Splitting the Web
ploum.net
ploum.net
My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be usable then I'm gone. I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content (Twitter included). The web is not so much splitting in two. We are simply saying "no more" to the exploiters and grifters. Eventually, they will have to learn to eat with the commoners or eat by themselves.
I do also use my hosts file for stuff that will never, ever, ever get a pass, like google analytics.
I use 2 browsers, one with JS disabled and blocking everything (like 95% of the time), and second one for say "important" stuff like banking, youtube and facebook ;)
https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin...
Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.
I was eventually able to run the app on a friend's computer, but finding no in-built option to export the images I was forced to take screen grabs to email to my primary care provider.
Occasionally, a remote doctor (not from our office) would call for help with the viewer we provided on disc. Usually, because some advanced feature they could have used at their office didn't exist in the patient viewer, or worked differently.
Normally, instead of discs, we just transceived images via PACS, or accepted physical films to be scanned into our PACS.
But recently installed duckduckgo on my android phone and turned on their app tracking protection. The unnecessary requests made by apps I haven't used in months is jaw dropping.
It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and less.
Meanwhile my normie friends are sending me TikTok videos of people reading screenshots of Reddit comments posted to Instagram. Regular users absolutely do not care about any of this.
I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.
Perfectly 'approachable' even on mobile devices.
The only thing that makes sites like this and that 'unapproachable' is stunningly high (genuine, not stat-massaged) levels of functional illiteracy.
They don’t want to direct traffic to my website, I’ll get by on word of mouth.
I'm just saying that if it's gonna be a techies web and a non-techies web we ought to recognize that some of us tend toward toxic elitism and work to counteract it.
As much as I enjoy being a Linux snob and a person with Stack Overflow reputation and a pedantic nitpicker on Wikipedia, I don't think that those parts of me, left unchecked at scale, make for a nice community. I want other kinds of specialists around and I don't want them to feel like second class citizens because they don't know their way around a private key (or, if that's unavoidable, I want to have at least tried to teach them).
I'm specifically interested in the ability to share your ideas with your peers in a way that resists tampering by third parties, provided you're willing to put in a reasonable amount of work re: learning to do so.
If we let that be the mark of a privileged class, then we might as well go back to the middle ages.
You owe nothing to these traitors who actively sabotage the goals that you deem important.
Besides, we have to deal with the consequences of their votes, so it's in our interests to oppose whoever would manipulate them because those manipulators are threats to things that we care about. Things like privacy, and the ability to control the devices that we "own" in ways that contradict the vendor's wishes.
Once it is be accepted that "normal peoples" need to ingest advertising ad nauseam and each of their movement is being tracked, people who actually value their privacy and a content web become the abnormal peoples.
The author mention the dark web, this is exactly what is happening. If you value your privacy you are now assimilated to criminality and terrorism.
See https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/06/05/criminalization-o...
“All members contacted adopted a clandestine behaviour, with increased security of means of communication (encrypted applications, Tails operating system, TOR protocol enabling anonymous browsing on the Internet and public wifi)”.
“All members of this group were particularly suspicious, only communicating with each other using encrypted applications, in particular Signal, and encrypting their computers and devices […].
"The elements of the investigation that have been communicated to us are staggering. Here are just some of the practices that are being misused as evidence of terrorist behavior6:
– the use of applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Silence or ProtonMail to encrypt communications ;
– using Internet privacy tools such as VPN, Tor or Tails7 ;
– protecting ourselves against the exploitation of our personal data by GAFAM via services such as /e/OS, LineageOS, F-Droid ;
– encrypting digital media;
– organizing and participating in digital hygiene training sessions;
– simple possession of technical documentation."
Now using encryption and secure messaging with anything but whatsapp and imessage marks you as a potential terrorist, later it will be ad blockers, disabled javascript, not using chrome's WEI and using the smol net/web.
The internet? Why should anyone want to write an email if you could simply call somebody? Why would i want to get in contact with some random person on the other side of the globe? Why order something online? Is the "Quelle Katalog" (something akin to Sears) not much better?
Well... nearly all of the normie friends that did make such statements are now happily online, albeit nearly entirely on the corpo-web. My take on this: Let them. Let them sell their lifes to the corporations, but give them the opportunity to break free and learn of the "other web" if they show interest. Freedom is also the freedom to harm yourself.
The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while.
It wasn’t.
I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks.
I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.
