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Splitting the Web

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Re: Splitting the Web

#121

Post by [deleted] »

steinuil wrote: post #26
the_gipsy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 heav…

[deleted]

Re: Splitting the Web

#122

Post by jeffreygoesto »

c22 wrote: post #117
Dalewyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of W…

There are free DICOM viewers you can use. For example https://weasis.org/en/.

Re: Splitting the Web

#123

Post by striking »

c22 wrote: post #117
Dalewyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of W…

Aside from noting the fact that DICOM exists for a reason, I'll also just vouch for that particular piece of software running acceptably under Wine.

Re: Splitting the Web

#124

Post by zzo38computer »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #52
masfuerte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OK, but there are many instances and you should be able to somehow make it automatically work with all of them when you access the URL (even in browsers that somehow do not render HTML).

You could use but that only specifies that it is using Activty Stream and not that it is using Mastodon.

Re: Splitting the Web

#125

Post by esafak »

This happened because the marginal cost of supporting a user for many online products is low enough to be advertising- and data exhaust-supported, thanks to machine learning (which increases the revenue by better matching users with ads). This is not entirely a bad thing; most people are poor, and rich people are effectively subsidizing them. I give Google Search a pass, but I don't want to use it myself any more.

Vote with your wallet if you can.

Re: Splitting the Web

#126

Post by lolinder »

palata wrote: post #70
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 som…

It's common to assume around here that most people care about snappy UIs and corporations are just dumb and give in to designers who need to justify their paycheck, but... what if that isn't true? What if the people who care about load times in apps like Slack are a tiny minority, and the majority actually likes the "glossy, useless UI stuff"?

It's easy for a native computer user who grew up with (or before) Windows 95 to dismiss the gloss as frivolous, but given that the glossy products constantly beat out the minimalist ones it's hard not to suspect that modern computer users have a different set of values.

Re: Splitting the Web

#128

Post by neilv »

Dalewyn wrote: post #104
skydhash wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

Even old.reddit.com seems to be doing this now.

Re: Splitting the Web

#129

Post by Kovah »

gochi wrote: post #55
Kovah wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underfund…

To be fair, the claim that 90% of the people don't care about that is a bit exaggerated, but I think it points into the right direction. I'm absolutely with you. I would love that the web becomes what it once was. A place where people care about people, instead of just money. And our best bet would be to show our lovely relatives and friends that there are websites out there where they don't have to click through huge cookie banners, being constantly forced to download apps or whatever, or having 50%+ of the screen occupied by ads. And not to forget that their privacy is being respected. Yes, we can do better.

Re: Splitting the Web

#130

Post by RalfWausE »

Swizec wrote: post #79
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 won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content Meanwhile my normie friends are sending me TikTok videos of people reading screenshots of Reddit comments posted to Instagram. Regular users absolutely do not care about any of this .

When i started to get into computers and later the internet my normie friends thought of that stuff as utterly pointless. Sure, they were sure that there was some use to computers in big businesses, replace the typewriters and make the life easyer for accountants, but everything else? Nah, nothing interesting for the wider populous, just nerd toys.

The internet? Why should anyone want to write an email if you could simply call somebody? Why would i want to get in contact with some random person on the other side of the globe? Why order something online? Is the "Quelle Katalog" (something akin to Sears) not much better?

Well... nearly all of the normie friends that did make such statements are now happily online, albeit nearly entirely on the corpo-web. My take on this: Let them. Let them sell their lifes to the corporations, but give them the opportunity to break free and learn of the "other web" if they show interest. Freedom is also the freedom to harm yourself.

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