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Splitting the Web

ploum.net

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Re: Splitting the Web

#51

Post by teekert »

throwing_away wrote: post #43

> When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content. 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,…

I do see it quite often. Also when signing up for things often I need to disable ublock or move to Edge entirely.

Re: Splitting the Web

#52

Post by seabass-labrax »

masfuerte wrote: post #46
superkuh wrote: post #19

>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.

It's such a shame. I stopped reading twitter links when they went js only. Mastodon is actually worse because there's no way I'm enabling js from some random domain I've never heard of before. It would take literally a couple of hours to add an unstyled html feed but, apart from me, who wants that?

Mastodon is fully usable without any JavaScript at all; there are a number of 'client' applications that you can install entirely locally[1].

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.

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/apps

Re: Splitting the Web

#53

Post by bad_alloc »

This post expresses something I have been feeling fro a while. We need some catchy names for these parts of the web. I'd propose "Corponet" for the big sites (borrowed from Cyberpunk). How to call the other side though? "Fediverse" is its own thing, is there any other term that encompasses the fediverse, random personal sites and so on?

Re: Splitting the Web

#54

Post by throwing_away »

teekert wrote: post #51
throwing_away wrote: post #43

> When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content. 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,…

I do see it quite often. Also when signing up for things often I need to disable ublock or move to Edge entirely.

I've never run into that. I wonder what services? Maybe stuff I would get some other way.

Re: Splitting the Web

#55

Post by gochi »

Kovah wrote: post #31
jakelazaroff wrote: post #3

> 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…

I thought that there must be a middle ground after reading that part, too. But we, the people who know, run and support that cozy web, are actually a minority compared to the mass of internet users. It's not a good comparison, but my family and friends know absolutely nothing about all the things that make up the cozy web. Dozens of people and literally nobody knows what RSS, Mastodon or blogs are. When asked about p…

I have a lot of thoughts about this, most glaringly because we tend to use our perspective of social media to paint our idea of others, when in reality social media in general still only captivates around 55% of the general population. It's important to keep this scale in mind, to prevent us from giving up hope and claiming nobody cares.

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.

Re: Splitting the Web

#56

Post by aendruk »

the_gipsy wrote: post #20
superkuh wrote: post #19

>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.

The awful thing about Mastodon is it used to serve inert HTML but this behavior was removed.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

Re: Splitting the Web

#57

Post by teekert »

throwing_away wrote: post #54
teekert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do see it quite often. Also when signing up for things often I need to disable ublock or move to Edge entirely.

I've never run into that. I wonder what services? Maybe stuff I would get some other way.

It's mostly stuff like the local sushi shop like [0], works poorly, renders the "pay" button outside the screen on FireFox. Office 365 tools, sometime just kill FireFox performance, or there is no audio, while everything looks ok. Lots of issues trying to sign into this learning platform as well [1]. Can't think of more, but as said it happens surprisingly often.

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.

[0] https://www.sushimochi.nl/

[1] https://www.develop-yourself.com/

Re: Splitting the Web

#58

Post by cutler »

AI is a much more divisive factor than Javascript. AI polarises the end user and the massive corporate cloud entities with the technological capital to compute what an individual cannot. The corporate cloud is the real evil which has taken away the agency of individaul developers.

Re: Splitting the Web

#59

Post by NovaDudely »

teekert wrote: post #45

I feel this too. Moreover, I often want to signup fro something, like a webshop. Often it simply does not work and I choose to order without an account, sometimes it works then. Sometimes I need to disable ublock, sometimes I need to use Edge (on Linux). Often I'm already dropping out, using a different shop altogether. I guess we are a group to small to care about though.

I will give various sites a little wiggle room via NoScript but by the 3rd failure due to an excess of 3rd party requirements I just move on to somewhere else.

Re: Splitting the Web

#60

Post by klabb3 »

jfengel wrote: post #44
klabb3 wrote: post #7

It’s the monopolistic companies aka mega corps that really restrict individuals and stifle innovation. 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…

In what way do they stifle people? I had the impression that for the most part they just ignored small fry. If you want to boot up a server and point a DNS address at it, knock yourself out. 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 extre…

> You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things.

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.

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