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
:(
This is why Mothra is the most advanced web browser. The only one to have a fully integrated “moth mode”! However, for us mere mortals I am excited about the ladybird browser as an alternative (in a couple of years most likely).
I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.
Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox
Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?
Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.
The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.
From another thread
“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” - founders of Google in 1998.
But the siren song of money always wins.
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
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.
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.
Arguably better than even books. It forces people to be social and have good memory.
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]
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?
The cloud was a mistake. I still think truly dystopian that the new Windows OS has you save things to the “OneDrive” by default rather than your actual physical harddrive. That type of shit is the realest consent manufacturing, structure superstructure, 1984, power is whatever that has the means to deem something normal-ass shit ever.
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.
it’s so fucking over changing my username immediately
dombat_coomerism
my evil gooner alter ego
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to post that for days lol
glad you had the vision, actually made me lol earlier when I read it
Switch verb for adjective.
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 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
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”.
Oh I didn’t recall that part, might have to relearn some things of Ye Olde Gooden Times, but if so, that’s wonderful!
Perhaps there is something like mount.gopher in the AUR already…?I’m not sure about the Linux world, a quick search reveals https://github.com/ewe2/gopherfs which seems like it’d do the trick.
I’m dumb. So does Gemini feel like 1998 internet, or something even earlier?
It actually feels newer and fresher (kinda 2000-2002-ish) despite it technically being limited to a modeling and rendering of documents in the style and paradigm of about
19941974.Credits where it’s due, tbh.
Completely agree! I like to limit myself to HTTP 1.1 and any website I’ll ever make will just be simple handwritten HTML with some CSS. I like to use elinks and xlinks for hypertext but in some cases – like lemmy – I’m unfortunately forced to use a bloated browser that supports JabbaScript and black magic (which makes no sense because online forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, etc. in the past all used to work without any JS). I like Gopher/Gemini a lot but I find it hard to discover interesting holes/capsules.
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.
Since they acquiesced to pressure and included DRM in the browser Mozilla has morphed into a long con exit scam for tech grifters. I find ex mozilla dev and founder jwz pretty insufferable but he was kind of right about the company and foundation. People gave them a pass for far too long. They took the google money, built an inflated non-prof using donations, and now have like the 2nd or 3rd CEO trying to scrape what little value is left there into a golden parachute. Firefox is a really small team at Mozilla. It basically exists to collect Google money.
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
the web is dead. long live the web.
S P O N S O R E D L I N K S B Y P O C K E T
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.
Scratching one more company off the very very short list of software corps I think I could work at without experiencing total self-loathing
fucking betrayed i just finally dumped chrome completely
next i’ll finally move to linux and somehow every linux build will be bought up by microsoft or something
Thankfully in Linux land the evil corporation is Canonical, who aren’t really even all that evil, more like a Team Rocket (anime version) style nuisance.
Red Hat has been doing some shady shit to its downstream projects since being acquired by IBM.
Does this include Fedora?
Its more shady like business decisions regarding red hat enterprise linux and its downstream forks, not privacy/security problems. Fedora workstation isn’t really affected.