The thing is, I was using the same exact software, doing the same exact tasks on windows 7 with 16gb of ram and I rarely had issues.
Not to mention windows 10 has completely borked my network stack. I can’t get a single WiFi card to work.
I am longtime Firefox faithful. But I keep extension usage down to minimum- multi account container, ad block for YouTube, leechblock, clear url, zotero and fpl tools (fantasy football) right now. Tbh Firefox rarely bothers me nowadays with resource usage. I am confident I haven't had to restart Firefox since last November.
My work laptop is a Lenovo P52 with 32GB of ram and win10. Home laptop is a Lenovo legion with 16GB of ram and win11. I had so many issues with performance in the past that I just trained myself to never keep resource-hogging stuff running in background that I am not actively using.
I regularly have zoom and Firefox running while playing MMO games on home laptop. Firefox, SQL server etc. running in background while running multi-core data analysis on work laptop. I never had issues with Firefox, and if there's a memory crash I usually know what caused it. But it is down to hardcore discipline using the machines, and I understand it is not usual patterns for others.
Is that happening? I feel like there's a ton of middle ground, and it's only ever expanding. My personal website isn't a huge JavaScript app tracking my visitors, but I wouldn't really call it handcrafted HTML. I'm involved with a bunch of communities that aren't overly corporatized but don't take a big principled stand against it either.
I prefer Maggie Appleton's diagram of the web [1]. The click-obsessed corporations are what she calls the "dark forest of the clear web". But below that there are email newsletters and RSS feeds, there are personal blogs and digital gardens, there are communities run on Discord and Slack.
They care mostly about the metadata, not so much about the content of your messages.
They know who you write to, when you write to them, when you check the app (which for many people basically means when they wake up and when they go to bed), they have your whole list of contacts.
They are really tracking you.
Yes, all of that is metadata.
You’re absolutely right that they’re tracking you either way, of course.
Only Meta know if they’re using that information for sure.
Their track record on abusing things like 2 factor phone numbers for snooping isn’t great though.
From my experience and what I know about web users in general, this seem to scale to the whole internet. Like 90% of the people know nothing about "our cozy web" and don't care about anything else than the commercial web.
We often keep the cozy web secretive due to eternal september and also underfunded. You can see how these loop into each other very easily. Can't fund a better solution when we keep trying to keep it a secret.
We're also very bad at framing things. So often I'll observe what should have been a slam dunk: convey why privacy matters and easy alternatives they can use/ways to keep themselves safer, yet they wind up just convincing the person why they should stick within the misleading warm glow of the commercial web trap. Happens so often! A complete lack of empathy, just scoffing and dismissal.
I say all of this to say, we can do better. We have ample opportunity, we need to stop squandering it and indirectly killing the cozy web along with it.
That's fine. It can survive and even thrive with 1-2%. And, if it turns out to be superior in some important ways, and stable & persistent (vs the ups and downs of Windows and various former Unixes), it's got nowhere to go but up.
I remember there being similar contempt for Linux in those days: nobody cares, normies will never get it, it's a rounding error. It was viewed as just a weird little cult and a punchline.
Now grandma has an Android and aunt Betsie loves her Chromebook, and pretty much everybody interacts with Linux systems every day--and that has resulted in more variety, better driver & software support, and more features for us geeks.
This may be the beginning of something similar. If it is, it'll begin as a niche community of like-minded geeks, like that described in the article.
Of course, this could also be a short-lived fad that dies out in a couple years as people get bored and return to the normie web. If so...it's fun in the meantime.
How are they using any modern website without despairing? The web, particularly news sites, is unusable without ad blockers. It's insane, some pages insert ads every two paragraphs of content.
- Most horrible one is that they are either used to it and just accept the way it is without questioning it.
- News can be consumed in other ways, TV is popular especially for older generations. My wife for example listens to the podcast of one of the biggest newspapers: 10-12 minutes of the most important news with only a short break for commercials.
- Not sure about that one, but there's also the option to pay. From what I know the prices for access to a digital version of a newspaper without ads is kinda fair.
From Facebook breaking copy/paste so you can’t email calendar events to people not on the platform to Twitter closing APIs to third party clients to Google attempting to stop ad blockers.
It’s all just to make life worse for a tiny group of people.
I know of a large company that uses one.
A cursory google (I haven't verified it) "42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad blocking tools at least once a month. 27% of American internet users block ads. AdBlock, a popular blocking extension, is reported to have more than 65 million users."
