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A simple web we own

rsdoiel.github.io

151–160 of 240 posts

Re: A simple web we own

#151
post #4

> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...

Yes agreed.

It is possible through what he says. I’ve made fx [1] exactly for the purpose of the author. Wordpress but written in Rust for efficiency and loads of unneeded features omitted. Publishing is not via static site generator because the time between edit and seeing the result was too long for me. It does use Markdown for the posts and has built-in backup to Git functionality. I’m using it for my blog and like it a lot since I can quickly use it to jot down notes [2].

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

[2]: https://huijzer.xyz/

Re: A simple web we own

#152

I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name. Then the URL was http://www. /~ I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time. Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?

Nowadays you could use Vercel, Render, Netlify, or Cloudflare for free. Most even have a drag and drop interface.

Re: A simple web we own

#153
post #72

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…

Instead of thinking about cables, have we considered the idea of satellites getting cheap enough to launch?

there is already so much “space stuff” that launching spacecraft is increasingly difficult.

The next comment will be “but they can have short orbits” but that betrays the fact that they can collide with other objects and if its so cheap we will launch thousands for bandwidth.

As always: technical solutions to political problems is a band-aid and makes everything worse, lets beat our politicians to death (metaphorically) instead.

Re: A simple web we own

#154
Publishing markup content is not the problem world needs solving. Infact there is no problem with web that applies to all users of the web. Most are just consumers of the content. Mostly non-text content.

I guess the author first need to get some stats on content type, use cases, money flows, controls etc and then define the problem that applies to most users of the web.

Keep in mind that, usually a system that evolves through feedback loops, and shaped by forces, doesn't have a major problem as it's evolution has ensured the fit between itself and it's context.

You may call the forces which shape that evolution as evil. But the forces are part of the context that you need to live with. The forces are also a product of that evolution.

Re: A simple web we own

#155
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.

Honestly if we could have we would have, we can't even tax the people destroying our world, how are we going to create utopia

By making an effort. If we fail, at least we tried.

Re: A simple web we own

#156
post #72

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…

> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.

> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.

Maybe we can, but it is A) a far bigger, older, and more difficult problem than how to structure a computer network, and B) fundamentally not solvable through technological means.

No matter how much technologists love the idea of technology as a liberating force, our worst instincts and dynamics always reassert themselves and soon figure out how to use that same technology to destroy liberty.

Re: A simple web we own

#157
Yes, but: 1) Cooperatives inevitably transition into centers of power. If a cooperative becomes powerful enough, it becomes another mini-government that "unpublishes" you if you say something they don't like. 2) Your freedom ends at the ISP boundary; you don't own the cables. If the ISP doesn't like what you publish, they just disrupt, throttle or disconnect your upload link. They probably have the legal right already. 3) Even if you own the wires (or you invent a LoRa mesh stable enough to provide an alternative Internet), the government will disrupt you (or worse) if you say something they don't like. It's very likely the will disrupt you preventively because you could potentially say something they don't like. This is not right wing vs left wing: look at the UK, for example (left-wing government, abysmal freedom of speech on the Internet)

The issue with publishing content has always been censorship. Anyone in power has incentives to apply as much censorship as they can. It's never been a technical problem.

Re: A simple web we own

#158
> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product? What can I do to change the equation?

Host your own website (on a free server for as long as you can), print out some flyers, paste them around town or pass them around (to bypass the Ad Gods), ask for donations to pay the growing costs of bandwidth etc. as you get more users?

Ultimately it comes to down to convincing people, the ickiest task on earth :<

Re: A simple web we own

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you pay for it at least, and hence enter into a contract with the service provider. A free GitHub account is a come-on by Microsoft to enmesh you further in the world of hosted services - the precise thing this manifesto is complaining about

I don't think the manifesto says anything about that actually.

I'm not sure how you can read the opening paragraphs of the manifesto and come to that conclusion:

> Today the Web and Internet is owned and controlled by large for profit corporations and a few governments1. Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification

> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product?

> What can I do to change the equation?

> Those two questions lead me to a bigger question.

> What happens when ownership and control of hardware and software shifts from the domain of corporations to a world where a significant percentage are owned by individual people and cooperatives?

Re: A simple web we own

#160
post #72

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…

>there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

I'd settle for a maximally private totally uncensored IPV4 like there used to be. Broadband turned out to be over-rated in some ways.

One of the good things about dial-up was the way it was built on a peer-to-peer network that "everybody" already had, their land-line telephone service.

Way before actual "networking", anybody with a modem could connect privately with anybody else who had one.

An ISP could be formed by taking incoming calls from all active digital users simultaneously, and that was where the networking was done, plus connection to other networks around the world.

You could still contact any one computer user privately if you wanted to, without going through an ISP, just like it was before the web.

Also connect one network with another distant one, such as one office building to another, without ISP.

If anybody wanted to form their own working ISP, they could do it privately anytime as an interested group and not even tell anybody about it if they didn't want to. It might not be a commercial ISP but there was no mainstream to begin with where it was assumed that an ISP must be commercial or make any money at all.

These connections were intended to be "totally" private by law, it was well-established that a court order was required to do a wiretap, and the penalty for violation was based on the concept that spying on Americans was one of the worst crimes, and needed to deter those who acted to compromise the privacy & freedom that America cherished so deeply. And preserve citizen rights the country was chartered to uphold, no differently than before the telephone was invented.

There's nothing like this any more, land-line copper is in miserable disuse so the only remaining wire if any is TV cable. But the only way to do peer-to-peer contact over cable is through an ISP, how private is that and why is there not a court order necessary before privacy can be compromised and very select Americans be subject to espionage?

Cell phones won't help you now, they can be tapped without wires.

The options are far fewer than the possibilities offered when dial-up first got popular.

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