We’re watching the old internet fall apart.
We are Flowers for Algernoning our technology.
If I use my phone (not android Auto), I can no longer say, “Navigate to <place>”. It flat out does not work.
Navigate to Local Bakery Xyz.
I’m sorry I can’t do that.
(It tries to open the non-existent app for the local bakery).
If I’m in the car that has android auto, it refuses to let me type while in drive (fair enough) and it recognizes the “Navigate to…” Instructions, but if I click on the Maps nav bar for voice and say my destination (it literally says, no text while driving speak your destination)… It tries to open the app.
This shit used to work, it’s getting actively dumber.
This morning I got fed up and asked,
“Can I use you to navigate somewhere?”
Sure! Where would you like to go?
“Dutch Bros”
(Opens the Dutch Bros app)
It never occurred to me before now but from here on out, there will probably always be some old part of the internet, crumbling and sparse, moldering and broken, populated by far fewer denizens than it was designed for.
I wonder if that’ll just be the ever-fading “old folks” internet.
You mean sourceforge?
Meanwhile, over at Codeberg: https://status.codeberg.org/
They achieve all of this using 100% open-source infrastructure. If I remember correctly, it’s all running on Codeberg-owned hardware as well, not some rented servers.
They were down for like entire day once because they moved that server to a new location by train. In a backpack.
Migrations should always incur downtime
“Hey we’re migrating, take a break for a week”
I am disappointed. A few servers have been moved via train and stayed online. Codeberg should do better.
If that was their only downtime that year, that would have resulted in 99.7% uptime.
A company at which I once worked built a functioning server into the frame of a motorcycle. It was after I left, so I’m not sure of the details, including whether it had to be plugged in; but regardless, they called it “the world’s fastest server!” and I think that’s pretty funny.
To be fair the number of users they serve is probably orders of magnitudes lower.
To be fair MS makes orders of magnitude more money and has the benefit of operations at scale. Whereas codeberg’s operational budget for 2025 was 100k euro and they still need to deal with DDoS and bot scraping. They also were running off a single server up until sept’25 when they had two donated hardware services which are now hooked up to make a 3 node ceph cluster.
