Tell me about your favorite tree (a slow-web proposal)

https://nannnsss.omg.lol/2025/tell-me-about-your-favorite-tree/

by surprisetalk • 1 year ago

91 80 1 year ago

nannnsss.omg.lol

WJW• 1 year ago

I'd have to say some sort of B-tree. Though many bugs live in mine, I still like it. The amount of leaves it has throughout the seasons may very wildly, but I like it even if it has no leaves at all. I don't think I have ever framed a leaf from it myself, but I have definitely serialized it into binary and sent it off over the network, so it's possible that somewhere along the route it got stuck into an ethernet frame.

All in all an A-tier tree and I would definitely get a new one if I lost this version.

uncircle2• 1 year ago

My thoughts lately have been bouncing between "they've finally killed the internet" and "there's no way to create an island for humans online anymore, is there?" and I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question.

In an ever-larger Internet with ever-growing bullshit and regurgitated, useless data, social-media-driven madness, commercial interests, the odds of finding islands of naive and purely human interaction shrink by the day. Given the advances of AI, the hope of having a network of "unadulterated" users, however small, are practically nil. Add the fact that most of human affairs are now online - work, leisure, communication, paying taxes, shopping, etc. - there is not even a realistic hope of living without the net.

What are we to do? Do we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming? Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible? Can we connect three computers with the full guarantee they are all being operated by homo sapiens? Will "real-life, face-to-face interaction" become the new frontier for outcasts, weirdos and idealists, just like the internet was 30 years ago?

This is a serious question and request for comments. I do not particularly care to start a discussion on whether AI is good, the internet is fine and I'm being dramatic; there are plenty of other places to discuss AI optimism.

[My favourite tree is the birch. Majestic with its white bark, reminds me of cooler climates. Also pines, with the peculiar smell and the reddish, thick carpet of needles they leave on the forest floor.]

fsflover• 1 year ago

My thoughts lately have been bouncing between "they've finally killed the internet" and "there's no way to create an island for humans online anymore, is there?"

https://wiby.me

cosmicgadget6• 1 year ago

And if the humans are willing to link the connections:

https://avocado.outerweb.org/

bevr13376• 1 year ago

o we only have the choice to assimilate the AI-driven, algorithmic future or to become complete Luddites living on subsistence farming?

A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.

The interesting gist is that Luddites were misrepresented then and continue to be misrepresented today. The Luddite movement isn't conservative nor regressive, it is human!

9rx11• 1 year ago

The Luddite movement isn't conservative

No? To be conservative is to be hesitant of change. I know you say the Luddites have been misrepresented, but if they don't represented at least that much... What do they represent?

it is human!

These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I expect every human is conservative sometimes.

nolist_policy• 1 year ago

A few days ago someone posted an article linking luddites to the NASA moon landing program to AI-generated furry porn.

Have a link?

yesfitz• 1 year ago

An additional concern: Even if you can require proof of humanity to enter an online space, how can you know that the human isn't communing with an AI and reposting whatever it says to?

I agree that there's no way to guarantee that you're interacting with a human online.

Optimistically, this could spark a return to the internet/real-world relationship that the author mentioned: "Back then, the internet felt like an addition to our in-person connecting..."

Rather than meeting people online, you meet them in real life and have the option to talk to them over the internet. Just like you trusted that they didn't hand off their account to another person before AI, you'll have to trust that it's them that you're talking to.

The biggest threat to that scenario is suburbanization and the lack of third spaces. How will you meet new people if there's nowhere to just exist? This was already happening to kids, and the pandemic really accelerated it.

Long story short, I think there's a possibility between assimilation and rebellion, but it's not in the suburbs. We need to work for it now, and fast, because the next generation won't have the frame of reference to do it themselves.

cosmicgadget6• 1 year ago

AI is going to get more interesting. Right now you get vanilla chats and weird, generated images. Eventually AI will have the wealth of all knowledge and a personality.

Is that frightening? Maybe. But it is considerably more cerebral than the infinite scroll/influencer status quo. And there will always be personal interaction and voice/video with realness attestation.