That forum or chatroom you are participating in for your niche hobby. Etc. It's differently shaped for everybody, and the name isn't ubiquitous. I think you may be confusing it with the fediverse?
Yes, on the one extreme you have Facebook, and the other extreme is say Mastodon, but there's also a huge middle way which is well populated.
This week I've browsed hacker news, Wikipedia, done some research for an upcoming trip, kept up with OpenSSL and Jquery (yeah, that's still around, and still useful.)
I bought some waterproofing (direct from the manufacturer), looked up nearby steel manufacturers, and looked up the phone number of my electrician (on his site).
In cases where I feel I might be tracked, I just open an incognito browser [1]. Mostly though (apart from news) I don't really find myself on sites driven by advertising.
If you spend your day on social media, news sites, or buying everything online, then sure, I get it, you're gonna get tracked. But that's really (for me) a tiny part of my browser history. Everyone is different I guess.
[1] yeah I know, tracking is more than cookies, but I see so few ads anyway I haven't even bothered to load an ad-blocker. Then again, I'm not on social media...
If you are not on any social media and not logged into google, then you are really in a very small minority.
Perhaps a little side tracked here, but the internet has basically become useless for DIY projects lately. We're renovating and needed some advise on which kind of paint to use for a particular project and we have given up on using the internet for advise. SEO, bad translations and straight-up scams have prevent us from finding even the most basic information. Instead we just go to the paint store and ask there. They also know exactly what kind of paint, wallpaper and tools are available and don't recommend stuff that's can only be shipped from the US or China. So congratulation, we broke the internet and we now back at consulting local experts in physical stores.... Brilliant.
This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini, GrapheneOS, and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd are so bad that the only reason to use them over commercial alternatives is ideological.
Which, for Gemini at least, is intentional.
So I guess I agree that the web is fracturing but the post makes it sound like some kind of battle between the commercial side and the 'tech savvy's side, as the post refers to it, when really it is just a minority of tech ideologues rejecting commercial tech, a tale at least as old as Stallman and not particularly interesting.
Like the famous scene from Mad Men:
Tech Savvy Web: "I feel bad for you, commercial web"
Commercial Web: "I don't think about you at all"
I don't know... many "commercial websites" are really, really slow. Slack, for one, regularly takes seconds to show me a few text messages. A big bloated website I absolutely hate is HelloFresh: I see how they may think it looks good, but loading it feels like I'm compiling a kernel or something. Facebook has an infinite wall, and regularly when I scroll it just makes me jump somewhere else (and therefore I lose this one post that was looking interesting in the middle of those ads).
On the other hand, SourceHut may look "old", but it is so snappy, it's refreshing. And I find the UX really good. It just removes the glossy, useless UI stuff.
It's easy for a native computer user who grew up with (or before) Windows 95 to dismiss the gloss as frivolous, but given that the glossy products constantly beat out the minimalist ones it's hard not to suspect that modern computer users have a different set of values.
We know from experience, a lot of work gets signed off as soon as they can put a tick in the box to say it’s done and not when it’s actually done well! ;)
> but given that the glossy products constantly beat out the minimalist ones
Another theory would be that the glossy products have a much better marketing than the minimalist ones. Nowadays, people just don't see you if you don't have a heavy marketing. IMO it has nothing to do with the quality of the product.
> What if the people who care about load times in apps like Slack are a tiny minority
Haven't you ever heard of somebody (not tech-savvy) buying a new smartphone because their current one is "too slow"? I have. It just feel like those people accepted that "the phone is too old, so it is now slow" (just like they have been taught to accept that most software is buggy). Where I don't. The phone is slow because the programs it runs are (unnecessarily, IMO) bulky. And most software is full of bugs, which makes it pretty bad.
Theoretically a client could choose to ignore some of that but it's not really a Gemini client anymore.
Straight from the FAQ, emphasis mine:
> Rather than trying to decide whether Gemini is about turning the clock forward or backwards, it's better to think of it as trying to deliver a particular online user experience that its fans think of as not being old fashioned, out of date, or obsolete, but not modern, cutting edge, or innovative either.
> TLS required
I don't like this I think it should be optional and a different URI scheme should be used for TLS vs non-TLS. The same port number could theoretically be used (due to the format of the TLS initial data, it cannot be confused with a valid Gemini request), but as far as I know the existing software (e.g. stunnel) does not do that.
