Splitting the Web

https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

by bertman • 3 years ago

332 195 3 years ago

8chanAnon2• 3 years ago

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 usable then I'm gone. I won't put up with 15mb downloads just to read some content (Twitter included). The web is not so much splitting in two. We are simply saying "no more" to the exploiters and grifters. Eventually, they will have to learn to eat with the commoners or eat by themselves.

skydhash• 3 years ago

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.

sodapopcan2• 3 years ago

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.

38• 3 years ago

if it helps I have my rules here:

https://github.com/1268/blog/blob/main/2023-08/ublock-origin...

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

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.

theonlybutlet2• 3 years ago

Been doing this for a few months too.

But recently installed duckduckgo on my android phone and turned on their app tracking protection. The unnecessary requests made by apps I haven't used in months is jaw dropping.

anthk4• 3 years ago

Get Lagrange in PC/Android, head to gemini://gemi.dev, go to The News Waffle and paste the whole URL (whole, as with https://www...) there in the URL input form.

It works for sites and for news home pages. It detects RSS feeds, too, putting that option in the first place when you get the rendered page. It can cut down most pages down to 5% and less.

Swizec• 3 years ago

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.

forgetfreeman4• 3 years ago

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.

RalfWausE3• 3 years ago

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.

kedean• 3 years ago

More than not having patience for the glossy websites anymore, I find myself trusting them less too. If I visit a company website and it's covered in pictures, big shiny buttons, flashy menus, and those damn "helper" bots, there's a solid chance it hasn't been updated in a few years and won't have any useful information.

dirtyid• 3 years ago

I just want unified reader mode experience for content oriented sites for consistent experience. I wouldn't mind some sort of AI constantly interpreting browser content in background and split out basic website in the foreground even if it involves wasteful amounts of computation. The way things are going, that's probably how to ensure adblock in the future.

vGPU2• 3 years ago

If a website tells me to disable Adblock to use it, I go somewhere else.

The modern web is already too damn heavy. I just built a new PC. I figured 32gb of RAM would be enough for a while.

It wasn’t.

I now have 96gb of overpriced ddr5 just to be able to basic tasks.

I wonder if windows 10 is the culprit? 16gb of ram was more than enough for windows 7 doing the same work.

esalman2• 3 years ago

I wonder what kind of basic task would require 96GB of RAM.

jakelazaroff4• 3 years ago

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 expanding. My personal website isn't a huge JavaScript app tracking my visitors, but I wouldn't really call it handcrafted HTML. I'm involved with a bunch of communities that aren't overly corporatized but don't take a big principled stand against it either.

I prefer Maggie Appleton's diagram of the web [1]. The click-obsessed corporations are what she calls the "dark forest of the clear web". But below that there are email newsletters and RSS feeds, there are personal blogs and digital gardens, there are communities run on Discord and Slack.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

chomp• 3 years ago

Well, her analogy is more for protected areas where you can hide from lifeless, aggresively public areas and where you can consume (presumably) more authentic content. It doesn't work well in this case for e.g. "cozy web" because places like Snapchat are definitely harvesting your interactions. Whatsapp is literally Facebook. The author of this article is more ranting about the "commercial web" in this case. They don't seem to have the same level of appreciation for some of the corporations that Maggie does.

jakelazaroff4• 3 years ago

That’s why I feel like the author is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of people’s blogs have all sorts of nasty tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.

Kovah3• 3 years ago

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 privacy, nobody cares. Nobody except my brother uses ad blockers. Just a few examples.

From my experience and what I know about web users in general, this seem to scale to the whole internet. Like 90% of the people know nothing about "our cozy web" and don't care about anything else than the commercial web.

jakelazaroff4• 3 years ago

I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. Like, yeah, the “cozy web” is fairly marginal, but the “tech-savvy” web the article discusses is even more so.

gochi2• 3 years ago

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 underfunded. You can see how these loop into each other very easily. Can't fund a better solution when we keep trying to keep it a secret.

We're also very bad at framing things. So often I'll observe what should have been a slam dunk: convey why privacy matters and easy alternatives they can use/ways to keep themselves safer, yet they wind up just convincing the person why they should stick within the misleading warm glow of the commercial web trap. Happens so often! A complete lack of empathy, just scoffing and dismissal.