Also, imho we don't want islands of real people since we've seen the islands turn into facebook and tiktok. We need networks of real people interleaved with whatever the rest of the net decides it wants to be.

jbeninger2• 1 year ago

I've often thought that what we need is a social network. You only see your friends, and your friends' friends, and so on. With tools for blocking branches of the graph and restricting views to those friends. All controlled by signed content. A blockchain without the "chain" bit, I guess.

The devil is in the details, of course. Is it even possible to thread the needle of usability and controlling your own data/algorithm? Maybe! But if there's going to be a human island, I think this is the way. Individual trusted connections branching out from you.

delecti• 1 year ago

Bluesky does most of this. One big miss is the lack of private accounts though.

And the "block" in "blockchain" is a different sense of the word from how you block users on social media, so I don't think it bears any resemblance to blockchain. It sounds more like email (or another similarly federated network) with a whitelist.

grep_name• 1 year ago

I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question

Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for the term 'small web'. In particular, I like gemini and tildes (tilde.town, tilde.team, tilde.club, etc) which are actually pretty neat if you take the time to ssh in and checkout the ecosystems they've built. The tildes in particular might surprise you, gemini can be a bit of a ghost town if you don't know where to look though.

Tildes technically aren't public since you have to login to them, but they're not that different from social media in that respect (and since membership usually involves messaging the server owner personally, it's hard to imagine bot activity getting too bad). Gemini is public but you have to use a (usually terminal-based) browser program in order to interact with it and usually self-host a gemlog if you want a 'website' on it.

These communities make me happy because you tend to find people who use xmpp or IRC or alternative platforms there and kinda get away from the enshittification loop. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure since this is HN I'm going to get some very snarky responses for mentioning these things as alternatives, but my experiences with exploring the communities around these technologies have consistently made me smile, which is downright weird in the current year. It's got me considering checking out usenet, which I'm too young to have used before outside of direct downloads.

In retrospect, it's funny because all of the things I mentioned are technically 'not the internet', which might honestly be your answer.

uncircle2• 1 year ago

Thank you for the pointers, I will check those out. Though whatever the protocol it’s only a matter of time before these places get infested as well by bots, bad actors or bad behaviour in general.

vonunov• 1 year ago

technically not the web*

9rx11• 1 year ago

Are (open) islands of humans communicating over the internet possible?

If there is a desirable quality about open islands of humans, sure. Of course. Whatever that desirable quality is will allow recognizing what and what isn't human.

But I suspect there isn't a desirable quality to be found there. In fact, before the "Facebook age" came along, the idea of humans on the internet was more or less considered to be a scourge. HN itself is a product of that era, removing all semblance of whatever humanity there might be hidden in the implementation details. The Internet was seemingly born to be a completely different world, void of humans, only software.

ramses0• 1 year ago

There was an old blog post that talked about "hot tub communities" ... legend says there was a backyard with a hot tub with a passcode lock. The owner didn't mind people using it until the A-holes showed up and then he'd change the passcode on the lock again.

There's more to the story (of course) than this half-remembered paragraph, but I've thought through if there was a way to reproduce that.

Nowadays, there were two schisms. One was between Facebook and YouTube... FB being content walled and protected by default, where YouTube (and old blogs and StackOverflow, Reddit, etc) were public by default.

I hate feeding Facebook, but now, "speaking in public", you're "just feeding the bots". Your content is vaporized into the aether the instant you make it public.

I've thought through if there were a way to make more private, semi-distributed communities, but you run smack into the difficulty of one "traitor" that rebroadcasts content (or any rebroadcasting at all) ends up ruining the closed system.

Time to change the lock on the hot tub again, and delete all the recordings from the cameras. :-/

riebschlager• 1 year ago

I resonate with this nostalgia for the early internet, I really do. But lately I've been wondering if the tools available to us now are the key to bringing back what we miss about the old internet.

For example, let's look at "for you page" style algorithms. When I open Reels, I see incredible musicians, mind-blowing visual art and really thoughtful insights from people all over the world. That's exactly what I wanted out of the early internet, and here it is, an ever-evolving system that connects me with all the weird and amazing things that exist out in the world.

