Neocities, tilde.club?
cosmic.voyage!
What Is the Small Web?
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and forget to mention Indieweb. Another all-in-one solution compatible with Indieweb and Fediverse tech, with optional hosting as a service, would be a great project to that goal, and an addition to the ecosystems. But no, has to be its own thing.
This 'indieweb' was sponsored by Google, hardly going to be in line with the goals of Aral's 'Small Web'.
It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes very useful support you can grab without any commitments.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#73>Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients.
I'm less and less sure about that. Clients are increasingly becoming prisons run and owned by BigCorps, iOS being an extreme example of that. Taking ownership is fittingly called jailbreaking.
I think the whole client/server distinction isn't that useful. The important question is who controls what.
The granularity of delegating power is crucial, because completely opting out of BigCorp offerings is something only tech experts can do.
Consumers need to be able to mix and match, and not have everything follow from some initial choice they get to make once every few years at best.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#74I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit much, even for me. > The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.
I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users. Even if that was the case, is "(drug) user" a nice term compared to what else is used - like addicts, fiends, junkie, tweaker, etc. It kind of recognize the agency of addicts, instead of the dehumanisation following the other terms.
>I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users.
I've never met one calling them customers or clients either, I don't know that they had any term for them.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'addicting' aspect of what the tech companies have created and the behaviours they are willing to go to get their 'users' hooked is why the 'user' comparison to 'drug users' makes sense.
No it really doesn't. Are library users called users because the library preys of their patrons addiction to literature? This is a very weak wordgame, that at best muddies the point about tech companies.
There are multiple instances of tech companies exhibiting this 'drug user' behaviour on their customers, I am sure you don't have any examples for your false comparison.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#76Jeez, either they are high, or I am! What an unsubstantiated load claims. > You hear a lot of talk about blockchains and proof of work but this is not what the Small Web is about. Having a billion copies of the same database is not decentralisation. That’s centralisation. If you have a billion people having [...] unique databases is decentralisation. Really? This ignores the hard learned facts that, despite the claim…
clients in reality can be malicious.
I don't think it's talking about malice, just picking which side's use-cases get prioritized. https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology The server doesn't own the data.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#77[deleted]
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#78Hey all,
Just skimmed the comments (I know, I know, never read the comments) but here are couple of facts in case you care about that sort of thing (but please don’t let these get in the way of a lively discussion) ;)
- re: drug dealers/users, see: analogy
- Yes, six years ago, we thought we could fix the problem with a phone. Then we started working on the problem and realised we couldn’t possibly raise enough money to do so, then we did a crowdfunding campaign that never included the phone (we promised the alpha of an initial peer-to-peer Mac-based social networking client and promised to keep working on the problem, both of which we delivered on). Also, anyone who asked for a refund from the crowdfunding for any reason got one. If I could do it again, we wouldn’t have held the crowdfunding and I wouldn’t have started on Mac. But this was all part of the process of us learning about the problem.
- It wasn’t on Kick Starter, we built our own crowdfunding system because I wasn’t happy with how Kick Starter, etc., were gathering data (we didn’t want your privacy violated for trying to support us)
- Since then, I’ve sold the three family homes we had (apartments in Turkey, total worth about ~€200,000 or so) and we’ve kept working on the same problem for the past six/seven years with the the initial crowdfunding + those funds + sales of our tracker blocker (Better Blocker) on Mac/iOS + professional speaking fees when we speak at conferences, etc. + donations to our not-for-profit (which basically pay our hosting fees every month).
- Unless IndieWeb is suddenly about building single-tenant web nodes as part of a peer-to-peer future / topologically decentralised Web for everyday people, I don’t see how it’s the same as Small Web. If that is what they’re about now, then sure but, last I checked, they thought we were deranged zealots for publicly calling out Google, Facebook, etc., for being surveillance capitalists.
- Re: not having done anything since: we created Better Blocker, I personally spoke at over 50 events to raise awareness of the issue, including three times at the European Parliament, I spearheaded the creation of progressive tech policy at one of Europe’s most progressive political movements, and we worked with the City of Ghent on evolving what is now Site.js and the Small Web initiative.
- Finally, someone mentioned that some “privacy projects” say “Don't trust others, trust us.” If anyone tells you that, don’t trust them. We know how to, can, should be (and are) building technology where you don’t have to trust us.
Small Web is not about having your own Static Web page or having yet another tool for geeks. It’s not about going back to the 90s (been there, was fun, wouldn’t want to go back), it’s about taking the best of that ethos and implementing it for 2020 and beyond. Right now, I’m trying to build a tool for developers (including us) so that we can use it to build everything things for everyday people that don’t require a Faustian pact to give up your privacy, freedom of speech, or your personhood to use.
Whether or not this “succeeds”, who knows? But we’re sharing everything we make under AGPL and trying to share every brick in this bridge we’re trying to build between where we are (the sewer that is surveillance capitalism) and where we want to be in hopes that if the stuff we build doesn’t work, at least others can use the tools to build other solutions.
Here’s a recent talk if you’d like to learn more about what we’re working on:
https://small-tech.org/videos/eastern-partnership-civil-soci...
You don’t have to like what we do and you definitely don’t have to like me but I do hope that you will consider the ideas (and ideals) we’re working towards.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#79I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit much, even for me. > The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.
I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users. Even if that was the case, is "(drug) user" a nice term compared to what else is used - like addicts, fiends, junkie, tweaker, etc. It kind of recognize the agency of addicts, instead of the dehumanisation following the other terms.
Yay. I wonder when someone will pop up on Github, demanding "user" to be renamed, because it's pejorative due to that context.
Re: What Is the Small Web?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 'indieweb' was sponsored by Google, hardly going to be in line with the goals of Aral's 'Small Web'.
It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes…
If this was a mistake and they have changed their mind, sure. If not, (even when warned) it shows they don't have any principles, You won't catch Richard Stallman or anyone rightfully for privacy rights at such an event would you?
I would definitely be suspect and would actively call out privacy conferences being hosted and invited by surveillance capitalists.