I say all of this to say, we can do better. We have ample opportunity, we need to stop squandering it and indirectly killing the cozy web along with it.

ertian• 3 years ago

So, it's roughly like Linux in 1997 or something. It's out there, you can use it, lots of people love it, it's a whole community...and 99% have never heard of it.

That's fine. It can survive and even thrive with 1-2%. And, if it turns out to be superior in some important ways, and stable & persistent (vs the ups and downs of Windows and various former Unixes), it's got nowhere to go but up.

I remember there being similar contempt for Linux in those days: nobody cares, normies will never get it, it's a rounding error. It was viewed as just a weird little cult and a punchline.

Now grandma has an Android and aunt Betsie loves her Chromebook, and pretty much everybody interacts with Linux systems every day--and that has resulted in more variety, better driver & software support, and more features for us geeks.

This may be the beginning of something similar. If it is, it'll begin as a niche community of like-minded geeks, like that described in the article.

Of course, this could also be a short-lived fad that dies out in a couple years as people get bored and return to the normie web. If so...it's fun in the meantime.

mschuster912• 3 years ago

Nobody except my brother uses ad blockers

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.

Lio3• 3 years ago

What really bugs me about all the Google/Facebook/Twitter anti-ad-blocker stuff is that if only a tiny minority of us use them why are they putting so much effort into to stopping us?

From Facebook breaking copy/paste so you can’t email calendar events to people not on the platform to Twitter closing APIs to third party clients to Google attempting to stop ad blockers.

It’s all just to make life worse for a tiny group of people.

MayeulC• 3 years ago

The "cosy web" is supposed to be your family and friends instant messengers (chat rooms). Shared spreadsheets, that sort of "private" spaces on the web.

That forum or chatroom you are participating in for your niche hobby. Etc. It's differently shaped for everybody, and the name isn't ubiquitous. I think you may be confusing it with the fediverse?

bruce511• 3 years ago

I get where the author is coming from, but I feel like his conclusion is reductionist.

Yes, on the one extreme you have Facebook, and the other extreme is say Mastodon, but there's also a huge middle way which is well populated.

This week I've browsed hacker news, Wikipedia, done some research for an upcoming trip, kept up with OpenSSL and Jquery (yeah, that's still around, and still useful.)

I bought some waterproofing (direct from the manufacturer), looked up nearby steel manufacturers, and looked up the phone number of my electrician (on his site).

In cases where I feel I might be tracked, I just open an incognito browser [1]. Mostly though (apart from news) I don't really find myself on sites driven by advertising.

If you spend your day on social media, news sites, or buying everything online, then sure, I get it, you're gonna get tracked. But that's really (for me) a tiny part of my browser history. Everyone is different I guess.

[1] yeah I know, tracking is more than cookies, but I see so few ads anyway I haven't even bothered to load an ad-blocker. Then again, I'm not on social media...

hightrix• 3 years ago

Replied to wrong comment

palata11• 3 years ago

Everyone is different I guess.

If you are not on any social media and not logged into google, then you are really in a very small minority.

mrweasel• 3 years ago

I bought some waterproofing (direct from the manufacturer), looked up nearby steel manufacturers, and looked up the phone number of my electrician (on his site).

Perhaps a little side tracked here, but the internet has basically become useless for DIY projects lately. We're renovating and needed some advise on which kind of paint to use for a particular project and we have given up on using the internet for advise. SEO, bad translations and straight-up scams have prevent us from finding even the most basic information. Instead we just go to the paint store and ask there. They also know exactly what kind of paint, wallpaper and tools are available and don't recommend stuff that's can only be shipped from the US or China. So congratulation, we broke the internet and we now back at consulting local experts in physical stores.... Brilliant.

spansoa• 3 years ago

The link I clicked doesn’t open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day anyway. More time for something else.

Only on a rare occasion does surfing with no JS actually hamper my surfing. If a site needs JS, I make a rare exception and whitelist it temporarily with uBlock Origin. I have a dedicated browser profile for sites which require JS and I need to be logged in, like Amazon, Gmail, Reddit, etc

klabb32• 3 years ago

It’s the monopolistic companies aka mega corps that really restrict individuals and stifle innovation.

In the small-mid sized space, there are shitty actors but they’re easier to avoid, and don’t require resorting to living in a cave. They are competing with each other in the traditional sense of the word. They’re not on a mission to extinguish.

