Entries tagged 'cat:World Wide Web'

The web is too slow for most of what it's providing.

Entry created on 2024-08-16 Categories: #100DaysToOffload (21) EDGE (1) Gemini (2) Mobile Internet (1) World Wide Web (7)

I have a certain fondness for the Gemini space ever since its initiation. I like the main idea and am continuesly glad to see it growing in size and usefulness. I imagine that this is similar to how the web looked like at some point. Although I'm not about to make a Gemini site, I sometimes end up browsing other's sites. And it's a better experience every time. New search engines and other services, new blogs, geeky, topical sites and collections. It's such a great space for consuming interesting information when you're not exclusively looking for one specific piece of information.

Recently I was reading some personal Gemini sites and regretting not having more time before initiating a long duration of sleep is inevitable, when I suddenly noticed that I wasn't connected to the WiFi I thought I was getting my internet through. I was getting my internet through an EDGE connection with one bar on my Unighertz. That is generally not enough to do anything on the web noawadays. I wouldn't even deem it enough for today's emails. Mastodon works with that kind of connection. But you have to wait a very long time for thumbnails. Twitter didn't work at that speed when it still existed. But browsing Gemini capsules it hardly makes a difference. Not different from what I expected. But having had this experience I'm even more confident now in saying that most web sites are shit. Even a page from this site with relatively few data to load besides the actual content often consists of more than 50% of things that are not the blog article (CSS, menu, markup).

I've often thought about different ways how the Web could be used in a way that provides a better experience by making sure that bloated, malicious and faux sites aren't even linked to, without impairing the usability too much. People had so many ideas. Some of them more viable than others. But neither those I've read or heard about nor those that I could come up with fundamentally solve the problem (if you want to see it as one) that the web technologies are extremely flexible and powerful to the extend that they might as well be seen as infinitely capable of any function (and resource usage) imaginable only restricted by the client and server hardware in combination with the fact (and I think it has been sufficiently proven as such by reality) that people will create web sites that make use of the possibilities simplified by the accumulation of abstraction layers built on the core web technologies. Bad web sites will be built and linked to. Avoiding them will always be a hassle and can probably only be reliable if huge cutbacks are made by excluding the majority of web sites completely. An improved web experience in the form I imagine it would likely be easiest to achieve by starting from the ground up and creating a new web, possibly by restricting to a set of older technologies. Often suggested are CSS2, (X)HTML4 and a very limited set of JS instructions, although any set of technologies in various versions, no JavaScript, a new set of HTML tags, etc. has been suggested by now. Trying to find a way to technologically realise such a new, independent web might be a moot task.

A web built exclusively on older versions of the technologies that make up the World Wide Web seems desirable. It's what I and many others are used to already. It's very easy to make sure existing web sites work as expected on that new web: If they worked in Firefox 2, they're good. But taking this idea of a new web further, one might want to modify the feature set to prevent the same development happen to parts of the new web that happened to parts of the current web. And that's exactly the path of thoughts that Solderpunk seems to have followed and that might have lead them to the feature set of Gemini. (I'm sepculating here.) I don't agree with every single design decision. But almost all have a very good reason that adresses something that went wrong with the Web.

I've com to believe that this is the way to go if you want to escape the bloated web.

The Bad Web

Entry created on 2024-07-19 Authors: steeph (315) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (20) Computers (8) Open Web (1) The Small Web (2) World Wide Web (7) incomplete (28)

A lot has been written about the declining usablity of the World Wide Web due to web sites not respecting what visitors really want or need. So I'll just summarise here before I'll try to get to the point.