> no embedded images or videos
I think it is good to not have embedded images and videos. You could have a user setting to display embedded images for local files only or to not display embedded images at all (I think this is similar to what the Gempub specification says).
> Theoretically a client could choose to ignore some of that but it's not really a Gemini client anymore.
I think it still can be Gemini client if it is still Gemini protocol and file format just as well.
For example, I dislike scroll jacking in most cases, however some level of scroll based animation or interactivity can be nice and make things feel a bit more interesting.
Humans are wired to notice and react to movement, a slightly animated button to go alongside a click is satisfying due to this.
The author rails agains the world of corporate internet only after clicks and impressions. They have done the same, except with writing pitting one side against the other ignoring that the choice isn’t binary, it is, like all things in life, a spectrum.
But that doesn’t sell as well so, good vs bad it is.
I use no adblockers, yet I use services that are part of the small web. I host my own webpage. However, if I need to use some part of the "common" web, I use that part. It just doesn't get used anymore.
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, many news sites are distant places. I have nothing to block them, but my lifestyle pushed them out of my life. I'll continue scaling down until I hit that optimal point, but I won't go to extremes just for reaching that limit.
Also, seeing the bad practices and anti-patterns help me to keep my knowledge about these things up to date. This way, I can recognize the patterns and I don't re-implement them get blindsided.
I see it as expressing a feeling. "It feels like it's us vs them".
I don't know, I understand "extremist" as a pretty serious criticism ("I don't want to listen to that guy, he is an extremist"). But the author doesn't call for invading the Capitol, he is merely saying that he doesn't like how the commercial Web evolved.
Maybe it's more of a "purist" framing?
I literally have no idea why invading capitols is topical for javascript in web pages, nor how such a comparison is relevant, so I can't comment on that.
I don't know if we can say that a feeling (which is a descriptive concept) is "extremist". Then the author says that he feels like he is on the side of the ad blockers. Again, I don't see that as extremism. He is not saying "I will never open a commercial website in my life, and I strongly believe nobody should do it". He is saying "well if a commercial website works under my conditions, it's fine, but if they make sure to block me access because I don't want their ads, then I will live without their website".
The author frames the situation as "us vs. them". I don't do that. I have strong opinions too, but I don't act with despise or a hatred towards these entities.
I have seen the small web, and rise of web 2.0. So, it's just a progressive "I'll do this the old way" process for me.
What opened the floodgates for me was registering a domain. After getting it, I was able to put more and more of my life under it. My webpage, blog, other invisible infrastructure which improves my life started to move under it, yet I take a pragmatic approach. I'm a sysadmin and developer by trade, and I don't want a dozen more servers to manage, so I don't self-host everything myself, but use small/minimalist services which allows me to use my own domain.
Also, I'm not shy of sharing albums over Google Photos for example, because it's convenient for the recipients of the said albums. We're living in a social world, and I think balancing social aspects with personal choices is wise.
Because while I don't prefer bigger corporations, it doesn't give me the right to make other people's life harder. Life is already hard as it is.
You can see the balance from the links in my homepage: https://www.bayindirh.io
Still, I do feel the enshittification that they're talking about. I hate that Google is less reliable and that (e.g.,) reading a recipe online requires shoveling away a mountain of spam. I think this is just the natural consequence of funding the web through ad clicks.
Shameless plug: I'm working on something called GridWhale, which I hope eventually turns into a modern, global BBS. We'll be able to afford to publish the info you want without ads because we're getting revenue elsewhere. But since the revenue will come from customers, our incentives will be aligned, and we won't need to sacrifice privacy or use dark patterns.
OK, I realize I'm not adding much to this discussion, but I was just waiting for the compiler. Sorry.
But here's a technical description:
1. Imagine we build a platform abstraction layer on top of the typical nodes of a datacenter: web servers, database storage, etc.
2. We also create a remoted UI layer on the platform that renders on browser clients as HTML/JavaScript. Think of it like X Windows but higher-level and rendered on a browser.
3. Now we build a VM that can execute byte code and runs on the platform layer. We can now create programs that run entirely on the server/datacenter, but can render UI on the client. From the program's perspective, it thinks it has full control over a machine, but the platform layer takes care of remoting as appropriate.
4. Also, we have abstractions for shared memory, so that multiple programs can share data, even if they happen to be running on different nodes. Multiple programs, each potentially run by different users, can collaborate.
Effectively, all programs think that they are running on a single, giant, global computer.
