[OT] Centralization of internet makes it fragile
akmerlow
Posts: 1,124
At the moment of making this post i can't use Facebook or Instagram as both are offline. Not just for me, but for most people.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22708989/instagram-facebook-outage-messenger-whatsapp-error
And what's app doesn't work as it should as well.
Surely, the next day or something they will fix this and it will return to normal. But...
Just depressing to realize how much we depend on these services and when they switch off we are left helpless.
I don't even want to think about tons, and tons, and tons of content that exists only within Facebook or Instagram or Discord, be that very useful informational posts or photos/images.
And how many people nowodays use such platforms not just as entertainment, but also for actual work. And, for me, there are enough people with whom i have the only way of contact is through IG or FB.
...i think, for the sake of sanity, you all should just
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Comments
Ironic to think that the Internet (or its predecessor) was designed to be a robust network that could survive a nuclear attack that took out key nodes in the network.
And now someone fat-fingers an update in a zone file on a couple of DNS servers and the most heavily-used sites on the Internet go bye-bye.
I will be more productive today because of the particular sites that are down.
Oculus headsets are still working for everything except specifically for FB (friends, avatar) but all the apps seem to be working even Internet ones like YouTube and AltspaceVR.
Well, some of us don't use Facebook - but you have my sympathy
I have no accounts on Facebook or Instagram...
So, I'm not helpless today ;)
Also I have no credits.
What's wrong with me?
I'M FREE!!!
Twitter works in my place.
Wow, FB, twitter and IG being gone would be a reason to celebrate IMO, LOL
I am on FB daily, but I can honestly say, I do not feel helpless because I do have a life outside the internet which is, to me, so much more important.
Thanks. Personally, it feels bad how these three are "eggs in one basket":
- in facebook i have contact with people who abandoned any other means of contact; i also co-admin certain groups of interest there; and some developers/companies profiles to reach out;
- in instagram i was subscribed to musicians posting short videos, photographers and artists, also some friends who only ever reply to ig's personal message system; also some extremely useful channels like the one that posts colour pallettes for graphic design; and i know many companies overall especially concert halls or cafe or shops do rely so much on promotion via ig;
- since 2016, almost in every company where i worked, the very huge chunk of communication between colleagues and boss is done via whatsapp, with several group chats/conferences dedicated to this or that w.i.p. event or companies' partition e.g. separate chats for design team and logistics.
And so on and so forth.
Internet, or more correctly TCP/IP is still designed to be faukt tolerant. The issue is that now when there are millions of network owners that have contracts with each other for who will forward what traffic from that network to that network, as soon as something gors wrong, instead of nicely finding new way, "border routers" stand there saying "Thou shalt not pass!"
In the case of DNS issues, the propagation is quite slow, so when a bad DNS value is propagated, depending of refresh time (recommended to be 24-48 hours), it will take that long before the corrected value is propagated through everywhere.
There is a fun story about an African conference where they complained about slow internet. Analysis showed that the ISP used where the conference was held had been reconfigrued to route all traffic through China using the border router protocol configs. Yes, it's that easy for your traffic from point A to B to take a detour via somewhere it was not supposed to be.
Same worries i also have regarding recent fashion of using discord instead of a separate message board or chat room for communities/projects nowodays. People now treat them as forum replacement and often put important information that may not exist anywhere else (e.g. there was a circle of programmers who kept documentation of how to make custom mods for a certain game only in private discord and when admin had nervous breakdown and nuked the server, it basically killed the whole modding community as nobody even backed docs and posts), and also discord servers are not indexed by search engines etc. etc.
If one "board hosted on company's site" goes offline, its just it. If the whole discord or reddit goes 404, it's thousands of communities that loose access.
Relax, akmerlow. Nobody can use these services now, so you're missing nothing. Just have a rest and look around... may be you're missing something in real life ;)
Wheee..., no problems here... no accounts for Faceplant, TwitsAhoy, or any scheme of that ilk. I was there at the beginning and predicted what the Internet would become. Wrote a paper about it, opted out of everything except the basics. Never looked back. I do show up in a couple forums and also use on-line catalogs, banks & government but I wanted nothing to do with any of the social media apps. I could expound on why, but I'm sure a moderator would find a TOS violation in there somewhere.
One more free man :)
And, of course, there is a built in risk in complex systems. For example, a human body doesn't tolerate the failure of a non redundant heart, brain, liver, lungs, on and on....
I go with liver, heart, lungs. I am not going with brain. Given the behaviour of some people, regardless where located and if using so-call "social" media or not, the Zombie apocalypse seems to have started already. Too many brain-dead people around...
I like FB, or rather my friends and kin that haven't lived in the same neighborhood(s) now for decades. There is no better way to unobtrusively say "hey" again really.
This is not the best version of me but I'll be honest: I'd kind of love to see footage of influencers all over the world having a meltdown right now!
I closed my FB page a few years ago because of the extreme political and conspiracy stuff being pushed my way - even from people I had previously considered friends. I still use Messenger and WhatsApp though to keep in touch with family and real friends. So I can use SMS texts if necessary. No use for Instagram either so this is no biggie for me.
You could say that plenty of people who were in awe about social network stites in 2000s now only use them for private messaging. But, yeah, on the other hand it's still also a place to useful communities that sadly or not exist just there for some reason. E.g. facebook group "Bryce Paradise" has people (posting and discussing bryce related things) who are not presented here at daz.
Truth.
Messenger is back for me now
Ci Pwff (my Samoyed) has about 4,600 followers on Instagram and it's a lot of fun chatting with folks all over the world who are dog lovers :) I get a good laugh at some of the videos.
I also have no use for those platforms but yeah I'm sure they had meltdowns and made videos of themselves to share and spam the whole internet with their mental breakdown footage.
it could be worse...
DAZ could be down
Seriously, I'd miss that a thousand times more.
When Facebook first came out I had no interest in it, but eventually I made an account to shut everyone up so they'd stop bothering me about it, but by the time I made an account it was already turning into a pretty toxic place... I haven't used it for probably three years and have no intention to use any time soon... my initial objection to it was due to people insisting I join, but now my objections are just personal ones about the divisions and polarization it's helping to cause and how it banks on that to keep itself relevant.
That's a me too. All of it.