Megabytes of CSS and JS to display 15 Kilobytes of content and another few megabytes of ads and other bloat. It has become completely normal to have a hundret and more tracking cookies installed for wisiting a single web page. Many popular sites can't be read by at least some people because the distracting ads have become too much. Thise are the first major problems that come to my mind. Depending on who you ask the problematic development has started in the last couple of years, about a decade ago, in the mid-2000s or even in the 1990s. But most people above a necessary age to have experienced the difference seem to agree that the web experience was a better one in 2005 than today. Back then RSS was integrated by many popular sites. You could use it to read Twitter and subscribe to YouTube channels, for example, and sites that still offer it in the background used to place links to feeds visibly, not hidden in the source code for browser extensions to discover them. Web browsers themselves could not only display RSS feeds but placed an icon next to the address bar when a feed for the currently viewed page was available. RSS is often used to show how the web was more open in general. Even commercial web sites were created with a more open approach. A site were you had to register before you could view its content was an exception for which privacy was the reason, not monetary expectation or greed. This is the time to which most people seem to want to return to. When I say most people, I mean most people whose thoughts on the open web I read, which is those who post to the open web and are interested in such things to a degree that they want to write about it. So what I probably mean is "most people who are dissatisfied with the current state of the web". It's possibly that most people, or most internet users, love the way things are going now and hate the ideas advocated of the open web have, whether that is for or against their own good.

Sometimes I boost thought-out or new takes on the subject, well formulated demands or promotions of software solutions on the fediverse. And I often think about this myself. Because the web has brought me so many nice things and I want it to be a positive thing in society as well, which, overall, it doesn't seem to be anymore. What does the web need to make it better again?

First of all, the open web isn't gone, nor has it shrunk in size. There way more personal blogs, open networks and non-commercial projects out there than 20 years ago. Even new web forums open all the time. But it's less visible below the very very loud, commercial web. Maybe the greedy web is a good name for what I mean. Not every commercial web site is an example of how the web is devdeloping in a bad direction in my view. I want to be able to get information about a business from the business-owner themselves when I'm interested in their services, for example.

A search engine that returns links to non-commercial sites first, unless you really need information that can only be found on a page of a greedy site. I think- let's just not talk about the many problems (not even just challanges) that such a search engine would introduce if it is to be useful in practice.

A browser that only links to non-bloated/non-tracking/non-greedy/open web sites or warns when a link leads to a less-nice site. Again, I don't have the time right now to list all the problem that there would be if an attempt to implement this would be made. Maybe I'll write another entry about my deeper thoughts on the technological solutions that I mention here. But these thoughts don't contain any real solutions. So I don't know.

Create a literal small web, that only uses resources from and only links to, web sites that are following the same standard (e.g. only (X)HTML4, maybe only CSS2, possibly restriction on JS usage). That is in principle similar to building a whole new network, as is Gemini and Gopher doing. (I know Gopher isn't new, but I reckon the majority of sites is.) I forgot what other protocols with similar aims are there. As far as I know none that are widely used. There are initiatives to restrict the WWW to a smaller or older set of standards. Those probably influence site builders (mainly in personal web sites), but won't change the web as a hole. And so you'll eventually while browsing come across a site that doesn't restrict itself it what it's linking to, or you'll catch yourself linking to a bloated site because it's important to link to the original source of something.

JavaScript needs to be optional again. I've recently come to think that this is actually the one major goal among the technological changes that the current web would need to undergo in order to make it user-friendly and more usable again. In a time where you couldn't 100% expect that visitors were using a client that understood JavaScript, and had it enabled, web developers didn't have much of a choice and built in fallbacks so that a site was still usable without JavaScript. But the number of visiting clients without very good JavaScript became so small that it started to look optional, and in reality became not only optional but even rare, that fallbacks are included. JavaScript really took over the web. I could make so many words around this but don't have much time left this morning. Not only are there sites that are empty without JS loading the entire HTML. Such a thing isn't even special anymore.

If you are creating a new web browser, please include a switch in the GUI that allows to enable/disable JavaScript permanently (until deliberately switched on again) either entirely or for the currently viewed site. Or, maybe make it off by default.

tbd:this entry needs some links;write follow-up entries

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Entry created on 2022-11-25 (edited 2023-01-06) Authors: steeph (316) Categories: Software (47) Thoughts (71) Web Browsers (1) World Wide Web (7)

I remember when Firefox got the new feature to re-open the last closed tab. That was a real useful invention. Do you know what we did before that was possible? … Yes, it was exactly how you imagine it.