This is not unique to tech, it’s everywhere. Private actors that become the size of countries switch to playing zero-sum games, by acquiring and consolidating. It’s always bad for the consumer.

jfengel• 3 years ago

In what way do they stifle people? I had the impression that for the most part they just ignored small fry. If you want to boot up a server and point a DNS address at it, knock yourself out.

You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things. Your own web site is limited primarily by your imagination. (And occasionally the law, but that requires some pretty extreme stuff.)

klabb32• 3 years ago

You can't "innovate" on Facebook's site, but why would you want to? People go there to do Facebook things.

Parents use Facebook to schedule activities for kids. Governments and companies use Twitter to announce things to citizens and customers. So they are, as they claim, in a sense a digital townhall. But with arbitrary restrictions on access, both in terms of opinions and expressions and in terms of clients they don’t want you to use, or APIs they don’t want you to call.

for the most part they just ignored small fry

Very small, yes. But as soon as you’re bigger, they’re gonna want to eliminate you, peacefully of course. Acquisitions are probably the first tool, then it’s get uglier if that doesn’t work out.

Anyway, details in all its glory, but the trend as you grow larger is to play dominance games, which is another term for zero-sum. That’s not the only thing they do of course, but the trend is overwhelming.

gumby• 3 years ago

Key insight:

It’s a bit like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css have been used against usability, against them. Against us

shaunxcode2• 3 years ago

Apparently I joined this movement decades ago on accident? I lurked Reddit on occasion but even that is dead to me now. Mastodon is awesome. It does need door game support though.

beeburrt• 3 years ago

Door game?

pschuegr• 3 years ago

I assume this means something to do with onboarding

npongratz• 3 years ago

Not GP, but probably referring to door games similar to those found on BBSes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS_door#Door_games

rodolphoarruda• 3 years ago

I like the text, but the author seems to indicate there is a fork in the road ahead. Take left to the open web (HTML, lessJS, etc.); take right to the commercial web (Fb, GA4, JS, Ads etc). I think we can easily have both options at the same time.

If in the past we used to discuss our "work life" in opposition to our "personal life", I think we are at the point now of discussing our "small-tech text based web presence" vs. a "big-tech click based web presence" as described. Not a big deal, I think.

EGreg2• 3 years ago

As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them. I don’t see them and they don’t see me!

Aww how cute. No, they can still track what you do. Remember Facebook Beacon and the outcry? It is now a reality. Facebook (oh excuse me, Meta) doesn’t back down after people vehemently react to Newsfeed, Beacon, Metaverse etc. Mark used to respond “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” before justifying what he did. That was when he was wet behind the ears — he doesn’t bother to do that anymore.

Facebook changed our world, our ideas of the word Friend, of the word Like, etc. Whether you want to or not, these platforms controlled by a few people will reshape society unless we build open source alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533161/facebook-s-bea...

https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/18/is-beacon-back/

masfuerte2• 3 years ago

Beacon was client side. If you block access to facebook domains then they receive nothing.

EGreg2• 3 years ago

If a company has your first name, last name or other information, they can send it to Facebook

Large corporations are buying this data, and even governments

https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-broke...

https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-...

https://www.dli.tech.cornell.edu/post/facebook-and-google-ar...

Kiro• 3 years ago

Reverting back to phone calls and visiting physical stores again? This person is living my nightmare.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

I've largely been doing this (and more) for a few years now. It's seriously improved my quality of life.

at-fates-hands• 3 years ago

My kids are teenagers who have stopped texting almost altogether. They do more facetime and other video conferencing. When I need to get a hold of either, I actually call. Texting stopped working years ago as a means to get a hold of them.

Both are going to be seniors and have told me all their friends have all but abandoned texting and besides facetiming, they spend a LOT of time on conference calling when they're mobile gaming.

It would appear communications continue to evolve over time from generation to generation. I thought once texting took hold, phone calls would become obsolete. I guess not. There's a lot more interesting things they do with tech these days, but I was fascinated with how their communication habits have changes so rapidly even in their own short lifetime.

superkuh2• 3 years ago

People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

Mastodon is actually part of the "HTTP as a secure application delivery protocol" and is no longer part of the "HTTP as website document delivery" team.

