Retvrn. Are there any other fellow Hexbear 9 enjoyers?
Can we go back to terminals like this?
Right? I’d love to get my hands on an East German Robotron PC 1715, it just looks so good
Get the Mozilla hater apology form out
The fucking nerve to say any of these Ad funded services are free or even services (does someone robbing you count as a service?) is enough to justify using guerilla warfare against these fuckers. We need to start documenting, sniffing out, exploiting, and flooding the APIs of all these ad driven sites till they become unusable. Just claim we are doing AI research. If I have to switch to command line web browsing, webscraping, and undocumented API calls via scripting to not see ads then so fucking be it.
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.
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.
Mostly that even for something three decades newer, it does nothing with the newness except bad things: it doesn’t allow for more than one (1) link per paragraph, if at all. Doesn’t have a concept of text alignment, text weight, spacing, italics, underline or any of the other stuff CSS 0.1 inherited from the historical printing press. To my recollection, doesn’t even allow you to use any alphabet set that is not English’s one (so stuff like math equations are out of the question), and you can’t post a link that has international characters (like the wikipedia page for “Ñandú”) without hideously percent-escaping them. In 2024.
In exchange, Gemini seems to require SSL and a certificate of all things, which means it’s a lot costlier to implement on low-end hardware and it’s noticeably vulnerable to tactics like domain seizure because you need a valid cert which means you need an external “naming authority”.
Looking at it from a distance, it feels like someone looked a Gopher and went “I wonder how would this feel in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.
On the plus side tho, thanks to the lack of anything even resembling formatting, Gemini does realize one thing that I don’t recall Gopher realizing in full: rendering of the document is under control of the viewer, not of the author. For good or bad.
Another thing I like about Gopher is that it was designed essentially to be a mounted read-only networked filesystem. Works well with the whole UNIX philosophy of “everything is a file”.
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
We really don’t need the modern web.
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
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
w3m it is
I’m just cracking up at all the people who were OMG HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY USE CHROME WHEN FIREFOX EXISTS THEY WILL NEVER DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL as if basically every company won’t eventually sell all your data anyway. I can appreciate trying to use the Internet while keeping your personal data safe but it’s also a completely unrealistic pipe dream. You can do all the open source homegrown browsers and websites with no script and ad block on a homegrown OS and you’re still going to be tracked. Your ISP knows what you’re doing, or your VPN does, and it’s a dream to think they won’t or aren’t using your data for something nefarious. Your phone certainly is. Your bank is. Your social media is. Your deviantart or Etsy account is. You name it someone somewhere somehow is tracking you in ways you aren’t even considering.
If you don’t want to be tracked don’t use the Internet. It’s just so ridiculous when folks who live under the immense yoke of capitalism pretend like you can magically will yourself out of it by making a personal choice like using a different browser.
I’m gonna get flamed to hell by this post but I really don’t care because you know I’m right. You aren’t protecting your identity from capitalist exploitation by using Linux or an open source browser. There are certainly plenty of other reasons to do so but that ain’t it.
With internet use becoming more and more mandatory in modern society, what choice do we have? Obviously communist revolution is the long term solution, but I don’t know what we can do besides take steps to mitigate the worst effects in the meantime.
You kind of don’t have much choice, that’s kind of my point. It’s better to focus energy on things that can be changed
Damn this website just got me onto Firefox like a year ago
It’s still better than Chrome.
we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror
