"In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. ... There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of the open web."
i'm sure it was a major and scary decision to branch out to their own platform, but the precarity of building on third-party platforms like twitch/youtube really can't be overstated
"[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you." – @ben
@molly0xfff@ben@dangillmor Stack Overflow's conduct and handling of the situation is atrocious. I support protesting/pressuring SO but deleting answers is only detrimental to real humans looking for help via search engines. SO has backups/edit-caches that OpenAI will consume, deleting makes that data exclusive to the "AI".
Adding a protest message to answers and directing users to community forums/spaces outside of walled gardens is more effective.
@shom@molly0xfff@ben@dangillmor Ever heard of low-background steel? Various instruments are made out of world war 2 and earlier battleship steel, some recovered from the bottom of the ocean, because all post-1945 steel is radioactive.
Pre-2023 Internet content is going to be a precious resource like low-background steel someday, the way things are going. Archives will be valuable, especially if one has the legal right to use them. (Although that will NOT deter people, they will obfuscate.)
“Crypto researcher Molly White skewered [Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own] with the delight of Pete Wells after downing an Almond Joy cocktail at Guy Fieri’s Flavortown.”
finally made an "AI" category (https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?collection=ai) for @web3isgreat to capture all the disasters pertaining to AI-powered cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency-powered AI
fascinating review of studies on Internet use and cognition — including potentially negative effects on concentration and memory — found by way of an excellent article in Nautilus titled "Viva la library"
@molly0xfff I was reading it on my phone and managed to get through it without task switching, but not for lack of attempts by my phone to distract me! I was feeling proud of myself for getting almost to the end without even thinking about task switching when 2 text message notifications came in 😅 Under normal circumstances I would have opened them, but I thought better of it given what I had just read
@molly0xfff It's possible by setting a unicode character (fallback) in the CSS content, then style it with a custom webfont (e.g. convert the SVG with IcoMoon).
That's how I manage such link indicators in my personal website, although I move them to the right gutter instead of inline. Example: https://heracl.es/geary/
The difference between versus an SVG is negligible. Of course, opinions may vary between what's good practice between icon fonts and SVGs.
Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
@molly0xfff ISPs however have slowly, gradually minimized what people get when they get an internet account.. shell accounts are gone, usenet is gone, in most cases a little bit of storage for your own website/webblog is gone, self-hosting at home is still a privacy nightmare, and hosting your own weblog via a community cloud like Tor or i2P isn't common yet.. yes we should do as you suggest but how we get there is the question
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff websites maintained by experts on a topic, using space provided by their ISP or institution, without any monetization or tracking. Also, the prevalence of text, and a view that any serious website would not clutter the screen with animations and autoplay video (even though unserious ones always did).
@molly0xfff Websurfing! The ability to jump from link to link as topics interest me!
That's the one thing which to me feels like it really has disappeared. Even on blogs, its rare for me to find them linking the concepts they discuss, & if they do its to previous articles of theirs.
Wikipedia seems to be the last bastion of it! Though that's also internal links.
I try to make up for this, give my readers a taste of what I miss. But that just informs me of how difficult linkifying is!
silver lining: it was awfully thoughtful of all these boston college administrations to draw the attention of a group of young, energetic, politically active students to last year's "tent ordinance" that cruelly targets the unhoused and is now being used to crack down on speech