Let's Make the Web Weird Again [audio]
podcasts.apple.com
podcasts.apple.com
lol. I'm not saying this is futile, but seeing this call to action next to "podcasts.apple.com" means whoever this is won't be the one to do it.
> 3. Making the web weird again: the explosion of retro design ascetics [sic] on the web
Oh, so it's not even about making it weird. It's just sloganeering about quaint aesthetics to shovel React tooling?
I expected little, and I was still underwhelmed. Oh well, such is life.
Well, your comment about it is really nice, it made me smile, especially this last sentence (I find it... poetic!) and at least this thing produced a little connection between me and you.
You never know :)
No.
No no no no no.
This isn't right.
The modern Internet is such sellout. It didn't turn out anything like what I'd hoped.
Bittorrent, semantic tagging, RSS, decentralized aggregation. Ownership. All dead or dying.
These companies are all gobbling up the commons and pushing us into serfdom. Apple, Google, the RIAA. The whole lot of them have poached and polluted the web and protected their profits.
Pretty soon we won't be able to "view source". It'll just be binary blobs with DRM. The browser monoculture will collapse into a universal thin client that leaves "standards" in the dust and takes away all the features BigCo developers don't themselves need. Nobody wants URL bars or ad blocking extensions. Those get in the way of the revolutionary UX they've prepared for us to predictably fawn over.
If Flash can die, one day 3rd party websites can too. In fifteen years your personal website won't even work. I can hear it now: "What's haitch tea tea pee?" Too confusing. Too dangerous.
Your tiny applet will exist within the WeeChat shell that is ChromeOS. The BigCo [1] will take 50% of your profits and make you obey arbitrary rules, lest your app be taken down. This bleak utopia is coming to Microsoft Windows too, because they know best how to Protect You™ and make your computing Trusted™.
All interactions will be recorded for training the models. You don't deserve that data yourself. Only BigCo has the resources and expertise to build their own. And they'll use it against^W for you to sell more ads and Farmville Loot Crates. You're just another whale to pump full of dopamine.
"Nobody would personally own an oil rig or an airplane, so why would anybody own a computer? What a laughable concept. Only big companies get to have those. Go back to your safe and easy to understand smart tablet that we've prepared for you, and consume your TwitterTok FaceFeed."
...
I hate supporting this. Economically or with my brain.
Stallman told us it was coming. Brace yourselves.
[1] there are several, and that is an important point, because several BigCo competing for your attention cannot possibly constitute a monopoly. That's an outdated concept from last century. Go be angry at your local representative and/or family members so you can drive more engagement for us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
"City of Ember" is another version of this type of story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Ember
I'l pretty sure that there's at least one Star Trek TOS episode like this too.
Maybe Idiocracy was right, but not for the reason most people assume...
Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[1] makes a good argument that software quality has already suffered significant deterioration. We've just gotten used to software not working. Reboot the computer; refresh the webpage; spend the morning trying to work around the "improvements", regressions, and removed features in the software that forced an update.
We realign incentives and we will realign the web along with them.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your prediction, but I predict if things get so bad, there will definitely be a healthy community of counterculture hackers who will do things differently.
My goal once I can finance it is to create a virtual island that my family and close friends can rely on for vital services: emails, file hosting, calendar, contacts, a public web space, etc. If every hacker did this for its close circle the impact would be far greater than the current hacker communities we create.
Notable mentions: https://chatons.org/en & https://yunohost.org/
That sounds like a really cool project. What would the costs be to finance that?
The location would either be at my parents', as I move often and they have a rack installed (with nothing in it, the internet link isn't amazing but should be fine) or it could be colocated at a non-profit FAI (https://www.ffdn.org/en). The colocation is probably the most sensible option for the internet link and stability they bring (proper data center context, back-up generators and they have static IPv4).
+ long-term encrypted backups to some random service like Backblaze even if I have duplicate storage, I don't trust myself enough to do everything properly.
The idea isn't new, I have already seen a few online (I remember of two but no links). The focus was more around hacker&friend groups, looking like private tilde clubs. Here the idea is to provide services usable by anyone in my family, with a nice identity (I like seeing it as an island, a village or such).
The big things to consider are file storage, redundancy and long-term stability (availability for emails).
> "computer citizen"
I like these phrases a lot.
Podcasts are still mp3 files. They don't know to check for DRM before preloading the mp3
I don't really want to defend DRM, but the main tangible difference between DRM as part of the browser and the DRM that came before is that DRM plugins were shockingly bad for users. Flash was a notorious attack vector for all manner of malware and viruses. RealPlayer (first released in 1995 so it's not so much the 'modern' Internet that sold out) was literally spyware for a while. I'd love for DRM to vanish entirely and for me to be in control of what my browser is doing, but failing that utopian ideal I'd much rather have DRM be a first class citizen in the browser that means users don't have to open up gaping holes in their security to watch and listen to the latest cat videos and true crime podcasts.
Depending on the business 30% could make the whole enterprise operate at a loss, for example selling audiobooks or media or other real world products.
Everywhere around the world countries have figured out that was a good idea and have implemented a VAT. Amazon pays more taxes in my country than in the US lmao.
They will still be standard and "open" for everyone to see, but that doesn't matter because they are too complex and change too often for anyone but BigCo to implement.
https://open.spotify.com/show/0FiS79p7OPZjdGVj25e6kS
(would have preferred to link to some home page for the podcast but too lazy to search further)
Here’s direct link to the podcast website: https://anchor.fm/chapteroneventures
Listen directly in the browser without drm, import into your podcast app of choice with rss or download the mp3 locally.
By the way, an Apple device is not required—Apple podcasts work on Windows, and on Linux you can paste an Apple podcast link into a podcast client like GNOME Podcasts.
If I don’t have any app, at least I can read what podcast is that and find it elsewhere, while the error page seen after following a Spotify link takes care to not disclose a single bit of information about the podcast that could let one find it elsewhere online, and even podcast URL offers no glimpse due to being mostly a hash. Each time I am given a Spotify link without further context I basically can only respond with “sorry can’t access that, give me at least a name so I can find it elsewhere online”.
Of course, a canonical link to podcast page, if such exists, is best.
... which still fails the mpv/youtube-dl test.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/product-club-with/dusti...