And those people in the world who make this content now have an agent actively connecting them with their audience. Yes, I realize this is an extremely charitable interpretation of what's happening behind the scenes. But often, the content I see feels very close to what the author is describing: Someone taking the time to describe their favorite tree.

If there was ever a "good ol' internet", it's still in there. It's just had tons of freeways and high-rise buildings built up around it. The older I get, the more it seems like you just need to let your eyes adjust a bit to see it.

Edited to add: My favorite tree, right now anyway, is a pair of birch trees in a park near my home. When they leaf out and the wind blows, I sit in the grass between them and it sounds almost like I'm at a beach, which is really nice because I'm about as far from an ocean as you can be on this planet.

moolcool• 1 year ago

But lately I've been wondering if the tools available to us now are the key to bringing back what we miss about the old internet.

One of the best things about the old internet was Flash Player. It was an extremely low barrier-to-entry way for creators (especially young creators) to make games and animation which could be played in-browser on extremely low-power hardware. To this day, there's nothing which comes close to filling the vacuum.

9rx11• 1 year ago

what we miss about the old internet.

I expect the only thing we actually miss about it is that it opened up a new frontier to explore, with nobody really understanding what it could be, allowing us to geek out on trying all kinds of crazy ideas to see what might stick.

Nowadays we more or less have a good understanding of what the internet is. There is no doubt still room for a crazy idea here and there, but it isn't the every idea is crazy feeding frenzy that we found in the early days.

We don't really want the old internet back – it never went away. Instead, we are ready for the "next internet", whatever that may be.

cosmicgadget6• 1 year ago

You're saying we won't get the feeling back because it is no longer a frontier? I don't agree or disagree just curious.

parpfish2• 1 year ago

i can't help that think a big part of what made the internet special was that it wasn't for everybody back in the day.

it used to be that only certain types of people had the means and interest to be there. going there was like venturing into a world that was created and maintained by people that were all a little... weird. if you were also somebody that was also a little weird, it was a nice escape and gave a sense of belonging because the default way of being was "a little weird".

but now the internet is mainstream. the internet populus mirrors the real world populus. it's not built by and for nerds and academics and startrek obsessives anymore, it's built to serve the needs of the normal and popular people because normal people are now the modal people on the internet.

there are still pockets where you can find your weirdo kin, but you need to look for them. and the fact that you need to look for them kind of ruins the old allure where you could imagine what a parallel universe run by people like you would be like.

croisillon• 1 year ago

the weeping willow is my favourite tree, first because it literally weeps, the leaves drip honeydew, and also because i associate it with my late grandfather

micromacrofoot• 1 year ago

the slow internet didn't go away, it's just not the primary internet anymore so it's a lot harder to find through all the crabs in the bucket trying to claw their way to your eyeballs

cosmicgadget6• 1 year ago

While the buckets profit off that model. Been indexing the slow web, it's very much alive.

neogodless• 1 year ago

So to go a bit sideways, I'd say that a lot of people want to feel heard, and be around someone that is a good listener.

Fewer people care to be a good listener. And not without good reason. It's hard. It's hard to be the listener, because it can drain you. Other people like it, and they like being able to talk to (or at?) you.

And "most" people on the internet want to firehose their lives to the world, and then take a break and whip through glimpses of the internet at a million short clips a minute. How much are we absorbing along the way? Who is feeling "seen" and "heard" on the internet?

Now when someone sits down and writes an earnest blog post, and someone else takes the time to read it, and then writes a comment which proves they engaged, overall the interaction feels meaningful, and someone maybe gets a little reassurance they have a voice, and others in the world have a moment to listen.

But both of those things take time and effort, and most people simply don't see enough value in that. Maybe they are too distracted. Too drained from how life is lived, and then too low energy to do anything but consume distractions.

A downward cycle instead of a virtuous cycle. But how many of us are good at putting consistency into doing the healthy things for our body and mind that keep us feeling energized and motivated to slow down and engage?

munificent• 1 year ago

I think we all know that we should avoid junk food snacks and instead eat a few healthy meals that leave us feeling fully nourished and sated. The kind of meal where afterwards you feel done but not gross or weighed down.

