5 ms·

These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And a

by pentae 3y ago

These days most non technical people just have their phone and live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem. Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead. And that's what people do. Convenience-seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed. If you were Google making billions a year off the app ecosystem because its a superior experience.. wouldn't your incentive be to make web as bad as possible?

mnky9800n 3y ago
I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.
- simpaticoder 3y ago
  That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinionated nerds that are easily isolated and alienated and ignored.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.
    - simpaticoder 3y ago
      Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).
      - CuriousSkeptic 3y ago
        How about “sustainable web”? It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.
      - stavros 3y ago
        The small web?
        jack_riminton 3y ago
        The basic web? hear me out... why has hacker news remained steadfastly under the radar? in part because it looks like an academic message board of the 90's If intelligently produced text content is what is needed then perhaps we need to design a format that excludes, if not automatically diminishes, images and videos
      - jack_riminton 3y ago
        How about non-ad web? imo all of the ills come from misaligned incentives to extract ad/marketing money
      - flenserboy 3y ago
        The Useful Web.
  - radicalbyte 3y ago
    I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s. Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.
    - simpaticoder 3y ago
      Well I mean welcome to hacker news I guess.
      - krapp 3y ago
        ...the angry angry box to keep the smarties occupied.
    - mnky9800n 3y ago
      https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club
    - Vox_Leone 3y ago
      >>I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me. I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.
      - ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
        We just need some sort of "search engine" that can find it. If only such a thing existed.
        simpaticoder 3y ago
        I know of https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/. However, it's been 2 months and my site hasn't been listed yet, despite what I thought was a good convo with the owner.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    There was something posted recently about websites that are like web 1.0 in design. And they had like a wiki or a search or something. Stuff like this https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club
neilv 3y ago
> Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." I thought the name "Safari" was along the lines of the early dominant browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. But today possibly thinking closer to one of those curated tourist zoos that you drive through with your car windows rolled up, or sitting in a small train run by the place? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_Safari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_Safari
jwells89 3y ago
I don’t think the thing about Safari naming tracks at all. Keep in mind that Safari has existed since 2003, during which Apple was in a very different place — back then there was no App Store or even any hint that such a thing might exist at some point and OS X was going all-in on open standards compliance, with things like RSS support being major touted features, and WebKit was quickly approaching Gecko in being a top class web engine (as opposed to the dominant Trident and Tasman in IE and IE for Mac, respectively). As for in-app webviews, they’re not all made equally. Most apps use SFSafariViewController, which is an out-of-process Safari tab with its own app-specific cookies, local storage, etc that’s designed to give the user an opportunity to see if the page is really something they want to access and helps keeps their main browser’s tabs clean while also breaking several types of trackers. Of course though some notoriously nosy players like Facebook and TikTok don’t use this and instead implement their own which is chock full of tracking crap… this is probably an area where Apple could stand to be more heavyhanded (ban custom browser reimplementations except where those add demonstrable value or the app itself is a browser). Also, web app devs aren’t blameless in user preference for native apps. For every web app done right, there’s three more that are shoddy and frustrating in ways that native apps generally aren’t (think breaking back button, scrolljacking, etc), some that are just plain badly built, and many that are unrepentant resource hogs. Often this applies even to web apps that have no counterpart native apps because their companies chose the web solely because it’s cheap to do so (resulting in cheap bad web apps). Are there crappy native apps too? Sure, but they’re somewhat less common and generally keep the crappiness somewhat bounded.
pests 3y ago
> live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. I agree with you. But I bet people 20 years ago were saying the same about the web, people never going on the real internet just being stuck in some "www.exe"

by pentae 3y ago

mnky9800n 3y ago

I've recently deleted Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc from my phone and it's like night and day. I basically only go to hacker news now or look at my own websites. Suddenly all of the noise of the internet was silent.

simpaticoder 3y ago
That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinionated nerds that are easily isolated and alienated and ignored.
- Roark66 3y ago
  I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.
  - simpaticoder 3y ago
    Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).
    - CuriousSkeptic 3y ago
      How about “sustainable web”? It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.
    - stavros 3y ago
      The small web?
      - jack_riminton 3y ago
        The basic web? hear me out... why has hacker news remained steadfastly under the radar? in part because it looks like an academic message board of the 90's If intelligently produced text content is what is needed then perhaps we need to design a format that excludes, if not automatically diminishes, images and videos
    - jack_riminton 3y ago
      How about non-ad web? imo all of the ills come from misaligned incentives to extract ad/marketing money
    - flenserboy 3y ago
      The Useful Web.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s. Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.
  - simpaticoder 3y ago
    Well I mean welcome to hacker news I guess.
    - krapp 3y ago
      ...the angry angry box to keep the smarties occupied.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club
  - Vox_Leone 3y ago
    >>I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me. I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.
    - ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
      We just need some sort of "search engine" that can find it. If only such a thing existed.
      - simpaticoder 3y ago
        I know of https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/. However, it's been 2 months and my site hasn't been listed yet, despite what I thought was a good convo with the owner.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  There was something posted recently about websites that are like web 1.0 in design. And they had like a wiki or a search or something. Stuff like this https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club

neilv 3y ago

> Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided." I thought the name "Safari" was along the lines of the early dominant browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. But today possibly thinking closer to one of those curated tourist zoos that you drive through with your car windows rolled up, or sitting in a small train run by the place? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_Safari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_Safari

jwells89 3y ago

I don’t think the thing about Safari naming tracks at all. Keep in mind that Safari has existed since 2003, during which Apple was in a very different place — back then there was no App Store or even any hint that such a thing might exist at some point and OS X was going all-in on open standards compliance, with things like RSS support being major touted features, and WebKit was quickly approaching Gecko in being a top class web engine (as opposed to the dominant Trident and Tasman in IE and IE for Mac, respectively). As for in-app webviews, they’re not all made equally. Most apps use SFSafariViewController, which is an out-of-process Safari tab with its own app-specific cookies, local storage, etc that’s designed to give the user an opportunity to see if the page is really something they want to access and helps keeps their main browser’s tabs clean while also breaking several types of trackers. Of course though some notoriously nosy players like Facebook and TikTok don’t use this and instead implement their own which is chock full of tracking crap… this is probably an area where Apple could stand to be more heavyhanded (ban custom browser reimplementations except where those add demonstrable value or the app itself is a browser). Also, web app devs aren’t blameless in user preference for native apps. For every web app done right, there’s three more that are shoddy and frustrating in ways that native apps generally aren’t (think breaking back button, scrolljacking, etc), some that are just plain badly built, and many that are unrepentant resource hogs. Often this applies even to web apps that have no counterpart native apps because their companies chose the web solely because it’s cheap to do so (resulting in cheap bad web apps). Are there crappy native apps too? Sure, but they’re somewhat less common and generally keep the crappiness somewhat bounded.

pests 3y ago

> live inside the FB/IG/TT/X/Gmail/Google apps on their phones and don't even go on the web. I agree with you. But I bet people 20 years ago were saying the same about the web, people never going on the real internet just being stuck in some "www.exe"