4 ms·

How about reviving the “blogosphere” instead? Does it even need reviving? Most of the personal or tech blogs I visit do not have heavy ads or tracking on them,

by yoz-y 8y ago

How about reviving the “blogosphere” instead? Does it even need reviving? Most of the personal or tech blogs I visit do not have heavy ads or tracking on them, still offer full RSS articles and so on. People who care still have a lot of nice web sites to go to. Maybe what we need is a search engine that penalises JS and tracker use.

vortico 8y ago
Fewer people read blogs. Why should more people write them?
- yoz-y 8y ago
  I have no proof but I have a hunch that although fewer people read blogs in comparison with Facebook and Twitter relatively speaking. More people read blogs than in the late 90’s and the 00’s in absolute numbers. I don’t think that social media has “stolen” many blog readers, rather the number of people on the web increased by helluvalot.
  - astrobe_ 8y ago
    That's the thing: Twitter and Facebook are nothing but least-effort blogs. Twitter in particular was touted as a "micro-blogging" platform.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  For yourself. web log is a diary, an external memory, a memoir. The fact that you can share it to help others as well makes it a blog.
  - vortico 8y ago
    That is more often not the case than is.
superkuh 8y ago
The web of the 90s is alive on tor. On tor the idea of running third party executable code in the age of spectre is (properly) seen as absurd. We just need to bring back webrings and we'll be set. Since it's on tor there's no need for evil centralization for DoS protection since it's baked into the protocol. Additionally your onion vanity name you brute forced cannot simply be taken away from you if there's political or social pressure on your registrar or above. No, we don't need gopher. We need people to stop running third party code like it's some normal thing. We need devs to stop making websites that don't render unless you run their code. It's really not that hard to run a hidden service. No harder than running a webserver. And everyone's home connections are fast enough now.
- pard68 8y ago
  Color me intrigued. How do I get started? (I have the Tor browser but can never find anything worthwhile, reddit just talks about illegal stuff)
- pmlnr 8y ago
  > We just need to bring back webrings https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/
- trqx 8y ago
  fyi its quite common in the gopher space to host behind an hidden service.
lrem 8y ago
I'm not even sure it's about search engines. Blogs got much of their viewership via feeds. However, RSS/Atom feeds lost the mindshare war with social media feeds. And that's not despite tracking, but in big part because of it - the more the feed knows about you, the higher chance it has at showing you something you'll like. Breaking out of this is more of a human nature than even an economical thing.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  RSS is not really a discovery medium, unless you subscribe to link lists though. Facebook and Twitter do have the advantage that they surface 'interesting' stuff that you previously did not know about, at least in theory. This is why I think that having a search engine that would search only in the 'cool' (read: old-style) web.
  - Avamander 8y ago
    RSS could be a discovery medium if combined with a discovery platform (social media). This is why I think Mastodon's (or any other federated decentralized social network) priority should be allowing aggregating external feeds.

by yoz-y 8y ago

vortico 8y ago

Fewer people read blogs. Why should more people write them?

yoz-y 8y ago
I have no proof but I have a hunch that although fewer people read blogs in comparison with Facebook and Twitter relatively speaking. More people read blogs than in the late 90’s and the 00’s in absolute numbers. I don’t think that social media has “stolen” many blog readers, rather the number of people on the web increased by helluvalot.
- astrobe_ 8y ago
  That's the thing: Twitter and Facebook are nothing but least-effort blogs. Twitter in particular was touted as a "micro-blogging" platform.
pmlnr 8y ago
For yourself. web log is a diary, an external memory, a memoir. The fact that you can share it to help others as well makes it a blog.
- vortico 8y ago
  That is more often not the case than is.

superkuh 8y ago

The web of the 90s is alive on tor. On tor the idea of running third party executable code in the age of spectre is (properly) seen as absurd. We just need to bring back webrings and we'll be set. Since it's on tor there's no need for evil centralization for DoS protection since it's baked into the protocol. Additionally your onion vanity name you brute forced cannot simply be taken away from you if there's political or social pressure on your registrar or above. No, we don't need gopher. We need people to stop running third party code like it's some normal thing. We need devs to stop making websites that don't render unless you run their code. It's really not that hard to run a hidden service. No harder than running a webserver. And everyone's home connections are fast enough now.

pard68 8y ago
Color me intrigued. How do I get started? (I have the Tor browser but can never find anything worthwhile, reddit just talks about illegal stuff)
pmlnr 8y ago
> We just need to bring back webrings https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/
trqx 8y ago
fyi its quite common in the gopher space to host behind an hidden service.

lrem 8y ago

I'm not even sure it's about search engines. Blogs got much of their viewership via feeds. However, RSS/Atom feeds lost the mindshare war with social media feeds. And that's not despite tracking, but in big part because of it - the more the feed knows about you, the higher chance it has at showing you something you'll like. Breaking out of this is more of a human nature than even an economical thing.

yoz-y 8y ago
RSS is not really a discovery medium, unless you subscribe to link lists though. Facebook and Twitter do have the advantage that they surface 'interesting' stuff that you previously did not know about, at least in theory. This is why I think that having a search engine that would search only in the 'cool' (read: old-style) web.
- Avamander 8y ago
  RSS could be a discovery medium if combined with a discovery platform (social media). This is why I think Mastodon's (or any other federated decentralized social network) priority should be allowing aggregating external feeds.