Reverting back to phone calls and visiting physical stores again? This person is living my nightmare.
I've largely been doing this (and more) for a few years now. It's seriously improved my quality of life.
Splitting the Web
21–30 of 201 posts
Re: Splitting the Web
#22Biggest issue will be to keep government and public services on the non-corporate web, as they probably jump ship for "security" reasons.
Re: Splitting the Web
#23It's sad, really. The information people want to get out of the web hasn't changed - an article is still a headline with a few paragraphs, a product is still a name, a description and a price, ... it's all so dead simple, yet the websites became unusable.
Re: Splitting the Web
#24I find it sad that people always want to go to extremes. It doesn’t need to be the “handcrafted HTML” vs “bloated JS” sides the author describes.
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.
Re: Splitting the Web
#25> 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.
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"
Re: Splitting the Web
#26>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 am ignorant of the underlying mastodon protocol, but couldn't there be a (mostly) HTML-only frontend for mastodon, or something like that? 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.
Sure, you can write or run your own fediverse server that renders HTML-only page, and every time you see a Mastodon link you paste it in your server's lookup form and browse it from there. Honk (https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk) is HTML only and very minimalistic. I'm sure there's frontends or clients for Mastodon that use less HTML as well, so you can also swap out Mastodon's default frontend for a less heavy one.
Re: Splitting the Web
#27I find it sad that people always want to go to extremes. It doesn’t need to be the “handcrafted HTML” vs “bloated JS” sides the author describes. 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 i…
I'm one of the people who's leaning towards the small web, yet I don't go to these extremes.
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.
Re: Splitting the Web
#28Sometimes people complain about life sucking in very general terms. Other times they criticize specific things, one at a time.
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.
Re: Splitting the Web
#29Do you guys think the non-commercial web will ever achieve critical mass to tilt the scale in its favor and spark a chain reaction to drive flocks of people out of the commercial web?
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.
Re: Splitting the Web
#30I get it, but man that's some hyperbole in there. I like Mastodon, but since there's still good stuff on other sites, I will read those, too. If the author thinks he's outsmarted analytics and tracking, they should check with their ISP. Or VPN provider.