As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web.
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Yep.
Yeah I kind of agree with this sentiment. If you’re looking for (or your reader) an alternative like this, I might recommend you look at Twtxt (in general) or Yarn.social (https://yarn.social). It is a small but growing community, things are a lot slower, and yes its everything you describe here in your post
I agree with the sentiment, however I disagree with the notion that alternatives have to be or should be married to the browser. As important as the web is, maybe we shouldn’t be putting all our eggs in that basket. WWW is not the end all be all of technology and even if it were, unfortunately it doesn’t completely avoid the issue since control over browser technology itself has become extremely consolidated. As we speak google is working on restrictions that make adblocking less effective. Meanwhile Mozilla, largely seen as the David to google’s Goliath, is also guilty of pushing it’s own walled garden restrictions on users.
Open networks built on open standards can be very beneficial even if they’re not based on browser technology. Open standards are far more important to user rights than simply being able to access them via a browser, so I’ll be a contrarian: “I implore you, only use technology & services that are open and anyone can implement them regardless of it’s it is a part of the World Wide Web“. 🙂
You are completely right of course I think open standards and open specifications and an open ecosystem is far more important. I’m a big fan of what the IndieWeb is all about for example for these reasons. I am a little disappointed in how “Browser” technology has evolved over time and what we’ve ended up with (oh the complexities! ♂️)
So… pop3 email clients, NNTP clients, and IRC clients (which are all based on open standards with no walled garden bullshit, user tracking or spam) all hate the Internet now?
Honestly, it took them long enough – I’ve been hating what the Internet has become for decades now.
Brendan,
Those and many more. I use SSH/openvpn/caldav nearly every day. And SIP for telephony. Heck I even use a clunker of a telephone to make & answer calls instead of the web. It would really suck for me if all these specialized services ended up being replaced by WWW. Web pages give me less control over the services and the software I prefer to access them with. On top of all this, screen scraping absolutely sucks for automation and integration.
Haha, clever use of irony. 🙂
What the author wants is already happening, most traditional software have been replaced with web pages long ago. The trouble with the author’s logic, or at least the way it got framed, is that the WWW does not solve social media’s proprietary captive portal problem.
So he/she/they hates Signal too. What would Edward Snowden say?
Is there any sanctioned messaging service left or are all discredited?
And what is Internet in 2022. It’s Facebook, TikTok, Google, Youtube, Twitter … For most of people it ends there.
Sadly what most people want is “convenience” over anything else. Its only now that we are (collectively) starting to see the price for that “convenience”. As the saying goes, if the product/service is free, maybe it really isn’t and you are in fact their product?
I work as a web developer and constantly have to battle even at my own workplace in order to have people respect the best practices and not replace proper links with buttons or some generic container elements.
Once we had to try an integrate our web service with that of another from our partners. We needed to be able to direct users around their web service but that 2as possible as there were no URLs to any page. When I filed a bug report about this, their reply was that it is a “web app” and therefore does not need any URLs.
The funny and sad thing is that using proper links actually makes everything easier. Dumb elements require manual click handlers and redirects and custom styling just to achieve the standard usability that links provide out of the box.
Edit: my post is being blocked by wordfence? I’m not sure what it has a problem with…but I’m splitting it up…
sj87,
I feel that what you are saying is relevant to web developers everywhere! I have to bite my tongue sometimes, but there are times when it drives me nuts when they ask to make websites less accessible and more frustrating to use. Sometimes it’s at the discretion of SEO consultants. Ever notice how echo-chamber hop-on-bandwagon oriented that industry is? All it takes is a tiny nondescript utterance by a high ranking goggle employee and SEO companies immediately start requesting changes of completely dubious value for end users. It’s lunacy.
Ah one of those. I encountered nearly the same thing at a job a long time ago for a large health care company that had a hard dependency on a partner’s website. Low and behold the website could not be integrated properly with ours. The solution I/we came up with, which really was a last resort, was to access the partner’s website through a proxy that injected the hooks that we needed for integration.
It basically hooked into the event to install our functions within the context of their site (or “web app” as you put it). We were no longer bound by their limitations. I wrote it as a .net filter for IIS back when when I was a junior windows dev ages ago. How time flies.
javascript onload
O/T: I found the culprit. Apparently typing “Xonload Xevent” minus the X is banned…
It really makes you wonder what kind of cross site scripting bug wordpress had that banning these words would have made any sense. Haha.
My local indie cinema has this problem. They have a SPA which makes it impossible to share the films they’re showing or their events. 😐
Impossible is a strong word 🙂
More effort then I want to put into it. 🙂
Dissecting a SPA on my phone so I can text a link to someone is not knowledge I need in my head. LOL
What? F$^@$ no! That s*^t actually works. If someone wants to write a web front end go for it, but quit forcing everything over HTTP. Web devs have done enough harm. Just stop, just stop.
Sometime in the future the Fediverse will figure out the web is a last resort interface, and it will end up architected more like Usenet, Email, IRC, or XMPP.
While the article is titled “PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet” – it does literally (Using one of the definitions of literally that isn’t the one that means metaphoric) start with “As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you”
(And I strongly suspect jwz does remember email exists)
Btw… (first time commenting on an osnews.com post, I normally follow this from Twtxt) — But why do none of you have a non-default Avatar?! ♂️ For the love of all that is good, put a face or something to your name Please!
No.
Respect local culture, please.
prologic,
I never really considered it, haha. If you stick around you’ll start to remember our handles.
I do find it interesting to read people’s profiles though, including yours. I should add something to mine but I’m lazy with that. Does anyone offer to write mine? I borrowed yours for now, hopefully you don’t mind 🙂
Incidentally since you brought it up, I’ve actually complained about the insecurity of gravatar.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/got-an-account-on-a-site-like-github-hackers-may-know-your-e-mail-address/
A couple years ago I managed to brute force several emails using high end consumer GPUs in the span of 30 or so minutes to see how easy it was for myself.