Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
It’s not the technology at fault, but the advertising industry
It’s Time To Go Back to Web 1.0
Submitted 2 days ago by macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/925f8a73-a706-4ac0-94cc-b946e977279b.jpeg
Comments
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 days ago
lupusblackfur@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh,
It’s not just advertising (and its commensurate tracking paradigm)…
Data mining for profit, SEO for profit, and pervasive Counterfeit Cognizance are all playing their part in ruining the Internet experience.
Perhaps all the above could be summed up by “Capitalist Greed”…??? 🤡 🖕
ogmios@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Perhaps all the above could be summed up by “Capitalist Greed”…??? 🤡 🖕
No. It’s can’t. And you’re actively hurting your efforts by attaching high school edgelord bullshit to it.
Corruption has been a seriously problem everywhere, forever, and does not care one bit what words the ruling party uses to express themselves.
macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
But is it? Because the amount of websites that aren’t search engines but have insane levels of tracking and data collection are very high. Not all of it is for search ranking, IMO.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Still not the technology at fault. Webapps for example are a good innovation. But it’s used for evil as well.
SerotoninSwells@lemmy.world 2 days ago
But JavaScript was a mistake. I’ve made my point. I’ll hear no counter arguments.
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 2 days ago
As great as it would’ve been to have Python on the Web instead of JS I don’t think that would’ve gone well when the Python foundation decided to make Python 3 incompatible with Python 2. That change already broke a lot of shit (Kodi addons never quite recovered from that) and I remember many people excusing it, but if websites ran on it, that wouldn’t have been inconvenient, it would’ve been far more devastating.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I mean, yes and no.
You know how when you look up at a nights sky, and the whole sky is covered in a series of rotating popup ads, with the stars as their backdrop?
What do you mean NO??? When you use your telescope to try to look at space, and all you see is a facebook ad, a mcdonalds ad, a starbucks ad, an ad for a local lawyer, you know…space ads. We’ve all seen them. Just ads floating in space, illuminating the night sky.
Oh, my mistake. This is 2025. That’s commonplace in 2125. See, the technology to impose global space ads isn’t a thing yet.
The thing about technology is, there’s always somebody looking to profit off of every new technology. The technology behind space ads is actually used to show important global events, like what the global dictator does everyday. Oh, right. In 2125 there’s a global dictator who rules the entire planet through oppression and slavery. So, not much different than 2025, besides even the illusion of freedom is gone.
The point is, you don’t have the technology to put ads in the sky, and therefore the advertising industry can’t yet be blamed. But once it exists, they will.
It really is a chicken or the egg situation.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Sky ad technology can be developed out of the good of someone’s heart. Maybe to show emergency alerts quickly. Disaster warnings. But then, it gets in the wrong hands.
We could say similar stuff about the internet. I don’t think Tim Berner’s Lee had bad intentions when founding the World Wide Web. It’s a double edged sword. Same has happened with a lot. I even believe that God’s sacrifice on the cross- an act of perfect love for all humanity- has been misused to control, manipulate and abuse. The guy who created dynamite wanted it to be used for safer mining practices, not a weapon. Many things we make as humans seems to be invented for good, but used for evil.
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Link us your website then.
9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Webrings ftw!!!
yumpsuit@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I still like MetaFilter and parts of the Something Awful Forums.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
y’all know that web 2.0 includes things like lemmy, right?
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.
Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.
Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.
Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?
When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.
Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!
But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.
will_a113@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Was just talking with a coworker about how with the rise of server-side rendering we’re finally technologically back to Web 1.0
thedruid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Lol we talked about that back when Google implemented dynamic rendering
pennomi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah that stuff bugs the shit out of me. It’s like people just discovered they can send HTML to a browser.
Skipping that whole loop would be far more efficient but it’s not cool to do that any more.
macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Right??? Like it’s 1995 all over again.
Phegan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’ve said for years. We need web1.5.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we’re going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody’s even using any common terminology for it. I’ve heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. “Small Web” seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it’s going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it’s not financial gain they’re after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it’s to hide something else they’re doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.
tarknassus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Genesis web
diegantobass@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well, we’re totally doing this and it’s working quite alright if you ask me.
“We” have been battling giants and absolute war machines for decades and…we’re still here, right? Open source software is running 90% of servers, and driving the innovation faster than ever. It’s supporting their shitty techbros empires and letting them live their wicked dreams just because the anarco-communist principles put freedom as the centermost value of all of this. Isn’t it?
All the while, aren’t we totally enjoying our small web world already? As many of us have pointed in the comments? We won’t cure tiktok adrelin addicted kids by inviting them into a webring. And I don’t think I even want them in before they’re cured anyway. Prohibiting greedy capitalist from poisoning our children isn’t our technological endeavour. We fight back, protect ourselves, and prepare the world after. But it’s a bigger problem than the fediverse, isn’t it?
Anyway, I propose we selfhost a lot of good stuff and get kids addicted to robbing giants, waddaya think? Yar
sirico@feddit.uk 2 days ago
It’s called gopher and you don’t used
lordnikon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
At least we have the tildeverse
a_cuddly_fox@lemm.ee 2 days ago
I’m embarrassed how I forgot about the famous ~
kernelle@0d.gs 2 days ago
I’ve recently found the indieweb, from their website:
tarknassus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Check out personalsit.es too - a wonderful collection of small, independent websites curated under the banner of personal websites. A lot of tech people there, but some other little nuggets too.
There’s also the indieweb webring which is a great old-school way to discover more sites on the indie web.
kernelle@0d.gs 2 days ago
Thanks, those are awesome! I’ll be adding my own site to both
macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Those are great links. Thanks for posting them! Gonna give them a look.