To me that seems the biggest split: self contained application versus hyperlinked documents.

the_gipsy• 3 years ago

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.

steinuil• 3 years ago

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 heavy one.

doublepg23• 3 years ago

GoToSocial exposes an API for basic frontends pretty much. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

aendruk• 3 years ago

The awful thing about Mastodon is it used to serve inert HTML but this behavior was removed.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

anthk4• 3 years ago

There is:

https://brutaldon.org

tannhaeuser2• 3 years ago

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.

masfuerte2• 3 years ago

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?

seabass-labrax3• 3 years ago

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

butz2• 3 years ago

Biggest issue will be to keep government and public services on the non-corporate web, as they probably jump ship for "security" reasons.

reidrac• 3 years ago

I hate when a official government organisation that has their own website still uses twitter and facebook to make important announcements.

The assumption all citizens use those private services is wrong and dangerous.

butz2• 3 years ago

Yes, this. Of course, there are no alternatives. EU could probably promote some instance of Mastodon as mandatory.

wewxjfq• 3 years ago

It's sad, really. The information people want to get out of the web hasn't changed - an article is still a headline with a few paragraphs, a product is still a name, a description and a price, ... it's all so dead simple, yet the websites became unusable.

simonbarker87• 3 years ago

I find it sad that people always want to go to extremes. It doesn’t need to be the “handcrafted HTML” vs “bloated JS” sides the author describes.

For example, I dislike scroll jacking in most cases, however some level of scroll based animation or interactivity can be nice and make things feel a bit more interesting.

Humans are wired to notice and react to movement, a slightly animated button to go alongside a click is satisfying due to this.

The author rails agains the world of corporate internet only after clicks and impressions. They have done the same, except with writing pitting one side against the other ignoring that the choice isn’t binary, it is, like all things in life, a spectrum.

But that doesn’t sell as well so, good vs bad it is.

bayindirh2• 3 years ago

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 out of my life. I'll continue scaling down until I hit that optimal point, but I won't go to extremes just for reaching that limit.

Also, seeing the bad practices and anti-patterns help me to keep my knowledge about these things up to date. This way, I can recognize the patterns and I don't re-implement them get blindsided.

palata11• 3 years ago

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.

wilsonnb32• 3 years ago

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 the non-commercial web crowd are so bad that the only reason to use them over commercial alternatives is ideological.

Which, for Gemini at least, is intentional.

So I guess I agree that the web is fracturing but the post makes it sound like some kind of battle between the commercial side and the 'tech savvy's side, as the post refers to it, when really it is just a minority of tech ideologues rejecting commercial tech, a tale at least as old as Stallman and not particularly interesting.

Like the famous scene from Mad Men:

Tech Savvy Web: "I feel bad for you, commercial web"

Commercial Web: "I don't think about you at all"

anthk4• 3 years ago

UX of Gemini bad? I've seen browsers with far more complex settings in average.

palata11• 3 years ago

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 something. Facebook has an infinite wall, and regularly when I scroll it just makes me jump somewhere else (and therefore I lose this one post that was looking interesting in the middle of those ads).

On the other hand, SourceHut may look "old", but it is so snappy, it's refreshing. And I find the UX really good. It just removes the glossy, useless UI stuff.

lolinder• 3 years ago

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.

underlipton2• 3 years ago

I've come to understand that there's irony in that Mad Men scene, in that the second speaker actually felt quite threatened by the first.

zzo38computer4• 3 years ago

Gemini does not have UX, so it isn't "bad". That is better than having bad UX. Some client software might have bad UX, but that depends which client software you are using.

wilsonnb32• 3 years ago

It doesn't have a UI but it definitely has a UX - TLS required, no embedded images or videos, very basic support for user input, etc.

Theoretically a client could choose to ignore some of that but it's not really a Gemini client anymore.

Straight from the FAQ, emphasis mine:

Rather than trying to decide whether Gemini is about turning the clock forward or backwards, it's better to think of it as trying to deliver a particular online user experience that its fans think of as not being old fashioned, out of date, or obsolete, but not modern, cutting edge, or innovative either.

moritz• 3 years ago

When Meta did not launch Threads in Europe, the Tech Media who had previously declared how Mastodon is a failure because its signup process is just too complicated for normie users (you have to choose a server!!) published helpful articles à la “Here’s how you set up a second US app store account, configure a VPN on your phone and fake your Insta-Account to US in 347 simple steps”

skybrian2• 3 years ago

Sometimes people complain about life sucking in very general terms. Other times they criticize specific things, one at a time.