Happy to answer questions if this is at all interesting.
1. I want developers to have a unified, integrated API. For example, the UI controls can connect to a database object and get data change notifications. That makes it easy to, e.g., show a table control that updates when rows change.
2. I want to (eventually) handle data and processing that exceeds a single node's capacity. For example, a map function over an array should automatically be distributed over as many cores/machines as needed. In a sense, the program should be able to tap into as many resources as it needs/can afford without special code.
Of course, I could have done both of those things in different ways, without a unified platform layer, but where's the fun in that?
I wrote a bit about it here: https://medium.com/@gridwhale/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a...
In the small-mid sized space, there are shitty actors but they’re easier to avoid, and don’t require resorting to living in a cave. They are competing with each other in the traditional sense of the word. They’re not on a mission to extinguish.
This is not unique to tech, it’s everywhere. Private actors that become the size of countries switch to playing zero-sum games, by acquiring and consolidating. It’s always bad for the consumer.
You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things. Your own web site is limited primarily by your imagination. (And occasionally the law, but that requires some pretty extreme stuff.)
Parents use Facebook to schedule activities for kids. Governments and companies use Twitter to announce things to citizens and customers. So they are, as they claim, in a sense a digital townhall. But with arbitrary restrictions on access, both in terms of opinions and expressions and in terms of clients they don’t want you to use, or APIs they don’t want you to call.
> for the most part they just ignored small fry
Very small, yes. But as soon as you’re bigger, they’re gonna want to eliminate you, peacefully of course. Acquisitions are probably the first tool, then it’s get uglier if that doesn’t work out.
Anyway, details in all its glory, but the trend as you grow larger is to play dominance games, which is another term for zero-sum. That’s not the only thing they do of course, but the trend is overwhelming.
Mastodon is actually part of the "HTTP as a secure application delivery protocol" and is no longer part of the "HTTP as website document delivery" team.
To me that seems the biggest split: self contained application versus hyperlinked documents.
I really hated that about twitter too, that for reading a goddamn SMS-lenghty tiny text it couldn't just have been "prerendered" on the server, no, you have to fetch a million things and watch different spinners before you get at it.
And people do this?
In contrast, JSON parsers are a dime a dozen, and HTTP+JSON has been the standard in APIs for well over a decade now. Be happy Mastodon isn't based on XML-SOAP, that would have been a right fucking mess and depending how rigid the clients would parse it, you'd end up with immediate ossification of the protocol instead of people just adding new fields for new functions (e.g. polls).
The forgotten 2000-era web had solutions for all of this in the form of XML and XSLT. The server serves XML, which is "semantic" (data structures). The XML has a header pointing to an XSLT file, which defines a functional transform of the XML to HTML. You could use namespaces to embed semantic info inside other schemas like XHTML if you wanted, also.
It never took off, partly because XSLT was a pretty unpleasant programming language (I actually built a product with it back in the day), partly due to latency reasons and partly because the XML vision wasn't sufficiently backwards compatible with regular HTML.
These days browsers don't support such tech anymore, so you need to treat HTML+JS as an app platform, HTTP as an RPC protocol and JSON as the serialization format but because that arrangement was never really designed per se there are lots of little missing pieces, like being able to discover the RPC protocol a web app uses without actually executing that app.
If you're using the 'normal' Web interface to Mastodon, you'll only ever need to run JavaScript from the server you registered for, even if you read posts from other servers.
You could use <link rel='alternate' type='application/activity+json'> but that only specifies that it is using Activty Stream and not that it is using Mastodon.
It's just a 'plumbing' issue, a matter of the rest of the Web ecosystem catching up with the rapid pace of the Fediverse's development.
I run Brave with privacy features on, on a Linux laptop, and I have not had any issues with employment, at both startups and very large tech companies. Facebook, for example, didn't care that I didn't use Facebook or have an Instagram account.
Often, the most useful perspective is not the one that regresses to the mean.
To me, that’s a competitive advantage.
I am self-employed and make a good living from that website. The hardest part of my job is going against advertiser expectations. I control if, when and how I mention products, and that’s very unusual to some of them.
Why? None of my professional work is related to the web at all. Why should I have to suffer the hell that is the modern web just because most people choose otherwise? Doing so wouldn't improve my work at all.
This has been my browsing habit for a long while now. Sure if I need to add a macro or google some compiler flags to compile an OS, I'll do it. But fiddling with noscript when I know your site is just images and text (plus trackers/ads) is not worth it.