I also remember when web browsers didn't have tabs. I'm still not sure whether that was such a good invention after all. Why is there no popular alternative? Opera folded a long time ago with its thumbnail buttons. There are extensions to order, manage and group tabs differently. I think I'd like to try vertical tabs in a bar again for a while. Or just separate windows. Let the window manager manage them. There must be a good reason why every attempt to do that is quickly abandoned. But I'd still like to try it. There are browsers that don't have tabs. But those don't have an engine that I'd like to use for daily web browsing.

It doesn't look like there's any interesting setting to change the tab display in Fitefox.

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The Old Fediverse

Entry created on 2022-10-30 Authors: steeph (316) Categories: Fediverse (1) Internet (3) Thoughts (71) World Wide Web (7) Languages used: de (74)

Gestern dachte ich mir: Wieso gab es früher (vor 2016? 2015?) so wenige starke Bestrebungen, ein Fediverse in Form von Sozialen Netzwerken zu entwickeln?

Die häufig verwendeten Vergleiche Telefon- und E-Mail-Netz sind ja nicht die einzigen Beispiele dafür, dass es sinnvoll ist und funktioniert. In der Geschichte des Internetz waren schon fast von Anfang an fast alle und so gut wie alle weit verbreitet eingesetzten Protokolle dezentral aufgebaut.

Ich denke es liegt daran, dass es das Web schon gab und Menschen, die Dienste baueten, versucht haben, so wenig wie möglich neuzuerfinden. Es heißt ja in Sprichworten, das Rad neu zu erfinden sei Recourcenverschwendung und produziere neue Rad-Varianten mit neuen Nachteilen, die tendenziell überengineert sind. Und nicht nur Unix-Fans finden, dass Technologien simpel und modular aufgebaut sein sollten. Das Web ist schon dezentral. Und es gibt schon lange genug Technologien, mit denen die Funktionen der großen, beliebten Sozialen Netzwerke abgebildet werden können. Weblogs mit öffentlichen oder auf Mail basierenden Kommentaren, Pingbacks, Commented Re-Shares, … Und um den Content so wie er in App oder Webseite üblicherweise von Menschen abgerufen wird darstellen zu können braucht es auch heute nichts als einen Webserver, HTML und CSS.

Dass ein eigenes Protokoll dafür benötigt wird, um Plattformen zu bauen, die von Massen akzeptiert und zügig adaptiert werden, obwohl es seinerzeit Facebook, Twitter und Co. auch nicht brauchten; das ist eine Einsicht, die von der entwickelten Community erst mal breit angenommen werden musste.

Mit dem World Wide Web hat sich das Internet bzw. dessen Nutzung sehr weit verbreitet. Aber das liegt nur teilweise an den Möglichkeiten im und Fähigkeiten des Webs. Unkonventionelle, textbasierte Kommunikationsformen, auch mit großer Asynchronität zwischen Sender- und Empfängerzahlen, waren schon vorher die größte Stärke des Internets. Von daher finde ich es richtig, in Teilen gut vergleichbare Massenkommunikationsplattformen aus Vor-Web-Zeiten Fediverse zu nennen. (Zuerst stieß mir das ein wenig auf.) Das war ein guter Gedankenstarter.

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Community Based Discovery of Interesting Content on the Small Web

Entry created on 2022-04-01 (edited 2022-04-02) Authors: steeph (316) Categories: Bulletin Boards (2) Content (1) Google+ (1) OPML (1) The Small Web (2) World Wide Web (7)

Warning: This entry uses a LOT of words to come to a banale conclusion. Skip to the last paragraph for a tl;dr.

I was thinking about possibilities how interesting web sites could be discovered without relying on general-purpose search engines, web directories or unstructured recommendations in blog posts or threads in bulletin boards. Search engines will likely always be prown to SEO and therefore commercial content popping up among search results when that is not what the seacher is looking for. Web directories can be very nice and helpful if they are maintained well. But the criteria by which links are selected and categories don't always fit the needs of the visitor who is in search of new interesting content. Personal recommendations are worth a lot and I like it when people care enough about a web site or blog posts to share a link in chats or web forums. But they don't satisfy the use case that I have in mind. What I mean is the use case of wanting to create an aggregated feed of content (blog posts, other text posts, videos, audio podcasts, etc...) without learning about every single source of interesting content individually first. If you've been a member of a large social media platform you probably know how helpful it can be, especially to somebody who is new, to be able to follow sources that produce similar content quickly, making it worthwhile to stay, even though you'll want to do a finer selection of what goes into your feed over time. On Twitter I used the retweets of some few accounts with similar interests to build a very interesting feed quickly, and follow and remove single accounts over time to build perfectly individualised lists for myself. On Reddit, you can join a few really big subreddits and have some interesting stuff instantly, then over time find smaller and even more interesting subreddits that weren't among the search results of your favourite search terms.