This post seems like a generic, zoomed-out sort of complaint, and that doesn’t appeal to me, because I’m not sure I learned about anything specific. I guess it’s about how it’s possible to stop using some business’s websites and interact with them in other ways? But which businesses?

“Splitting the web” implies a big claim that other people do the same, but how many? I guess we don’t know since they aren’t tracked?

Yes, there are patterns, but each website is different. Maybe websites should be judged for themselves? I don’t think it’s a good idea to stop using a website I like due to generic concerns like this.

palata11• 3 years ago

Well the article describes a feeling which is shared by many (me included). It is interesting (again, at least for me) to see that others feel the same way.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to stop using a website I like due to generic concerns like this.

I think that the idea is not to philosophically decide to stop using some websites. It is rather that some of those websites have become unbearable, and the author says that they won't make an effort anymore.

I tend to do the same, and I guess many people do that too: if I start loading a website and it takes forever, or it lags, or it seems like a big spam, I don't spend 10 minutes checking if my feeling is right or not: I just close the tab.

skybrian2• 3 years ago

The author writes about actively blocking things and that's not something that just happens, it's something they chose to do:

Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care.

Occasionally I will try to help someone with a lot of browser extensions installed who is confused about why some website doesn't work and does care, and the first thing I will recommend is creating a fresh profile with no extensions and seeing if that works.

Meanwhile, I tend to browse with fairly vanilla settings, so I'm not going to see the problems they see. I do see ads sometimes. Maybe I should block them, but often I will just go to a different website. I guess that's similar?

In some sense, we are seeing a different Web because we are running different web browsers. That's going to be true anyway, though. People have different preferences about which websites they like.

fouc• 3 years ago

Actually I read it as the opposite of a complaint.

They're basically saying they're able to use and enjoy the web just fine with no-JS. Even if it limits them from many sites, it also frees them to enjoy what is left.

It is a choice that automatically filters out a ton of noise, leaving them with a quieter, more peaceful, more thoughtful internet.

carlossouza• 3 years ago

Do you guys think the non-commercial web will ever achieve critical mass to tilt the scale in its favor and spark a chain reaction to drive flocks of people out of the commercial web?

A refreshing thing about the non-commercial web is the fact that it is not trying to monopolize my attention and not trying to hard-sell me anything.

More and more, I see people complaining about the big tech services... but that's a qualitative perception, certainly biased... I wonder if that's really happening.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

Do you guys think the non-commercial web will ever achieve critical mass

I don't know. I rather doubt it. Personally, I've given up on that as a goal -- the masses can do what they like. My goal is more about self-preservation: finding those spaces that are beneficial to me.

What I think is actually happening is that the web is balkanizing, as people who feel as I do build spaces that serve their needs.

hanniabu• 3 years ago

That's what the web3 movement is about but everyone is too caught up in bias based on false narratives

palata11• 3 years ago

That's what the web3 people try to make you believe

TheIronMark• 3 years ago

I get it, but man that's some hyperbole in there. I like Mastodon, but since there's still good stuff on other sites, I will read those, too. If the author thinks he's outsmarted analytics and tracking, they should check with their ISP. Or VPN provider.

johnnyworker• 3 years ago

How about a web ring? A manifesto? A good name for it, or several? By that I mean things to make this distributed discontent more discoverable, and more importantly, all those neat little tools and protocols that achieve great things with a fraction of the resources while keeping the autonomy of the user intact.

We also need (more, discoverable) beginner level material that explains the beauty and potential of the web and many of its good parts (there are so many!). People who are as excited about the web and DIY as the Veritasium guy is about physics and math, and as talented at showing it. I certainly would tune in, and spread the word.

Wouldn't it be great if we could leave something to future generations, like people left us diaries and books? If we just keep shoving our "content" and personal musings into those silos, chances are very good they will get basically nothing. A big fat hole, compared to what could be have if we actually cared about our files and bytes, and got the average person to care about theirs too. I consider that literacy in the digital age. You don't stop at 20% literacy, that would be appalling.

