That's a them problem. 30 years ago we knew they'd be trouble if they ever adopted the web en masse and they (and the folks that prey on them) have proven that prediction right at every turn.
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.
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.