I am a tech-savvy person that doesn't like Mastodon or Gemini or whatever. They're equally cult-like, the very cult they were trying to escape. I stopped reading after this.
> It’s a bit like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css have been used against usability, against them. Against us
Only on a rare occasion does surfing with no JS actually hamper my surfing. If a site needs JS, I make a rare exception and whitelist it temporarily with uBlock Origin. I have a dedicated browser profile for sites which require JS and I need to be logged in, like Amazon, Gmail, Reddit, etc
Each generation grows up with stuff and sticks with it in the face of 'better' or 'more modern' alternatives. We see this with adoption of different social media platforms where there is a clear age difference between different platforms. My generation (i'm in my 50s) are big facebook users, my son (in his 20s) doesn't use facebook, but uses tiktok & discord. I'm pretty sure in 20 years time the next generation will be using something different and there will be an aging tiktok demographic too.
All this means is that if you are developing a new competing platform in what appears to be a closed space, there is always room for you, if you target the next generation and their expectations.
The assumption all citizens use those private services is wrong and dangerous.
Aww how cute. No, they can still track what you do. Remember Facebook Beacon and the outcry? It is now a reality. Facebook (oh excuse me, Meta) doesn’t back down after people vehemently react to Newsfeed, Beacon, Metaverse etc. Mark used to respond “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” before justifying what he did. That was when he was wet behind the ears — he doesn’t bother to do that anymore.
Facebook changed our world, our ideas of the word Friend, of the word Like, etc. Whether you want to or not, these platforms controlled by a few people will reshape society unless we build open source alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533161/facebook-s-bea...
Large corporations are buying this data, and even governments
https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-broke...
https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-...
https://www.dli.tech.cornell.edu/post/facebook-and-google-ar...
A refreshing thing about the non-commercial web is the fact that it is not trying to monopolize my attention and not trying to hard-sell me anything.
More and more, I see people complaining about the big tech services... but that's a qualitative perception, certainly biased... I wonder if that's really happening.
I don't know. I rather doubt it. Personally, I've given up on that as a goal -- the masses can do what they like. My goal is more about self-preservation: finding those spaces that are beneficial to me.
What I think is actually happening is that the web is balkanizing, as people who feel as I do build spaces that serve their needs.
We also need (more, discoverable) beginner level material that explains the beauty and potential of the web and many of its good parts (there are so many!). People who are as excited about the web and DIY as the Veritasium guy is about physics and math, and as talented at showing it. I certainly would tune in, and spread the word.
Wouldn't it be great if we could leave something to future generations, like people left us diaries and books? If we just keep shoving our "content" and personal musings into those silos, chances are very good they will get basically nothing. A big fat hole, compared to what could be have if we actually cared about our files and bytes, and got the average person to care about theirs too. I consider that literacy in the digital age. You don't stop at 20% literacy, that would be appalling.
And I posit it's not actually hard to become an adult, it's way harder not to. As long as you don't exercise autonomy it seems more and more daunting and hard, if you do, it becomes easier. I think the same applies here. There's just all these swarms of middlemen telling people it's all impossibly hard and dangerous (while they shovel on layers of complexity to make it so). They say don't bother walking, walking is hard, and offer to carry you. That goes well for a while, until you depend on them, until the idea of walking positively scares you. Then they start carrying you where it serves them.
Yup, doesn't work either: https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/writings/yesterweb
This post seems like a generic, zoomed-out sort of complaint, and that doesn’t appeal to me, because I’m not sure I learned about anything specific. I guess it’s about how it’s possible to stop using some business’s websites and interact with them in other ways? But which businesses?
“Splitting the web” implies a big claim that other people do the same, but how many? I guess we don’t know since they aren’t tracked?
Yes, there are patterns, but each website is different. Maybe websites should be judged for themselves? I don’t think it’s a good idea to stop using a website I like due to generic concerns like this.
> I don’t think it’s a good idea to stop using a website I like due to generic concerns like this.
I think that the idea is not to philosophically decide to stop using some websites. It is rather that some of those websites have become unbearable, and the author says that they won't make an effort anymore.
I tend to do the same, and I guess many people do that too: if I start loading a website and it takes forever, or it lags, or it seems like a big spam, I don't spend 10 minutes checking if my feeling is right or not: I just close the tab.
> Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care.