And I posit it's not actually hard to become an adult, it's way harder not to. As long as you don't exercise autonomy it seems more and more daunting and hard, if you do, it becomes easier. I think the same applies here. There's just all these swarms of middlemen telling people it's all impossibly hard and dangerous (while they shovel on layers of complexity to make it so). They say don't bother walking, walking is hard, and offer to carry you. That goes well for a while, until you depend on them, until the idea of walking positively scares you. Then they start carrying you where it serves them.

potta_coffee• 3 years ago

Discoverability for the kind of content I want to see is completely broken. I can barely find anything on the web anymore. Google gives me Reddit, Facebook and a million crappy review sites.

pmlnr• 3 years ago

How about a web ring? A manifesto? A good name for it, or several?

Yup, doesn't work either: https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/writings/yesterweb

deepsun• 3 years ago

I’ve never received so many emails commenting my blog posts.

I've always wondered if there's is an easy way to have a pre-moderated, owner-sorted list of comments section.

Emails are private, but sometimes users can say something interesting for others to see. And I don't mind if website owner deletes/edits/down-sorts my comments -- it's their web property.

PS: If only that page had a Like button... :)

revskill• 3 years ago

My blog has no JS, but my customers dashboard is full of JS, a SPA. I'm on both side where it matters.

throwing_away2• 3 years ago

When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

Author lost me here.

I use Firefox and Kiwi browser with uBlock Origin with all the annoyance lists enabled, bypass-paywalls-clean, unpaywall, sponsorblock, alternate player for twitch, violentmonkey and a few scripts. I also have yt-dlp, streamlink, and mpv.

I regularly read HN, Slashdot, and TechMeme, and it's extremely rare to get a link that I can't access.

Oftentimes I can access content without a browser, thanks to mpv's excellent web support.

I get that it's annoying, but it's really not that hard to solve it once and rarely think about it again. This has been my setup for at least 3 years now.

Occasionally something will annoy me and get through my filters, and I have to spend a few minutes fixing it.

The only thing I'm walled off from right now that's slightly annoying is browsing specific accounts in "X" with tweets ordered by timeline and viewing tweet replies. This is really low value so I haven't bothered looking for a solution, but if anyone knows one, feel free to link it here.

teekert3• 3 years ago

I do see it quite often. Also when signing up for things often I need to disable ublock or move to Edge entirely.

throwing_away2• 3 years ago

I've never run into that. I wonder what services? Maybe stuff I would get some other way.

teekert3• 3 years ago

I feel this too. Moreover, I often want to signup fro something, like a webshop. Often it simply does not work and I choose to order without an account, sometimes it works then. Sometimes I need to disable ublock, sometimes I need to use Edge (on Linux). Often I'm already dropping out, using a different shop altogether.

I guess we are a group to small to care about though.

NovaDudely• 3 years ago

I will give various sites a little wiggle room via NoScript but by the 3rd failure due to an excess of 3rd party requirements I just move on to somewhere else.

GMoromisato3• 3 years ago

It's not symmetric, however. Those of us on the "full web" are still able to access everything. Which is why I don't feel compelled to "pick a side".

Still, I do feel the enshittification that they're talking about. I hate that Google is less reliable and that (e.g.,) reading a recipe online requires shoveling away a mountain of spam. I think this is just the natural consequence of funding the web through ad clicks.

Shameless plug: I'm working on something called GridWhale, which I hope eventually turns into a modern, global BBS. We'll be able to afford to publish the info you want without ads because we're getting revenue elsewhere. But since the revenue will come from customers, our incentives will be aligned, and we won't need to sacrifice privacy or use dark patterns.

OK, I realize I'm not adding much to this discussion, but I was just waiting for the compiler. Sorry.

flir3• 3 years ago

Everything beyond the main page is a 404. I just wanted a technical description of how it works.

GMoromisato3• 3 years ago

Apologies--still working on everything (which is why I didn't post the URL).

But here's a technical description:

1. Imagine we build a platform abstraction layer on top of the typical nodes of a datacenter: web servers, database storage, etc.

2. We also create a remoted UI layer on the platform that renders on browser clients as HTML/JavaScript. Think of it like X Windows but higher-level and rendered on a browser.

3. Now we build a VM that can execute byte code and runs on the platform layer. We can now create programs that run entirely on the server/datacenter, but can render UI on the client. From the program's perspective, it thinks it has full control over a machine, but the platform layer takes care of remoting as appropriate.

4. Also, we have abstractions for shared memory, so that multiple programs can share data, even if they happen to be running on different nodes. Multiple programs, each potentially run by different users, can collaborate.

