📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet

[acka47@openbiblio.social]

@tg Thanks for this essay! At the German librarian convention #bibliocon26 , I will soon be advocating for more participation in web standards work and I am tempted to take over some of the thinking. Sometimes I believe, libraries do not want to give anyone the opportunity to call them "boring" and that's why so many are chasing the latest hypes, like currently AI. Why not just embrace being boring, essential knowledge infrastructure and also start supporting boring standards work?

[jake4480@c.im]

@tg oh awesome thank you- really gotta get it out!

[thelancashireman@hostux.social]

@tg

MAGA - Make Archie Great Again!

[thelancashireman@hostux.social]

@tg

The old "platforms" were better too.
ftp:sunsite.unc.edu was great. There was another that I can't recall offhand.
Also the crusty Demon Internet (UK) service for nntp.

FWIW I have my own low-volume blog with RSS. Maybe I should use it more.

[guffo@topspicy.social]

@tg Excellent! That sums up what my brain has been orbiting for some time.

[kochiko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@tg wow!
I checked the command and it is really work!
You inspired me to know about old technology. Thank you)

[wanderinghermit@mindly.social]

@tg

Unreadable, gray on black and/or dark colors on black DOES NOT WORK for those of us with old eyes.

I suppose I could copy it and paste it into a text editor, but I don't care enough.

[hailsandales@metalhead.club]

@jake4480 @tg you also need to post your blogs here Jake! I wanted to boost your latest cartoon post!

[jake4480@c.im]

@HailsandAles @tg hahaa oh man you're so right. For the more specific, non news-collecty ones, I will try to - that one had a lot in it and I'd been collecting that info for months hahaha - thank you for reading, man!

[thelunarfox@mindly.social]

@wanderinghermit @tg Your browser may have a button to make it easier to read. I'm using Chrome, and under the options there's an option to "show reading mode."

[wanderinghermit@mindly.social]

@Thelunarfox @tg

Cool, I'll try that. Good to know, thanks!

[wanderinghermit@mindly.social]

@Thelunarfox @tg

Wow, reading mode (or SpeedReader as Brave calls it) is a game-changer. Thank you so much!

Learned something new today...

[ghosttie@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@tg if they DDoS scrape it to death it'll die

[nethad@swiss.social]

@tg lovely essay, I feel the same way ️

[swade2569@mastodon.social]

@tg Ah such a wonderful trip down memory lane. Usenet and alt.binaries The lessons learned from encoding binaries has served me well. Thanks for the memories and a little reassurance all is not lost.

[grumpykaiju@mastodon.social]

@tg Great essay! The modern web feels like a panopticon where every action is immediately fed into an algorithm without being asked. And yet, the truly great things are only recommended by real humans.

[hinnerk@mastodon.social]

@fasnix @tg @johl Maybe I was stuck a bit in the past. They seem to have come over the issues they had. Still no way for a concept to authenticate a user afaik. Everything is very public but dependng on the intention that may not necessarily be a problem.

[c_riesen@openbiblio.social]

@tg Thank you for writing and sharing this, Terry! Most important thing I've read in a while. There is a kinship to libraries in there somewhere I'm interested in exploring. (Thanks to @datn for sharing)

[artfulrobot@floss.social]

@CowMan @sr_rolando @tg haha I gave up reading because of that UI. Every paragraph I read was interrupted by the next one "loading". Good that there's a button to do away with it but not going back now.

I wonder if it was normal and there was a button instead that said "make it all fadey and disappear when you scroll back" anyone would click it?

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@tg Yeah, a significant frustration I've had for a while is trying to get parts of my community to actually move to the boring-but-resilient options. I've had some luck dragging a few people over to XMPP, for example, but many are still stubbornly clinging to things like discord, and presumably won't leave until a chatbot asks for an HD scan of their ID & what their political affiliations are.