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Rediscovering the Small Web

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Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#51

Post by kickscondor »

mrspeaker wrote: post #34
kickscondor wrote: post #12

If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before) * Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com ) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed52…

I love Fraidycat - it gave me the final push to delete my twitter account I had since 2007: let's me keep following the half-dozen accounts I actually cared about. Thanks for your work!

Hey - good to hear! Thank you for sticking with it.

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#52

Post by pfraze »

clarry wrote: post #45
moonchild wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is beaker appreciably different from freenet? https://freenetproject.org/index.html

Completely different. Look up privacy or anonymity on beaker's site? Crickets. It's a browser, apparently with all the dangerous bloat (javascript...) with a bolted-on p2p network that apparently does nothing for privacy or censorship resistance. Freenet is a p2p network with a focus on anonymity and resistance against censorship. It's not a browser, but for freesites it's got protections in place to filter out dange…

We're focusing on the protocol's capabilities and performance right now. Distributed or non-distributed proxies are on the roadmap, but not the current priority.

We aren't for everyone and the current lack of IP privacy is a good reason not to use Beaker if it concerns you. We're more about software freedom and solving walled gardens, so that's what we chose to solve first.

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#53

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41
snazz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, that's true of many specific hobbies--bicycling, sailing, gardening, etc. It's especially true of hobbies where purchasing ever-more-expensive things isn't so important. Hobbies like cars have more magazine-like and shopping-mall-like sites compared to less consumerist ones (although bikes can be like that too).

I wouldn't say that this is still true of bicycling, at least not bicycle touring. The amount of standalone blogs in that hobby have plunged drastically now that people choose to simply upload photos to Instagram, and what few blogs exist are often buried in Google search results. One can see that standalone forums are emptying out, reduced to mainly middle-aged members, as younger generations turn to Reddit or Faceb…

and ironically, these changes make it harder to sell used gear. a site like crazyguyonabike.com had (has) excellent bike-touring focused used gear ads, but who reads that stuff now? i have some touring gear that i've been trying to sell for 4-5 years ... it was never going to be easy, but it's now a lot harder.

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#54

Post by pfraze »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #47
pfraze wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really sorry about breaking your old apps. If you ping me on twitter (@pfrazee) or IRC, I can spend some time helping you convert them over. Most of the same capabilities are there (or on the way) so we'll hopefully just need to update the code. EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliab…

> EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though. What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future? I really like the project and realize it’s still young and can probably risk piling on breaking changes, but I c…

> What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the future?

I will say that I'm personally embarrassed that we had to do it. I don't like disappointing people who support our work. There was a post on HN recently about how Unity keeps breaking its platform; I don't want to end up like that.

The other thing I'll say is, there was a year-long gap from the 0.8.x beaker releases to the 1.0, and a lot of that time was connected to the engineering work on the protocol. The top priority was scaling, but we also added tooling the protocol so that if a similar breaking change is needed in the future, we can handle it smoothly.

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#55

Post by jamesjyu »

J.K. Rowling is releasing a new novel chapter by chapter called "The Ickabog" on a website [1]. I went there, fully expecting some over-engineered and productized site, and was pleasantly surprised that it's a very clean, static site: webmobile optimized, light svg graphics, clean markup.

No bullshit, just focused on the text and reading.

Hoping that more authors take this route when releasing stuff for the web.

[1] https://www.theickabog.com/home/

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#56

Post by livatlantis »

z3t4 wrote: post #42

I like this article, and I also like hand typing HTML and CSS. But coding is not for everyone. What we need is a better Wordpress, so ordinary people can publish their own website. It has to look good, perform well and be secure, but most importantly publishing content should be quick and easy.

Indeed, my first homepage was on Homestead IIRC, using the online WYSIWYG builder. It was terribly hard to get consistent results, but it worked. And got me into learning HTML4. I don't think they're too common now — it's usually things like Wix that have a more "pick a theme and enter content" + automagic website creation.

An opportunity, perhaps...

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#57

Post by livatlantis »

the_af wrote: post #40

This is a great article, the kind of stuff I find interesting on HN. Some of the "old school" web style clashes with my aesthetic sensibilities these days -- a lot of words to say I find it somewhat ugly! -- but I miss its hobbyist, non-commercial aspect. A lot of hobby style content I find interesting has moved to YouTube or Facebook these days, and everyone who's been reading HN is aware of the lack of control auth…

Indeed, I enjoy that æsthetic in certain contexts, admittedly because it makes me nostalgic more than anything else. I had to exercise restraint! :) I wanted the site to remain readable and accessible in text mode/lynx/screen readers and respect basic typograhical conventions.

But I agree with you that the thing that I miss the most is the hobby-ist, non-commercial aspect. But I'm discovering a lot of great links on this HN thread!

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#58

Post by heavyset_go »

kickscondor wrote: post #12

If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before) * Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com ) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed52…

Any interest in breaking fraidycat out into an app you can self-host and visit via the browser? I'd love to be able to use it from any device via a browser, and have the hosted version be the single source of truth.

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#59

Post by pea »

I had this the other day when I was reading about the origin of the word 'bear'. I found this page: https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html

This is anecdotal, and I'm not making a "then vs. now" argument - but there was something about the exchange that I found reminicent of this 'old web', and totally devoid from the way people communicate nowadays. I can't put my finger on it - but on what social platform where would this exchange live now?

Re: Rediscovering the Small Web

#60

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

zargon wrote: post #33

Somewhat related is https://millionshort.com/ It's a search engine that removes the top million domains from your search results (or top 100,000 or 10,000, etc). I find it useful sometimes to discover things on more obscure sites.

Just tried that for a C error I have, that... was super helpful. I've seen a lot of alternative search engines but this something else. Good link.
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