101–110 of 201 posts
I am a tech-savvy person that doesn't like Mastodon or Gemini or whatever. They're equally cult-like, the very cult they were trying to escape. I stopped reading after this.
> 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…
How are they using any modern website without despairing? The web, particularly news sites, is unusable without ad blockers. It's insane, some pages insert ads every two paragraphs of content.
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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.
You can thank W3C's ActivityPub charter for that, who, in their infinite wisdom, have decided it woukd make sense to use JSON for sending hypertext around, rather than, you know, HTML.
In contrast, JSON parsers are a dime a dozen, and HTTP+JSON has been the standard in APIs for well over a decade now. Be happy Mastodon isn't based on XML-SOAP, that would have been a right fucking mess and depending how rigid the clients would parse it, you'd end up with immediate ossification of the protocol instead of people just adding new fields for new functions (e.g. polls).
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.
Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.
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That's a them problem. 30 years ago we knew they'd be trouble if they ever adopted the web en masse and they (and the folks that prey on them) have proven that prediction right at every turn.
I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable. I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.
You owe nothing to these traitors who actively sabotage the goals that you deem important.
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I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable. I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.
There's nothing unapproachable about a 100% static site with some server-rendered navigation elements, much like livejournal was in the early 2000s. Much like HN is today. Perfectly 'approachable' even on mobile devices. The only thing that makes sites like this and that 'unapproachable' is stunningly high (genuine, not stat-massaged) levels of functional illiteracy.
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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.
I've stopped using NoScript because it was breaking my own apps. It was fine until Mozilla changed something in Firefox. The problem is that NoScript inserts a lot of JS into the web page and some of that JS gets broken by some sort security lockout. It may be a bug in Firefox and maybe it's been fixed but I wasn't satisfied with NoScript anyway. I'm now using uMatrix. It doesn't insert JS on every active element (ju…
I do also use my hosts file for stuff that will never, ever, ever get a pass, like google analytics.
> 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…
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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.
Ah now it's clicks. Used to be eyeballs.