Occasionally I will try to help someone with a lot of browser extensions installed who is confused about why some website doesn't work and does care, and the first thing I will recommend is creating a fresh profile with no extensions and seeing if that works.
Meanwhile, I tend to browse with fairly vanilla settings, so I'm not going to see the problems they see. I do see ads sometimes. Maybe I should block them, but often I will just go to a different website. I guess that's similar?
In some sense, we are seeing a different Web because we are running different web browsers. That's going to be true anyway, though. People have different preferences about which websites they like.
I recently decided to try "I don't care about cookies" (Firefox extension), and it feels really good to not have to spend 2min trying to find the hidden "reject all" button on all those popups :-).
They're basically saying they're able to use and enjoy the web just fine with no-JS. Even if it limits them from many sites, it also frees them to enjoy what is left.
It is a choice that automatically filters out a ton of noise, leaving them with a quieter, more peaceful, more thoughtful internet.
If users of alternative browsers (Firefox apparently being one now) are more likely to block analytics scripts and more with uBlock Origin (etc.) then we've fallen off the map insofar as tracking us goes. Does that mean these browsers are actually more popular than statistics suggest? Is there any way of knowing? I suppose Raymond Hill would have some idea from the ratio of user agents who download updates, but that's just one addon among many.
Not that I'm expecting more than an additional blip, but even that would give me joy.
Plaintext SNI or TLS other than v1.3 is one way of gathering information, namely, a list of every domain the computer accesses.
TLS1.3 without SNI: https://web.archive.org/web/20230801115645if_/https://ploum....
If in the past we used to discuss our "work life" in opposition to our "personal life", I think we are at the point now of discussing our "small-tech text based web presence" vs. a "big-tech click based web presence" as described. Not a big deal, I think.
Vote with your wallet if you can.
I've always wondered if there's is an easy way to have a pre-moderated, owner-sorted list of comments section.
Emails are private, but sometimes users can say something interesting for others to see. And I don't mind if website owner deletes/edits/down-sorts my comments -- it's their web property.
PS: If only that page had a Like button... :)
I guess we are a group to small to care about though.
On Android, I've always rooted my phone to install AdAway, as a next level now I use AppManager (get it from muntashirakon.github.io) to disable advertising/tracking components within apps, and Google Play Services itself. Youtube being a special case, I use ReVanced Extended. Took some doing, but now I've managed to happily use whatever the corporate web throws up minus every piece of track advertising/analytics/tracking crap that they throw at me on either laptop or phone/tablet. Occasionally I look at the uBlock Origin logs and shudder to see all the crap that got blocked.
Tl;dr - I don't have to turn hermit and seek out indie websites exclusively when I'm able to extract exactly what I want from the mainstream web. Ultimately, your devices belong to you; you have to take back control over what gets sent to it.
Both are going to be seniors and have told me all their friends have all but abandoned texting and besides facetiming, they spend a LOT of time on conference calling when they're mobile gaming.
It would appear communications continue to evolve over time from generation to generation. I thought once texting took hold, phone calls would become obsolete. I guess not. There's a lot more interesting things they do with tech these days, but I was fascinated with how their communication habits have changes so rapidly even in their own short lifetime.
Used to be eyeballs.
Author lost me here.
I use Firefox and Kiwi browser with uBlock Origin with all the annoyance lists enabled, bypass-paywalls-clean, unpaywall, sponsorblock, alternate player for twitch, violentmonkey and a few scripts. I also have yt-dlp, streamlink, and mpv.
I regularly read HN, Slashdot, and TechMeme, and it's extremely rare to get a link that I can't access.
Oftentimes I can access content without a browser, thanks to mpv's excellent web support.
I get that it's annoying, but it's really not that hard to solve it once and rarely think about it again. This has been my setup for at least 3 years now.
Occasionally something will annoy me and get through my filters, and I have to spend a few minutes fixing it.
The only thing I'm walled off from right now that's slightly annoying is browsing specific accounts in "X" with tweets ordered by timeline and viewing tweet replies. This is really low value so I haven't bothered looking for a solution, but if anyone knows one, feel free to link it here.
Edit: Also, on icloud in the browser I consistently need to click explicitly where I want to type (in notes) or my text won't register.
It's the same type of sites that happily take my 32 random char password then I later find it was truncated to 12 chars or so. Just amateur stuff.
his "solutions" do nothing to address the power of these monopoly platforms.
Oh, his solutions DO address the problem in a way that works best: Walk away.