With weblogs and the small web though, you have to know or find some web sites first to get just a little bit of interesting stuff, then click through a lot of blog rolls and link lists to find some more. It can be a very interesting journey and pastime. Maybe it fits the mentality of bloggers who don't publish on large platforms. But not everybody sees this as a good thing. And looking at it practically, somebody who wants to switch from consuming a single large social network to reading many small independent content producers does not have it as easy as somebody switching from one large social network to another.

Lists on Twitter and Shared Circles on Google+ are the perfect intermediate between picking out yourself what you want in your feed and following what everybody else follows. You do pick yourself, based on a list of interesting sources a friend or like-minded person has shared with you, but you don't have to pick every source individually. Likely there will be content among the possibly hundrets of authors you've started following with one click that you don't like to read. Then it's up to you to put them into a different circle/on a different list or to unfollow them completely. But to start out with a good set of interesting bloggers, you didn't have to search through thousands of web sites yourself first.

I don't see a reason why this isn't done more often with weblogs and other interesting web sites. I've shared and received OPML files for this purpose before. But for some reason people don't usually post their collection of great RSS and Atom feeds on a topic publicly. I'd like to encourage you to do so. If my feed collection wouldn't be embarrassingly outdated, I'd make a start. But the reason why I started thinking about this topic is precisely that I don't have a well looked after list of feeds on any topic. I just haven't cared about them enough for years. I will get it in order and post it here at some point though.

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Unpublished Poetry

Entry created on 2022-02-03 Authors: steeph (316) Categories: Personal (12) Poetry (9) World Wide Web (7) Languages used: en (179)

There was a time where my days were more influenced by poetry. A time where I ruminated more about feelings. At that time I was a regular reader of some web forums that were hardly or not specific to any topic. Do you remember those web forums? It may have been created as a place for a group of friends to interact online, but kept public, growing into a close community of so-called virtual friends. Or it may have been created to be a place to mainly discuss things around a single topic, like most web forums, but the off-topic sub-forum developed to be an important part of people's lifes, or even the main purpose to visit the web site. Or it may have been a web forum that was created for no declared reason, as a learning object for somebody who wanted to learn more about computers and web hosting. I loved those places. I still love the memories of them, and the thought that I was carelessly interacting with strangers back then, without the issues that are inherent in posting something to an unknown or wide audience of people today.

Anyway, I stumbled over short poems in 2008 that one user kept posting from time to time. Sometimes two a day, sometimes one a quarter. He was posting those for years and usually got no, seldom one, reply. I don't know what meaningful things people could have replied to them. They were just expressions of the authors feelings at the time, philosophical thoughts in a poetic dress, sometimes short stories, furious or gleeful, of events in the author's life. I didn't understand why they didn't catch more attention, expression of gratitude, attempts at answers to open questions or reader's thoughts from their own viewpoint. After all, they posted them publicly, in a friendly community, where it was expected to get all sorts of replies. Maybe the poems didn't often resonate with a lot of people. But many of them did with me. I never before thought that poetry would ever build a nest in my head. But theirs did, before I noticed. They hit a spot in my mind that I didn't know was perfect for reading and feeling poetry. I made a compilation of their posts in which I was sure to find a piece to cheer me up when needed, get the strength to make the right decision against my intuition when I knew my intuition wasn't a good guide, and all sorts of other little helpers in everyday life, as well as new thoughts I wasn't looking for. In that nest in my head there soon were my own thoughts and experiences, that, at some point, wanted to leave that nest. So I made some effort to form them into nice sentences, phrases, lines, sometimes rimes. That is, I started to write my own poetry. It felt necessary. Those thoughts had to go somewhere. I wasn't any good at it, which is why this entry is about somebody else's unpublished poetry, not mine. Mine fell to the ground as soon as they left the nest, and I didn't care for them enough to make them into something that I would have deemed worth backing up or copying to a new hard disk when necessary. I didn't even remember them when I typed the title of this entry.

