Technology

Google commenting on the decline of open standards feels like a tobacco company commenting on cancer rates.

Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.

Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.

Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.

Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.

You're not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.

Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I'm glad I stopped using imgur years ago but I wish the rest of the world would catch up...

And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.

You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.

I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.

Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.

Prior to Discord, there was IRC.

The cat is out of the bag and long gone.

People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.

So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won't use the software.

It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.

Late stage capitalism ftw

You can tell they’re scared of it because they immediately tried to retract/clarify the statement.

Though IDK why they’d care this point since the Supreme Court already declared Google a monopoly and turned around and said they weren’t abusive enough and gave them no punishment.

And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world... :-(

In your analogy I think Google sells chainsaws, lumber, wood stoves, and paper pulp.

Essentially.

The fediverse, small-web, ubb-boards, xda, and parts of the darkweb, as well as places like 4chan all belong to a sort-of bound community.

Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Instagram etc make up the mainsteam internet with Tumblr and Reddit on the sidelines.

It's getting worse, it even trickles down to software choices and piracy. Choose Linux and trust the community, run Kodi and fight constant update breakage on Youtube and corporate streaming solutions when Jellyfin and samba shares just work?

At what point does their world of influence become seemingly worse than ours by default and everyone just ignores them? Will the giants allow themselves to be ignored? I believe they will eventually make self-sufficiency impossible. Somehow, some day, you won't have any of these choices and everyone will be nickle and dimed to death until the entire internet is an unskippable full-screen ad.

From some mobile-only average working Joes out there, that's all it already is.

So basically the fediverse?

I mean at some point even websites seem grey net when the mainstream internet is basically AOL Future.

I think if there's going to be an Eternal August version of the internet, it will be hidden in plain sight created by some of the same people that want to use it.

I think the term you are looking for is "Deep Net", although it originally meant websites that weren't indexed by web searches.