Effectively, all programs think that they are running on a single, giant, global computer.

Happy to answer questions if this is at all interesting.

reboot81• 3 years ago

I reject the ad injected sites, most gets handled with Pihole. To much ads? ⌘ + w. FB? I open the app once every 3 weeks, cant stand the ads. As the OP wrote: I have enough to read anyway.

bad_alloc• 3 years ago

This post expresses something I have been feeling fro a while. We need some catchy names for these parts of the web. I'd propose "Corponet" for the big sites (borrowed from Cyberpunk). How to call the other side though? "Fediverse" is its own thing, is there any other term that encompasses the fediverse, random personal sites and so on?

tolciho• 3 years ago

smolnet is one such term.

treyd• 3 years ago

The term "small web" refers specifically to the old style of small handcrafted websites. But that would exclude Mastodon which is actually fairly heavy to run if you don't use a dedicated client and use the main browser app. I've heard the term "indie web" to roughly include both of these.

emsimot• 3 years ago

I like cozyweb

cutler• 3 years ago

AI is a much more divisive factor than Javascript. AI polarises the end user and the massive corporate cloud entities with the technological capital to compute what an individual cannot. The corporate cloud is the real evil which has taken away the agency of individaul developers.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

"It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles."

Plaintext SNI or TLS other than v1.3 is one way of gathering information, namely, a list of every domain the computer accesses.

TLS1.3 without SNI: https://web.archive.org/web/20230801115645if_/https://ploum....

tonyfader• 3 years ago

another virtue signaler using false equivalence to avoid personal discomfort.

his "solutions" do nothing to address the power of these monopoly platforms.

RalfWausE3• 3 years ago

his "solutions" do nothing to address the power of these monopoly platforms

Oh, his solutions DO address the problem in a way that works best: Walk away.

casey2• 3 years ago

Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn’t open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day anyway. More time for something else.

This has been my browsing habit for a long while now. Sure if I need to add a macro or google some compiler flags to compile an OS, I'll do it. But fiddling with noscript when I know your site is just images and text (plus trackers/ads) is not worth it.

BlueTemplar• 3 years ago

The little mini-game of "what third party script domains do I have to enable in uMatrix to make this website work" is starting to get really grating these days. Especially for payment processors.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

Ah now it's clicks.

Used to be eyeballs.

sophacles3• 3 years ago

Before it was eyeballs it was clicks too.

royibernthal• 3 years ago

Very idealistic, not sure your conclusions were entirely thought out.

julianeon• 3 years ago

To me it seems dangerous to go to the author's side of the split, if you work in tech: you won't be exposed, at all, to the web that most people experience. Which is bad for you, professionally speaking - it's bad to be completely in the dark about "the web" as most people experience it. It's bad if you work in a startup which is on that web. And it's bad if you're entrepreneurial and would like to make money off that same web: you literally don't know what most of your customer base is seeing. I would even go so far as to say it's not a viable strategy if you expect to be employed by tech cos. or startups. It would be like trying to get a job at Disney or Paramount, while saying "oh I don't watch tv or go to the movies."

1shooner• 3 years ago

I agree. But considering it an other (probably less binary) way than the author, it means you have to intentionally undertake to understand an experience purely from your users' view, if you want to do your job well. I think it's more dangerous to have the misconception that you're keeping up with the broadening diversity of users. This, to me, is the beautiful part of the universal design philosophy being adopted by web development.

strix_varius• 3 years ago

I think this is a false assumption.

I run Brave with privacy features on, on a Linux laptop, and I have not had any issues with employment, at both startups and very large tech companies. Facebook, for example, didn't care that I didn't use Facebook or have an Instagram account.

Often, the most useful perspective is not the one that regresses to the mean.

nicbou• 3 years ago

I am on the author’s side of the split and this is reflected in how I design websites. The website on my profile is a good example of this: no cookie banners, no newsletter prompt, no call to action. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it’s exactly what you came for.

To me, that’s a competitive advantage.

I am self-employed and make a good living from that website. The hardest part of my job is going against advertiser expectations. I control if, when and how I mention products, and that’s very unusual to some of them.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

Which is bad for you, professionally speaking - it's bad to be completely in the dark about "the web" as most people experience it.