But the poems of this unnamed author were good. I was back then and pretty much still am as uneducated and inexperienced in poetry as I every was. I have no clue what a good poem is. But their pieces are really good, judged by the effect they had on myself back then and the feelings that they are still able to produce in me today when I read some of them. One time I got into a conversation with the author over personal messages and mentioned the compilation that I made. They replied with a PDF of their own, a complete (up until that day) compilation. It contained many poems that they hadn't published. Some of them because they were too personal or could have the potential to identify them. Many of the published ones were very personal, too. But they didn't want them to be connected to his person in "real life". I promised that I'll never share them with anyone, no matter how much I think they ought to be enjoyed by or given the opportunity to help others. And that's the reason I'm writing this entry instead of posting the PDF. I guess it is considered wrong to tell somebody that there is a secret that you won't say anything about except the fact that it is secret. Allegedly that's no use for anybody. I don't think that's true. It has the use for me to have shared what I sometimes can't stop thinking about and, hopefully, payed a little bit of tribute to the anonymous author.

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The Web Sucks

Entry created on 2021-12-25 Authors: steeph (316) Categories: Opinion (7) Rants (3) World Wide Web (7) Languages used: en (179)

Not all of it. But definitely most of the world wide web sucks. I recently stumbled upon a blog post that puts many of my thoughts about the modern web into words well and that I'd like to share:

The Web Sucks by Chucho.

25 years ago I imagined what would be possible if I had access to the internet. 20 years ago we were excited about and enjoyed the possibilities of the web It was better than imagined. 15 years ago we were excited about so much more interesting and useful content, "Web 2.0" and the new possibilities that really started to become useful tools in everyday life. 10 years ago pretty much everbody was online, it had become too crowded but we knew where to go, which browser extensions to install and what to filter for a good experience. 5 years ago I started to realise how fucked the web had actually become.

It happened so slowly that it felt normal. But eventually the vast vast majority of content on the web was and still is commercial websites that mainly serve a purpose other than educate the reader, share experience, knowledge or other content. Almost all of the sites that appear or claim to exist for spreading information contain more paid content than actual content. It has long become impossible to filter out the pieces of the web with a less-than-creditable intent. I think way back when you considered to install an ad blocker for the first time, that's when a major line was crossed. It became so much worse so quickly that I can hardly remember how benign a large potion of the web was years ealier.

More people than ever share content in good faith on the internet today. But even this urge to share experiences, be it for the gratification of an urge to present the author's thoughts and feelings (like this entry) or for altruistic reasons for a greater good, is commercialised and directed into channels optimised for profit maximisation. You can't even access most of it without signing a legal contract that you definitely don't understand (because specialised legal experts aren't even sure how to interpret many of the most important parts) with one of the subjectively most evil companies in the history of mankind.

No wonder many people try to abandon the web as much as it is still possible (which is becoming less and less). No wonder the Gemini project was founded with built in feature contraints and has their users argue and decide against implementing basic features into the protocol that would help make browsing the gemini space a more comfortable experience. From the technological view, openness to new festures, the extendibility of the protocol, has made the mess the web is today possible.

Of cource I'm ignoring many things here the modern web enables and that I use and choose to continue to use. I'm still wondering wether any of it is worth the trouble. From relatively small trouble, like megabytes of at best useless Javascript to larger trouble, like huge companies using AI-created algorithms that have never been evaluated for anything but how much money they potentially could produce when put to use, and intentional policy choices, pressing most of humankind to produce less helpful but more profiting content and, more and more commonly, intentionally harmful content on a scale science is starting to realise is impairing quality of life, empathy and may even have notable bad impacts on international politics.

Seriously, what are we ~~doing~~ allowing to be done with this technology?

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