When I'm disciplined about not buying junk at the store and my kitchen only has relatively unprocessed ingredients, I find myself obligated to make that kind of food.

But if the chips are there, it's really hard to not wander into the kitchen and snack on them. I only have finite willpower after all.

The modern world is like being completely surrounded by junk food for our attention, 24/7. It's no wonder ADHD diagnoses are spiking, people are anxious, no one seems to have enough willpower anymore, and we're all struggling to do what we know is best for ourselves.

strohwueste• 1 year ago

If they make decisions based in data, you should be in the data stream.

Going blind to the big data is like not voting in my opinion. I also cherish those Islands but I see it as a place in which you put data which shouldn't be in the bug data pool or at least in a different category and not traceable back to you...

Swizec4• 1 year ago

Whenever you pine for the old internet stop and think: Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

For me the answer invariably comes out as Yes. Mom filled the fridge, homework wasn’t that hard, and I could spend hours upon hours just existing on the internet. Find a new friend? GReat! Chat for hours. Find a new idea? Awesome! Deep dive into a wikipedia rabbit hole for hours. Get an idea? Superb! Spend the next week coding every day after school to make it happen.

Now I have, like, obligations and stuff. The list of fun new ideas and friends and websites to explore is … very long. Not to mention all the existing fun ideas friends and websites I’ve already accumulated that I also enjoy spending time with. Realistically there is very little room for anything new.

So ask yourself: Do you miss the old internet or do you miss being a kid staring at a new-to-you frontier?

edit: Whenever I talk about this with people IRL. “the old internet” is always whatever was available when they were in middle/high school. Funny how that works :)

9rx11• 1 year ago

Definitely a case of missing new tech, plain and simple. We don't seem to create much anymore.

There are glimmers of hope here and there. I'd say LLMs brought the same sort of wonderment as the internet for a short period, but we quickly pushed them to their limits. They're a bit too much of a product, not the basic lego building block that the internet was for them to offer long-lasting effects. Granted, perhaps they are the BBS of our time, with an evolutionary, but game changing, step on the horizon?

But in the last 30 years, the smartphone might be the only game changing tech we've gained. And, sure enough, I'd say the early smartphone era was just as fascinating and fun as the early internet era. However, by now it too has grown long in the tooth. We really just pine for another automobile/airplane/space rocket/internet moment; something that changes everything.

bevr13376• 1 year ago

Whenever you pine for the old internet stop and think: Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

This rings very true for video games. I cut my teeth on MUDs then MMOs and find myself craving pleasant social environments. It's easy to blame Discord or other social tools that gobbled up the gaming I enjoyed, but I'm old and all my peers are old, and the truth is I don't have 4 hours to roleplay about werewolf vampire monks.

That said, sometimes things really do change. I do get excited when I find a cool hobby website from a passionate nerd, or something like the MMOndrian game shared here a few days ago. There's more cool stuff than ever, but it does represent less of the general web experience.

agumonkey• 1 year ago

It's partly true, the world is managed for you as a kid. But I don't think it's more than that. I wanted the fast web, I talked about ajax at length, saving resources, and time for everybody. The cobra effects are now too numerous to count.

z0r• 1 year ago

There is something to what you are saying, but there's also the truth that an increasing amount of software has been shifted into web browsers. Now the web is full of places where you can't control your own data by default, news is locked behind paywalls and an unbelievable number of ads, and the most successful websites like Facebook have replaced blogs with Skinner boxes. Maybe you can contrast the ways you used to talk with your friends online with the popular options now and see some of the differences - all of the dominant options mandate a closed source client and federation isn't even a joke to laugh about.

sixdimensional• 1 year ago

IMHO, modern society critically undervalues the importance of open-ended play in all aspects of work and life.

musicale4• 1 year ago

Reminiscent of the push to make kindergarten more like upper grades or workplaces, rather than vice-versa.

The push to transform learning, or any form of productive activity, into drudgery, and humans into joyless (and often sedentary) robots, is regrettable. And the irony is that in the long run robots will be better robots than roboticized humans anyway.

chrismorgan• 1 year ago

When you follow niche interests like velomobile construction (just the example I thought of first), you find most of the useful stuff is from before 2006, and the best discussion venues old-school forums that have barely changed in at least 15 years, but are sometimes still alive.

