akakak [they/them]
These things make the web look like the singularity. Second life was so slow and monotonous compared to cutting to the chase with search engines, hypertext and images.
The top comments are trying to getting everybody to focus on Bezos. Reddit is astroturfed as fuck.
Taxes on profits and wealth seem like the only “fluid” way to fund the maintenance of these open source projects that the economy depends on now. What you describe would allow a whole new level of innovation not even bound by market forces.
Log4Shell is an example of way too much code made way too convenient to abuse though.
It’s been a long Saturday of labor that will go unaccounted for. The efficiency of capitalism.
That is a really good way of putting it as a percentage of GNI. Reminds me of danluu’s blog posts on web bloat and web optimization.
The developer admits it’s not a replacement for the web. It’s really a refuge for people sick of dealing with other people’s design decisions. Something that puts the content first. One input I would like is from somebody who is visually impaired however. This is where gopher leaves a lot to be desired: http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/css/gopher.html . I imagine gemtext solves the issue of reflows though.
Still the web is really useful especially for secure forms. There is alot of great work by developers that shouldn’t been thrown out with the bathwater but under without any sort of practical restraints it has made the climate problem so much harder to solve.
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.