11–20 of 263 posts
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
All that is happening on Discord these days. It is a shame that this is not happening over open protocols but I doubt most people care.
What bothers me is that even some tech forums use Facebook groups and stuff, hiding the information in non-searchable silos. Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
And Discord, which is terrible for that.
No ads I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a feature, then websites used it to show you ads.
No ads I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a feature, then websites used it to show you ads.
I prefer those ads to today's ads. At least they didn't track anyone.