(Older sites rot less, too; but even when you find archives of somewhat newer stuff, on average the content wasn’t so valuable.)

I miss the old web.

account42• 1 year ago

This is such a lame argument that comes up anytime someone dares suggest that things might have been better in the past. It's lame because it is not an argument at all but a casual dismissal of the original claim without anything of substance to back that up.

Swizec4• 1 year ago

a casual dismissal of the original claim without anything of substance to back that up

I am not dismissing it. I miss the old internet too.

But what I’ve found is that I miss the free time to explore a lot more. When I find that, there is suddenly plenty of good people on the internet sharing interesting things. But usually in my busy life I scurry past without even noticing.

For example: there are entire corners of instagram devoted to people with a few hundred followers sharing daily chicken drama from their farms. Like a soap opera with daily updates … about chickens. Doesn’t get more “describe your favorite tree” than that

Joeri• 1 year ago

It can be true that what people miss most of all is the freedom of childhood and that the internet is on a decades long decline.

The commercialized centralized appified algorithm-fed web is inferior when it comes to community-forming. It creates the illusion of social cohesion but in reality interactions are too superficial for real communities (and friendships) to form.

footy• 1 year ago

I do not miss anything about my childhood and you truthfully could not pay me to be any younger than 29 again, but the internet I remember from late high school/early university (before social media and the monetization of everything) was better than the internet we have now.

jrvieira• 1 year ago

It's the old internet. I started having meaningful interactions again when I deleted most my social media accounts and rediscovered IRC and other platforms alike.

I started consuming quality content again when i replaced youtube with a FOSS wrapper that allows me to avoid the algorithm and ads, started torrenting books and getting my news through RSS feeds.

I started having fun again when I stopped using Steam and replaced it with oldschool LAN parties with my friends.

And before you accuse me of nostalgia, I never went to a LAN party when I was young, nor did I use IRC that much (the internet was expensive!).

Yes, the old internet was and still is better.

safety1st• 1 year ago

I miss the world as it was before pervasive social media. Compared to back then, we are now utterly consumed by the opinions of people we don't know and will never meet. We spend time worrying unreasonably about what a disembodied hive mind thinks or how it might harm us if our opinions don't conform. We have research which shows that social media has added to the depression and anxiety in the world and contributed to a mental health crisis. This has nothing to do with my childhood or my middle or high school years, I was well out of college before Facebook was created.

musicale4• 1 year ago

Social media seems to be engineered to push people to extremes, and civil discourse seems almost impossible in many instances.

Facebook's original feed was kind of OK when it was just a chronological list of posts from your friends (though that still has some issues). But of course that doesn't make as much money as an algorithmic feed that pushes advertisements and outrage-driven "engagement".

Yellow journalism has been around forever, but now we have outrage media that is optimized for each person with an addictive feedback loop.

Somehow I don't think AI is going to improve the situation.

alt187• 1 year ago

You're refreshingly verbose, considering the quality of your argument.

Ironically, one of the biggest point raised against this Brave New Internet is its infantilizing and "managed" way of treating the user. You should probably read the original article -- it makes this point very clearly.

jtuple2• 1 year ago

Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

I loathed my childhood, and have far more freedom as an adult then I ever did then.

School, homework, chores, strict bedtime, dial-up Internet, shared desktop computers...

Yes, I spent a ton of time playing games, compiling the Linux kernel, and screwing around on the Internet back then. But outside of summer vacation (which I do miss dearly), I spend just as much or more online today as then.

I absolutely do miss the old Internet, not just that time period.

But, there's bright spots in the modern Internet too. The rise of online D&D via Discord during the pandemic was amazing. I play far more D&D thesedays then I ever did since the 90s. Discord also scratches the MUD/IRC itch. But, not sure Discord will survive the next decade either.

jtuple2• 1 year ago

TBH, its not even middle/high-school era Internet I miss most either. While I have fond mid-90s memories, I think peak Internet is somewhere in 2008-2012 range.

The Internet was mostly additive up to that point. New tech, sites, services existed alongside what came before.

