Tired of lazy loading. Tired of spinners. Tired of animations. Tired of infinite scrolling. Tired of auto-playing videos. Tired of short articles being replaced by videos. Tired of every site having a chatbot in the corner. Tired of full page overlays reminding me to pay or subscribe to a newsletter.
WOW hat tip to @yhancik (boosted by @mcc ) for turning me onto "One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age", a Tumblr + Research project digging through the torrent of The Entirety of #Geocities.
Hey uh, how hard is it to start a #neocities (#geocities ?) website if you don't know a single bit of #HTML and the last time you took a coding class was java 101 9 years ago?
I spent the last week scraping through a terabyte of GeoCities archives and collecting ALL THE #88x31 buttons! In the end, I gathered 29257 unique buttons (75k with duplicates). They are available at https://hellnet.work/8831/
Via janus.bsky.social @janusrose 10:09 AM · Feb 22, 2024
"#VICE has shut off our ability to download our emails after we received an anonymous tip that they’re going to be deleting our entire website today.
fun times in the media death spiral!!! will update once i know whether or not we’re all fired"
11:09 AM · Feb 22, 2024
"hey guys what’s everyone up to today? i’m just backing up 14 years of my professional work onto an external hard drive"
I've been online since the early 90's essentially and I have files going back to 95 or so. I did that because Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston where I worked pulled the plug in the VAX machine I'd been using for years and killed a bunch of personal stuff I'd stored on it. At that point I started backing up EVERYTHING electronic, friggin 5 1/4 disks and eventually floppies and never, ever disposing of HDs until they were backed up.
Not counting movies, photography and music my digital life since 1997 or so weighs in at 39 gb give or take. Music doubles that, photography and images X 10 or 15 pushing a tb, and movies and shows clock in at 9-10 tb.
Long way of saying that I never trusted online storage and still don't (looking at you #geocities). My digital life and presence are manageable given a NAS and sets of backup drives because online business is not held accountable for maintaining promises they make to users. Never have been really so I do it myself!
I wrote an article arguing that Web1.0, 2.0 and Web3 are all incorrect and inaccurate ways to categorize the web's history. Originally I was just going to write a post about how I didn't like the term Web3 but after reading about Web1.0 and 2.0 I don't like those either. It feels way too high level and ignores that the Internet...
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
Thank you for the optimistic PoV on the entrance of others to the #DeSoc of the Fediverse. It is an optimism that I share - especially with Matthias' announcement just an hour ago that his team behind the development of the #WordPress ActivityPub plugin has just released version 2.0.0 - considering the enormous footprint of WordPress installations across the entire Internet belonging to both common, everyday individuals and companies alike, of every shape and size, this is HUGE news.
It instantly, overnight, positions common folks and businesses to leap into the freedoms afforded them by the existing, privacy respecting, #FOSS based Fediverse that hitherto was... well, a bit of a leap for them psychologically. But now they have a familiar platform with which to begin a journey through the minefields of the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos; its proprietors programming their masses of #subjugated_chattel into livestock holding pens, where they are weighed, measured, packaged, placed into inventory, and sold.
That does raise the issue of an error in your assertions however. You mentioned, "instances in Meta's fediverses and on Bluesky".
The truth however, the reality, is that each are merely a single instance - One big monolithic silo, as described above, with the same incentives of monetization through privacy mining techniques that have made them the dreadnoughts that they are; at least in the case of #Meta (Threads).
Bluesky is of that vertically scaling market as well, but much smaller than the #Faceplant and #InstaSPAM engines operated by Meta, and now their new spearhead into the DeSoc space occupied by ActivityPub and other decentralized or federated protocol based, horizontally scaling instances.
#Bluesky hasn't actually shown their hand yet to the general public, but already, they've disenfranchised (fired) much of their talent; some, actually principal architects of their monolith who were frustrated and disillusioned with the direction Jay has been taking the company - moving further and further away from the disowned public community they spawned, organized, and abandoned following the initial trials and tests of the open source preview version of what became #ATP protocol (ATX).
Even Jack has moved on and embraced yet another horizontally scaling protocol in the DeSoc space, #nostr, and it's already bridged and interoperating flawlessly with the ActivityPub powered portion of the Fediverse, which in turn interoperates with instances running other protocols such as #Nomad, #OStatus, #Streams, #Diaspora, and #ZOT... all of them part of the Fediverse.
Many of the extant #ActivityPub powered instances in the Fediverse merely need to install these capabilities with a couple of clicks to enable this interoperability, while others bridge the divide through infrastructure developed and deployed over the past year or so.
What will be Meta's use case here for their business product?
That's the main question I think folks need to address - not punish the good people on the so-called evil side of the divide, the hitherto subjugated chattel that populate Marks so-called Metaverse or whatever he thinks he can compel people to adopt and endure. The point is, childish, domain level blocking by juvenile minds operating ActivityPub powered #Fediverse server instances only serves to paint themselves (and the users who have to date trusted those admins with being told what they can and cannot see and do) into a corner where they effectively cancel themselves, and find that their users have migrated to other spaces... maybe WordPress, where they truly control their own destiny in the DeSoc space and can now fully participate and engage with others - but on their own terms, not someone else's.
And that, I believe, is what the whole thing has always been about, going back as far as #AngelFire and #GeoCities :)
I do agree with you that we should indeed embrace these common, everyday individuals who, through their programmed ignorance, are mostly clueless as to exactly what the Fediverse is, and more importantly, has always promised for them. This is an opportunity, like Steve Austin, (the Six Million Dollar Man): "We can rebuild them, we have the technology, we can make them better, stronger, faster..."
One more thing I should correct you on, the Fediverse is an internetwork of networks, on the Internet - there are no fediverses, Fediverse is itself a plurality, but your intent wasn't lost on me.
Great article, I enjoyed the read and most of all, your optimistically tempered intent. Thanks for sharing and I hope to see much more from you in the future!
rn I'm doing a lot of research on early internet fandom for my bachelor thesis and since I was born after the turn of the millennium it's making me wonder how it must have been to be a fan on the internet when Usenet and ICQ/IRC/AIM and GeoCities were still a thing. It really feels like having some kind of lost nostalgia, I've only lived to see early facebook, msn and flipnote as my early internet interactions.
If you were a fan on the internet in the late 90's / early 00's, or know someone that was, please hit me up!! I'd love to have a chat about it!!
(please boost for coverage)
Tiens, je vous propose une petite expérience : j'ai ressorti des étagères ce Guide des meilleurs sites Web, édition 2000, paru chez Microsoft Press il y a de cela 23 ans.
Je vous propose de l'explorer page par page au cours des mois qui viennent et de découvrir combien des sites listés sont encore accessibles.
D'abord parce que ça va m'occuper, ensuite par curiosité, et avoir une idée de la portion du Web qui a survécu à ses 23 dernières années.
Ähnlich wird es auch #Twitter ergehen. Selbst wenn es irgendwo noch ein Nischendasein fristen wird, die große Zeit von Twitter - und auch von #Facebook - ist vorbei.
Sadly, almost 150 websites of the Restorativland #Geocities archive had to be pulled off Cloudhiker. 😔
It seems that some of the Restorativland pages contained malware and the whole website was blocked in Chrome browsers.
An Argument for Web5.0 (medium.com)
I wrote an article arguing that Web1.0, 2.0 and Web3 are all incorrect and inaccurate ways to categorize the web's history. Originally I was just going to write a post about how I didn't like the term Web3 but after reading about Web1.0 and 2.0 I don't like those either. It feels way too high level and ignores that the Internet...