The Internet is a Thin Cylinder: Supporting Millions, Supported by One

The internet is not always a busy place full of charm, but that is only a blink of it.

The other places? Either no one knew it existed, or the only thing that knew it was the bots.

Why is this an actual thing?

You might have been thinking, how could this happen? As of 2026, there are at least 1 billion websites, and if all these just have a few links to another, everyone should be able to see and visit them.

But this is not the case, the reason is not because people cannot find it, it is because they ignored it, because the site had been flushed away by the high-speed development of the Internet.

Some of the sites and tools might be a legendary in the past. But after new tools and technology came in, it is quickly forgotten, only leaving the few people quietly maintaining it.

An example of this

There are millions of examples of old websites that have been forgotten by time. We can take the GNU project Nano as an example that is fairly neutral, not too active, but not completely dead.

It is not a dead project; in fact, it is quite active. But active does not mean it has a big community; few people can create an active environment via just creating code, but few people cannot create charm as it requires not just the code.

If you look at the git log of Nano or the mailing list, you will find out that the only person that is really contributing to the project a lot is the maintainer.

And this project is the text editor that millions of programmers every day, a very important tool that I also use a lot of in. I am very thankful that its creator created it, maybe at the time, they never knew that it's going to be this big.

I am not saying that this is not good, or anything I mentioned in this post. Sometimes these projects are just "finished", and there are seldom bugs; a few people are enough for it to continue. Or working alone is what people prefer, including me.

I chose this project as an example, not because it is the worst. There are thousands of projects that have no one maintaining, it is because it represents the very fragile state of technology - Supporting millions of people, supported by 1 person.

New sites are also involved

Nano is an old project, but not only old projects are lonely, but new ones also do, in the same way. But it's also, a different way. That creates loneliness.

Technology only grabs attention when it can actually do something, or when it is interesting, projects like Nginx and Chromium give a very clear use, therefore people contribute to it and create an active environment.

But not all provides this type of engagement and interest of their websites and projects, take an example of my website at vyang.org, this is a simple website about myself.

I get about a few hundred unique visitors requesting my site; most of them are robots or Internet scans for vulnerabilities. Almost 70% of my requests are made by robots.

This gives you a fake feeling that your website is visited by a lot of "people", but the "people" are not actual "people".

This impacted the creativeness of the Internet, as of most people are moving into big platforms to post their things, and not like the Internet before, where we have to go access the entire Internet to find the solution to a problem.

Because of this, the Internet will be highly standardized, and now when people try to do something, everything is the same.

Looking back, what we have now

I know that there are a lot of problems on the Internet, it is growing fast, and it is very common that we will throw things away when we do not need them anymore.

The issue is that when we throw away things, we do not stop depending on it, while the attention is driven to new projects, the use of old ones never stops, but the development slows or stops.

We constantly invent new things, and shift attention to them. But we do not stop using them, causing a lot of old code to restrict the development of new ones.

Until now, I want to reference a meme picture from the Cloudflare and AWS outages, but the thin cylinder is the old software.

But the worse part about this is that when the fragile part is AWS or Cloudflare, they have engineers waiting 24/7 to fix the problem, but for old software, no one could fix it in time.

How do we solve it? Or do we need to solve it?

This is basically the entire post, what I want to say is that these all happened because the Internet had developed too fast. That people did not have time to absorb all the information and software already created, and new ones had already been created..

What I think is that we should care about the old but software that you use every day, you should always know that behind these software, there are always 1 or few people working for it

The full more detailed version of this blog containing more of my opinions is available on vyang.org.