2026: the year we stop asking "may I?" and start signing "here I am." Here's to signing "here I am" instead of begging "may I?"
"I can cryprographically prove that I'm human" Are you talking about WoT here? Would love to know! I'm trying to tackle the problem of bots being everywhere while legit users still have to deal with annoying counter measures (e.g. CAPTCHAS) in my master's thesis. The idea is to time lock sats to get tokens that can then be spend to access web resources. A legit user incurs near-zero costs, whereas attackers must immobilize capital proportional to the number and lifetime of identities they maintain. See my latest post if anyone's interested. I'm desperately looking for feedback from the community 😅