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Splitting the Web

ploum.net

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Re: Splitting the Web

#61

Post by palata »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #17
chomp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s why I feel like the author is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of people’s blogs have all sorts of nasty tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.

> I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram.

They care mostly about the metadata, not so much about the content of your messages.

They know who you write to, when you write to them, when you check the app (which for many people basically means when they wake up and when they go to bed), they have your whole list of contacts.

They are really tracking you.

Re: Splitting the Web

#62

Post by palata »

bruce511 wrote: post #4

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…

> Everyone is different I guess.

If you are not on any social media and not logged into google, then you are really in a very small minority.

Re: Splitting the Web

#63

Post by palata »

bayindirh wrote: post #27
simonbarker87 wrote: post #24

I 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 ou…

Hmm from your description, you sound very close to the author of that article. What makes you think they are extreme and you are not? Genuinely interested.

Re: Splitting the Web

#64

Post by anthk »

8chanAnon wrote: post #2

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…

Get Lagrange in PC/Android, head to gemini://gemi.dev, go to The News Waffle and paste the whole URL (whole, as with https://www...) there in the URL input form.

It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and less.

Re: Splitting the Web

#65

Post by gochi »

palata wrote: post #61
jakelazaroff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I feel like the author is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of people’s blogs have all sorts of nasty tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.

> I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. They care mostly about the metadata, not so much about the content of your messages. They know who you write to, when you write to them, when you check the app (which for many people basically means when they wake up and when they go to bed), they have your whole list of contacts. They are really tracking you.

None of that is metadata. It is just the data.

Re: Splitting the Web

#66

Post by anthk »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #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…

UX of Gemini bad? I've seen browsers with far more complex settings in average.

Re: Splitting the Web

#67

Post by sodapopcan »

skydhash wrote: post #47
8chanAnon wrote: post #2

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…

I’m moving to Firefox as my main browser, and the amount of sites that break because of me blocking JavaScript (with ublock) is staggering. I can understand SPA being JS only, but simple blogs and other content sites, no.

Using NoScript has been pretty eye-opening. I've come to learn that most of the time I'm happy unblock the primary domain. If the site doesn't work I'll look for a clearly-named CDN. If I can't identify one or, worse-yet, there is some kind of cdn.some-domain.com and unblocking that still doesn't make the site work, then I'm out.

Re: Splitting the Web

#68

Post by anthk »

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.

There is:

https://brutaldon.org

Re: Splitting the Web

#69

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles."

Plaintext SNI or TLS other than v1.3 is one way of gathering information, namely, a list of every domain the computer accesses.

TLS1.3 without SNI: https://web.archive.org/web/20230801115645if_/https://ploum....

Re: Splitting the Web

#70

Post by palata »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #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…

> This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini, GrapheneOS, and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd are so bad

I don't know... many "commercial websites" are really, really slow. Slack, for one, regularly takes seconds to show me a few text messages. A big bloated website I absolutely hate is HelloFresh: I see how they may think it looks good, but loading it feels like I'm compiling a kernel or something. Facebook has an infinite wall, and regularly when I scroll it just makes me jump somewhere else (and therefore I lose this one post that was looking interesting in the middle of those ads).

On the other hand, SourceHut may look "old", but it is so snappy, it's refreshing. And I find the UX really good. It just removes the glossy, useless UI stuff.

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