I can appreciate Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and even Twitter (it was huge for distributed systems/database community ~2009-15) at different points in time.

It was really the photo-first, later video-first, shift that happened mid-2010s + big tech dominance that strangled old Internet. No longer being additive, but shrinking the Internet into fewer properties, with everything just being "content".

musicale4• 1 year ago

D&D turned out to be a killer app for youtube, since game streams are fun to watch and also a great onramp for new players.

For online play though I have mostly used roll20 (occasionally fantasygrounds, and very rarely discord but just for audio.)

ofalkaed• 1 year ago

I miss the old internet and for me I consider that to be before the smartphone. I don't especially miss the internet of middle school and high school, I have some fond memories of it but I found the local BBSes far more interesting.

layer8• 1 year ago

You‘re assuming a certain age range where kids already had internet access. This wasn’t the case for the slightly older “piners”.

micheles• 1 year ago

I am old. The time of the old Internet corresponds to my Ph.D. years, so I was very much an adult. I still miss it ;-)

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

“the old internet” is always whatever was available when they were in middle/high school.

This is a really bad, lazy, thought-terminating meme. If you think the internet isn't net worse today, support your position. The existence of nostalgia isn't evidence that the quality of the world remains constant.

fennecbutt• 1 year ago

No, we still had responsibilities then.

I think the real answer is that we never thought what we had would change, or go away.

I think I described it in another comment from a wee while ago, but the old Internet was split. It was like there was a giant wall up between the serious business side of the Internet and the fun meme side of the Internet. "Pssssh, nobody is gonna make money from this stuff, that's not the point."

And then the serious business side realised that everything on the other side of the wall was monetisable. And so they broke the wall down, to offer us t-shirts and mugs with our memes on them. And then the denizens of the fun loving side realised that money could indeed be made from memes. And now you have it, the modern Internet where it's all purely about clout, creating an image/brand for yourself, monetising going viral, engagement farming.

It's ironically biblical, in a way.

musicale4• 1 year ago

People miss the old internet because the new internet is getting worse in tangible ways every year: adtech, AI-generated slop (and SEO slop even before that), manipulative algorithms, and ever-more-intrusive monetization.

The iron law of encrapification dictates that almost any web platform (youtube, reddit, etc.) will keep pushing the "degrade the end user experience to make more money" button until it stops working.

A slightly more charitable take is that people miss the "loss leader" versions of platforms before the inevitable monetization push (demanding continual growth even in a saturated market) took hold and started making them worse every year.

udev4096• 1 year ago

There are still parts of the web which are not capitalistically rotted. Bittorrent, Usenet, Bitcoin, Tor, I2P, etc. You can join them or better yet, support them by running nodes

parpfish2• 1 year ago

Most of the time that people share on the internet via social media, it’s a one-to-hugelymany broadcast. As a reader, I don’t feel the need to be a good listener. I’m one of a huge crowd listening, this message wasn’t meant to specifically engage with me. In fact, it would be weird if I replied because this is meant to be a big message going out to lots of people and I shouldn’t elbow my way into the middle of it. Better to just click +1.

If you sent a DM or group chat, I’d know for certain that I’m meant to engage and wouldn’t just superficially skim as a bystander. Just replying with a +1 would feel dismissive. You’re expected to engage and reciprocate.

This ability to have broadcasted vs targeted communications is relatively new for folks, and I’ve noticed that not everyone has learned to distinguish these communication styles.

Younger generations seem to grok it because they grew up with it, but everyone else needs to learn as they go. If you were blogging back on the old internet and had lots of meaningful targeted communication with your audience, it’s going to be a shock when people start treating your content as broadcasts and stop interacting the way you are used to.

The thing I think we’re missing is long-form targeted messaging like an old-school blog. You could send emails, but that is 100% private so there’s no way for a new reader to join in.

jppope• 1 year ago

Totally understand that the article is romanticizing the old web, which I do miss. But I do want to mention my two favorite trees, one is gone now.

