Bring back web rings!
Bring back visitor counters!
Bring back iframes!
Bring back general midi renditions of 90s pop songs!
Back then people made affiliates with each other based on category of the sites so you’d have these little buttons with logos of other sites in the ring. It was a way of findingnsimilar content when social media wasn’t a thing and searches weren’t as robust
I remember I used to read a lot of early video game web comics and they’d all have each other on the sidebar
That sounds really fun, getting recommended similar things based on what the creator thinks you might like rather than being a targeted demographic by amazon.
Ah really? Cpol. I haven’t dabled in web development in almost a decade but I remember there was a sentiment going around that they were bad.
Come check out Gemini, its a new very simple internet protocol. Kinda like the old internet but without a lot of the crappy parts. Also it has a disproportionately high amount of leftists (not everyone yet though…)
Its mostly made up of blog, personal wikis, and stories like this gemini://commie.space/blog/ultraviolence/ or this gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/hundredrabbits/weather.gmi
Gemini is still small enough that there are aggregators that list and categorized most of the active sites. There’s also a search engine which is neat.
Remember getting really into gopher around 2018 and losing interest just before this came out. Was really interested in refurbishing old computers but bloated web browsers where always the biggest problem. Was really disheartening during the pandemic to see school’s dependence on chrome browser, complicated enterprise software and zoom/teams when a lot of stuff could have been put up served over genimi or a really simple static web page.
The tech bros will cry “renewable investment” but there is only so much capacity that we can build every year. And really only so much capacity that should build before seriously damaging the surrounding ecosystems. The efficiency gains of computer hardware has been outdone by the wastefulness of the web and the race for things like better looking videogames. Protocols like this, matrix and bittorrent free us from the cruft of capitalism.
Yea exactly, we desperately need to stop making new computers and repair the ones we already have. Computers have gotten millions of times faster in recent decades, but feel mostly the same as software have gotten millions of time slower. Gemini’s goal isn’t really to “replace” the web per say, but to be the best tool for sharing simple plain documents and information around (It’s basically just updated gopher made by a lot of the gopher people). Obviously, for some of the web’s uses (big ole forums, web apps, video sites, etc) gemini isn’t useful and instead other software and protocols would need to be made to fill in those gaps. Arguing that gemini can’t replace the web is like saying bikes can’t replace cars, like yea obviously we’ll also need trains, busses, and a solid public funding for transport. Also not everyone can or wants to ride bikes, but it doesn’t mean bikes aren’t cool and good for the people like them.
With schools in particular I think it’s really important they build their sites in an accessible and light weight manner. If you know people who work at a university or school you could bring up the fact that lots of people (including potential researchers and students in non-western coutries) still use extremely old unsupported android phones and DSL connections (or worse). One of my co-workers at my last job used to drive over to my house to download shit because his home internet is 3Mbits down on a good sunny day.
This site is really good at getting the point across. https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/#gniCost
Gemini pages aren’t programs that run in your browser like most modern websites are; they’re just text with a little formatting, so there are no surprises. Once you know how one Gemini page works, you know how they all work.
Okay but that sounds dumb.
there are no in-line images
:wut:
Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it’s not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of “large” which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
Gemini is a “less is more” reaction against web browsers and servers becoming too complicated and too powerful.
It’s a cute system but I don’t see how it would ever gain any traction. There isn’t even a web hosted view of the source code repository. Also it’s a text-based protocol which is like the worst part of HTTP+HTML.
I can totally see that. Lol it’s basically what I dreamed about chatrooms being one day in the late 90s early 00s.
Vr is really cool right now bc it’s super fresh and hasn’t quite been corporatized even tho meta is trying like hell. I love how janky and communal it is.
People have their own worlds in vr chat with screen shots of them and their friends hanging out. It would be such cool tech under socialism.
Neocities.org is great for that sort of thing. There are also a ton of commies on there too! Be sure to check out the Yesterweb Zine, it has some really neat articles specifically about this topic: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-00/02/
errbody got nostalgia glasses for the times where you had to find the x on 6 different pop-up ads before you could even look at a website
i’m starting my own hexbear, with phpBB and animated cursors!
Setting up a hexbear bbs forum and changing the target of the domain to it for April fools next year
And leave it like that. I demand we becomes a bbs forum. It’s a better system .
I have a professor who refuses to use the official university website because he managed to get his last name .org ages ago and hasn’t updated the design much sense then
Powerful Java applets
Man I miss the mouse pointer effect thing that made the webpage look like rippling water.
The node_modules folder of a stupid, small web app at work (literally some Ajax calls, multistage forms and a login screen) is 1.4gb. Technology just sucks, man.
Yeah, we make gains in the efficiency of the tech, and then promptly wipe those gains out by just not bothering to optimize. My favorite thing about modern video games is how at some point devs just decided “well, everyone surely has massive SSDs now, so we can just have our games be 100 gigs, why not. Just stick all the uncompressed audio for a dozen languages in, sure”.
At least pirates make releases where you can cut the size down by not downloading a bunch of the extra stuff.
