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I get where the author is coming from, but I feel like his conclusion is reductionist. 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 waterproof…
Apparently I joined this movement decades ago on accident? I lurked Reddit on occasion but even that is dead to me now. Mastodon is awesome. It does need door game support though.
Apparently I joined this movement decades ago on accident? I lurked Reddit on occasion but even that is dead to me now. Mastodon is awesome. It does need door game support though.
Door game?
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...
From the article: But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. My thoughts exactly. Like the author, I don't have patience for glossy websites anymore. If a site needs third-party JS to be…
> It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML. Is that happening? I feel like there's a ton of middle ground, and it's only ever expand…
Well, her analogy is more for protected areas where you can hide from lifeless, aggresively public areas and where you can consume (presumably) more authentic content. It doesn't work well in this case for e.g. "cozy web" because places like Snapchat are definitely harvesting your interactions. Whatsapp is literally Facebook. The author of this article is more ranting about the "commercial web" in this case. They don…
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.
>People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages. 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.