Why? None of my professional work is related to the web at all. Why should I have to suffer the hell that is the modern web just because most people choose otherwise? Doing so wouldn't improve my work at all.

momirlan• 3 years ago

looked at kagi.com. paid search ? hmmm

spiritplumber• 3 years ago

it works surprisingly well. the main problem is that you won't know what to do SEO wise but if you're actually looking for info, it's good.

pard682• 3 years ago

Wait, doesn't everyone use an ad blocker?

delphi4711• 3 years ago

You already know the answer :). The answer is: no

pard682• 3 years ago

In some sense, yes I know. But in another, the elderly neighbors who I help with computer issues even use an ad blocker.

systemvoltage• 3 years ago

Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

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.

petermcneeley• 3 years ago

It is interesting to contrast this with the original declaration of cyberspace[0]. At the time the thinking was that the threat to the web would come from Government.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

esafak• 3 years ago

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.

cesaref• 3 years ago

I don't think this is quite right. What I believe is going on is that different generations have different battles they are fighting, different tech that they are comfortable with. How i'm reading it is the author is fighting against change, and the tipping point they are seeing is the realisation that the battle is lost - they have to either choose to adopt the new stuff, or close the door to it.

Each generation grows up with stuff and sticks with it in the face of 'better' or 'more modern' alternatives. We see this with adoption of different social media platforms where there is a clear age difference between different platforms. My generation (i'm in my 50s) are big facebook users, my son (in his 20s) doesn't use facebook, but uses tiktok & discord. I'm pretty sure in 20 years time the next generation will be using something different and there will be an aging tiktok demographic too.

All this means is that if you are developing a new competing platform in what appears to be a closed space, there is always room for you, if you target the next generation and their expectations.

eterevsky• 3 years ago

I think the author exaggerates a bit. Where on their scale between commercial and non-commercial web would you fit say Substack? It's obviously a commercial service, but it has it bells and whistles mostly tuned down, presenting to the users more or less pure texts of the articles.

sydbarrett74• 3 years ago

What pisses me off is that the Powers That Be (both government and Big Business) are requiring that we keep purchasing ever beefier hardware to run all the trackers that get shoved down our throats. We're paying to be surveilled.

doctor_radium• 3 years ago

This post touched on something I was pondering recently: disappearing.

If users of alternative browsers (Firefox apparently being one now) are more likely to block analytics scripts and more with uBlock Origin (etc.) then we've fallen off the map insofar as tracking us goes. Does that mean these browsers are actually more popular than statistics suggest? Is there any way of knowing? I suppose Raymond Hill would have some idea from the ratio of user agents who download updates, but that's just one addon among many.

Not that I'm expecting more than an additional blip, but even that would give me joy.

piocaidsn• 3 years ago

The analogy of "splinternet" to "Babelization" is quite fitting and brings to mind the story of the Tower of Babel, where linguistic diversity led to communication breakdown. Applying this concept to the internet highlights the potential consequences of isolating information and communication based on geographical or political boundaries.

willywanker3• 3 years ago

What do I do? Been blocking ads since I discovered it was possible in 1999, while on a shitty dialup and observing that banner ads loaded before the page itself. Back then I used a network level adblocker/firewall combo called AtGuard, which Symantec acquired later. Then moved onto AdMuncher on Windows for the next 15 years or so. Now I use Pale Moon as my primary browser - unlike Firefox that pretends to care about privacy while doing the opposite, this one, forked from Firefox 24 and maintained independently, does not have a shred of telemetry or analytics or 3rd party Pocket like bullshit that requires 50 different 'hardening' about:config tweaks to remove. uBlock Origin and eMatrix (a current fork of the discontinued uMatrix), both with an aggressive set of filter lists keep the web spanking clean for me.

On Android, I've always rooted my phone to install AdAway, as a next level now I use AppManager (get it from muntashirakon.github.io) to disable advertising/tracking components within apps, and Google Play Services itself. Youtube being a special case, I use ReVanced Extended. Took some doing, but now I've managed to happily use whatever the corporate web throws up minus every piece of track advertising/analytics/tracking crap that they throw at me on either laptop or phone/tablet. Occasionally I look at the uBlock Origin logs and shudder to see all the crap that got blocked.

Tl;dr - I don't have to turn hermit and seek out indie websites exclusively when I'm able to extract exactly what I want from the mainstream web. Ultimately, your devices belong to you; you have to take back control over what gets sent to it.

Splitting the Web

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