Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone’s niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
I tried Gemini once, honestly found Gopher to be noticeably superior, and on several fronts.
Gemini feels like someone was throwing a tantrum at the modern web and decided to overcompensate by rolling progress back like 45 years to Web 0.0001255 Standards.
How so? I’m going to tinker with both regardless, but I’m curious to know what you found lacking with Gemini so that I can evaluate it with a more critical eye.
I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.
And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers
Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.
I wasn’t always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.
Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).
Sure I can’t write full time with this model, but we’re billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that’s more than we can possibly consume.
And I’d rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.
Also, yes Mozilla, I’m sure the reason people aren’t switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.
100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.
We really don’t need the modern web.
w3m it is
I guess we’ve got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/
Not to be too doomer but this same thing has been tried so, so many times and it has failed/ been sabotaged every time. Every single one of them. Even this one is trying to do the stupid Apple-esque, Corporate Memphis shit on their landing page. You will never be able to sell this in the modern technological hellscape. We must return to the old ways, and I’m only partly joking.
Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.
The internet is turning into an AI-generated soup that only renders properly on Chromium and tracks every one of your vital measurements to serve you optimal ads
yes consumer, your gooch width is necessary information
Tired point but the only reason Firefox works is because Google gives them some number of billions per year to make Google the default search engine
FUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror
I understand that a high quality web browser in this modern age is really expensive to develop. Mozilla, which is like an ant compared to the gorillas called Apple and Google, needs to find the funds it takes to develop that browser and pay the people who work on it.
That said, it’s really the bigger picture here that’s totally fucked. The web browser is supposed to be a tool for the user, not for the advertiser. I don’t give a shit about someone else’s advertising, or their ability to reach me and to target my attention span. But in many ways the advertising model props up the entirety of the modern web as we know it. It’s kind of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem, but I don’t know if anyone has thought of a sustainable alternative model.
Further, I view it as a kind of condemnation of the modern WWW that web browsers must be so complex. It feels like half of the development of web browsers is just based on supporting advertising in some way or another, and making sure the 700 ad scripts that run when you load a page don’t bring the browser to a screeching halt (a form of supporting advertising). Another 25% is dedicated to making sure crap web frameworks like React run well.
There is real innovation in the web browsing space. Wasm, WebGL, and so on. The fact that you can play a fully interactive 3d game in your web browser without having to download and run it locally is impressive. But is it all really worthwhile?
The worst thing is I don’t have an answer to any of this. I realize most of this stuff is extremely dumb and pointless, but it feels like the Internet has been totally overwhelmed with AI spam, shitty websites that necessitate javascript to even view them for basic information, and endless ad and user tracking. This announcement is especially rich because Firefox is still both better than Chrome & basically second class compared to it. Many web devs (or their employers) treat Chrome like the standard and Firefox as an afterthought. I just imagine now Mozilla taking that beautiful little fire fox and caging it and poking it with cattle prods to see if it can find new ways to make its ember glow.
I’d love for an alternative to the WWW to spring up, and you’d think something like the Gemini protocol could be it. But if you’ve ever used it, you’d realize it kind of sucks to use. A website like hexbear wouldn’t even be possible on Gemini. It had its heart in the right place but doesn’t meet the moment, and IMO never will.
the sustainable model would just be the government funding it through taxes. there is no sustainable model under capitalism
It would also be sustainable if browsers just added less features over time.
The problem right now isn’t so much that the browser is a monstrously complex thing (whatever just fork Firefox), it’s that Chromium has 97% market share so anything Google decides to push becomes a de facto standard, and they use this position to push more new shit than a hobbyist org could ever keep up with.
i more meant the state of the internet as a whole, paying for all the servers and what not
Retvrn to Lynx.
Damn this website just got me onto Firefox like a year ago
It’s still better than Chrome.
Pack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
WHAT’S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS ADPack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protects from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
2035 - E-readers force you to watch an unskippable ad for 30 seconds between chapters. All physical books are banned.
They wouldn’t be banned, but instead they’d be like $100 and sold as these premium, artisanally-produced things to the few who can afford them.
[451]Thus we return to the days of rote memorization and oral storytellers
“Thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this story, go to nordvpn and use promo code ‘you will never escape’ for 3% off”
This retelling of the Odyssey is brought to you by HIMS.
Hear me out… what if everything you say and do, whether you consent to it or not, put on The Cloud and then regurgitated back to you as a quirky “AI” podcast?
Honestly, that’s where we’re headed. I don’t know if I’m going to be interested in scrolling through websites plastered by all the ads that are going to poke through the Manifest V3 ad controls.
Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.
Kind of reminds me of this shockingly based rant I saw on /g/ once that discussed that even smartphones set computing backwards.
Honestly interested in reading this if you have it saved somewhere. I have been feeling this way as someone working in tech for close to two decades and I feel more and more vindicated every day. The web of the future looks like the web of the 80s (maybe the 90s if we can behave) because these mother fuckers kill everything they touch. Technological “progress” for progress’ sake means nothing. I AM LUDDITE MAN / 410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
i just laughed at an ifunny meme i think it might be over for me
Don’t worry investors! There’s always more profit to be made finding more efficient means of killing kids in hospitals