My first favorite tree was an American Chestnut that I used to walk past on the way home from elementary school. For a time there was a slate sidewalk underneath the tree and the chestnuts themselves were a constant annoyance, but the tree was big, beautiful and shady, it made my neighbor's yard look really nice. I was shocked to learn later how fortunate I was to experience a real American Chestnut that had survived the blight (reddit even has a sub dedicated to finding survivors: https://www.reddit.com/r/americanchestnut/). I went back to try to find pictures of the tree and its since been razed. Presumably it died of blight, and the owners replaced it.

My second favorite tree is a somewhat famous Giant Sequoia I found after moving out west. I'm not doing disclose the location or the tree's name because its too easy to figure out where I am. The tree is the largest in town but not by much... it does stand out though. Without knowing its species the tree got me curious. I found out that it was actually a Sequoia! this surprised me because I thought they were relegated to small areas inside of national parks - NOT TRUE! Finding this tree led me to be intensely curious about all the other trees in town- what else was I missing? so I spent 6 months going on morning walks with a tree identification book. I met all sorts of people, and learned a ton about the trees. Tree identification is super hard by the way... I'm still getting my feet underneath me even after all that time. I was able to identify ~30 native species though, which was really cool!

I'd love to hear about other people's favorite trees.

voxleone• 1 year ago

The beautiful larch()

Come the fall, her crown turns gold, A fire against the coming cold. She sheds her robe as others cling— The only pine to welcome spring.

() Never saw one in person and maybe will never see.

whitehexagon• 1 year ago

I found a beautiful giant Giant Sequoia last I was contracting in Luzern, probably as old as the city itself. It's been my (digital) wallpaper ever since.

But my favourites have always been the oaks, and I still plant acorns whenever the opportunity arises. I have a few saplings in pots right now waiting for new homes. Maybe 500 years from now, someone will be sat under one of my oaks, reading a history book on the collapse of democracy during the 21st century, and the almost total destruction of global biodiversity. Planting trees feels like pretty much the only positive contribution I can make to this crazy world.

astrolx• 1 year ago

The aspen for me, I love how the leaves shake in the wind. My kid used to fall asleep watching them while I was carrying him around on walks at sleep time, good times!

croemer• 1 year ago

This is my favorite tree - a phylogenetic tree of 4k Pango lineages of SARS-CoV-2: https://nextstrain.org/staging/nextclade/sars-cov-2

philipov• 1 year ago

#1 The Larch

Daisywh• 1 year ago

I never really noticed it until one day, while I was walking, I suddenly noticed how much denser the leaves on the old tree at the street corner had become. That’s when I realized that the beauty of life often lies in these small details. People tend to rush after big goals and forget to appreciate what’s right in front of them. Just like the article mentions, slow networks are a way to return to the essence of life, allowing us to slow down and truly sense everything around us.

cosmicgadget6• 1 year ago

I want you to call me

Provides no phone number. Smh.

Blog posts are hit or miss but a good one is so much more rewarding than anything else on the internet.

motohagiography• 1 year ago

a romantic idea. I've managed to achieve a kind of Walden / Wonko the Sane way of life in tech, where I work by a picture window looking out on a large field on a farm, and I in fact chop wood and get my water from a well, actually.

the way I use tech now is mainly trying to get LLM agents to work to shorten the daydreaming process by giving me the answers I need. the thing is, tech is just for building more tech. it only builds upwards on the stack, and doesn't yield discovery or growth outside it. it doesn't make me a better musician, horseman, hiker, motorcyclist, lifter of heavy things, or friend, etc. these things are only the effect of practice.

maybe the response is not so much a kind asceticism where choices of taste in tech or opinion become a proxy for purity, but to ask, what have you physically practiced vs. merely consumed?

FlyingSnake• 1 year ago

My favourite tree is the Neem tree. It’s scientific name Azadirachta Indica means the “free spirited tree of India” and it comes from the Farsi word “Azaad Dirakht-e-hind”. A gem among trees.

I love the slow web and once in a while I try to write something non-technical about things that catch my eye. Each of us has got a unique perspective and it’s refreshing to read about them.

My attempt and shameless plug: https://samkhawase.com/blog/an-ode-to-the-tiger/

hsnice16• 1 year ago

I do something here - https://personal-logs.vercel.app/

Tell me about your favorite tree (a slow-web proposal)

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