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!
in hindsight it may have been a mistake to google "gimp mask" to try to figure out how to do a layer mask in gimp, the free and open source equivalent of photoshop
@draxil@happyborg@servelan@molly0xfff DDG isn't bing, it does use bing in it's results, but they have their own crawler/index and pull in tons of other sources, lots of manual exclusions of known ad sites/etc from the index as well. The only thing imho it doesn't do too well is trending/current events as the indexes don't update that quickly (which is also why the search is harder to game by advertisers, no fake stories to sell stuff)
last year i discovered that law360.com required a "professional email address" to sign up for free, which is how i came to be the proud owner of fartbag.lol
@molly0xfff I am the equal-parts-proud-and-ashamed owner of fisting.horse for the same reason. the domain was the result of trying to come up with the worst possible thing to have on a business card (without being outright offensive)
• enter password for password manager
• verify from email that it's me signing in from a "new location" (VPN)
• use security key
• use password from manager to sign into actual service
• complete image CAPTCHA
• receive text message with 2FA code
• unlock phone with fingerprint to get code
• access service
@molly0xfff Somebody on here pointed out that "MFA means it requires one thing that you can lose, and one thing that you can forget" and I keep thinking about that.
In 30 minutes: a hearing on whether Sam Bankman-Fried will be remanded to jail after leaking to the press private diary entries of a witness in his case.
going to start talking at great length online about how much i hate men to poison the dataset for anyone who tries to train one of these models on my social media #AI#AIEthics#TechEthics
me typing into google minutes after pulling off a multi-million dollar crypto theft: "how do i, molly white, evade prosecution for the crime i just absolutely committed"
"We believe it’s important for Mastodon to be good as a product on its own merits, and not just because of its ideology. If we only attract people who already care about decentralization, our ability to make decentralization mainstream becomes that much harder."
@ScienceisWhere@dusnm@molly0xfff Since the infamous github issue, I've been asking non-tech people about 'choose my own server'. Not one knew what it meant, and most assumed it would mean they would have to set up a server theirselves. It's a terrible, terrible piece of UX.
@dusnm
You are onto something there! I don't get why was this so hard to do A/B tests and understand that wording is crucial, and that having just one "well moderated server" is not a good look. It undermines all the hard work put onto those servers, servers that even made it past instance picker on official Mastodon website and closely follow Mastodon Server Covenant.
After all that work done, official app just wants to promote the single instance, even if it's covered by good intentions.
Just saw a really irritating anti-remote work chart crime from #Gallup making the rounds on twitter, from an article claiming that "The most worrying finding in the latest survey -- especially in a workplace that is increasingly hybrid and remote -- is that employees who can do their work remotely have an eroding connection to the mission or purpose of the organization."
Review: In "Read Write Own", the Andreessen Horowitz general partner and web3 superfan Chris Dixon lays out an unconvincing argument that blockchains are what it will take to fix the web.