Re: Reviving the terminal internet - looking for collaborators

[Mayank]
> - text-first, zero-noise browsing
> - terminal-native feeds (RSS/Atom, maybe Mastodon)
> - collaborative browsing sessions (think SSH for the web)
> - fast startup, no tracking, no dark patterns

I predict you'll get interest from users but almost nobody else.

One of the antipatterns that came in with the mainstream invasion of
the net is...money.  For large websites, the viewer is not the
customer; the viewer is the product.  The advertisers are the customer.
Anything that interferes with forcing ads into the viewer's eyes (or
ears or whatever) will get zero-to-negative levels of support from
them.  Consider the negative levels of support adblockers get.  That
they exist at all is a demonstration of the conflict of interest
between website operators and end users.

[Karen]
> Whenever I raise the need for say progressive enhancement design, the
> almost immediate, and wrong, thought is that JavaScript makes things
> safer.

Wrong?  Maybe.  Safer from what, for whom?

Javascript makes things a great deal less safe from being cracked for
end users; it substantially increases their attack surface.  While not
directly a safety issue in most cases, it also makes it significantly
more difficult for them to get their UI desires implemented.

It is safer for the website operators (their revenue stream in
particular), since it makes it significantly harder to block ads.  The
safety cost to the end users is an externality to them.  It doesn't
really affect safety for the website operators in the sense of risk of
getting cracked, because they aren't the ones running it, and even if
they run server-side JS, they *certainly* aren't running JS fetched at
run-time from a place on the net specified by some third party.

> second, profile around non graphical browsing in general..that
> somehow graphics equals modern, and text does not.

Well, on purely chronological grounds, graphics *is* more modern.  The
antipattern here is the notion that modern is necessarily good.

[David Woolley, quoting someone else and then writing]
>> "I turned off Javascript for a week, and it was glorious."
>> Illustrates there would be quite a market for simple text focused
>> Internet

...among end users, yes.

> The problem there is that the market, for web page designers, isn't
> formed of the web page consumers, but of the people wanting to sell
> things,

Right.

The real strength of the net lay in democratizing publication, letting
just-anyone make things available.

However, between mass-market connectivity being extremely hostile to
people providing their own content instead of being good little
consumers and taking what large corporations feel like feeding them, on
the one hand, and the unfortunate fact that the level of resources
needed to run a search engine makes a netwide search engine out of
reach for anyone *but* a large corporation, on the other?  The net has
been perverted into reinforcing the producer/consumer dynamic that is
one of the worst antipatterns capitalism has.

I don't have any good solutions.  It will all fail, eventually (read
John Michael Greer's _The Long Descent_, for example).  But it's likely
to take a while, and it's unlikely to be pleasant to live through.

About all end users can do is to refuse to participate in the
antipatterns.  For example, I spend at least twice what is typical for
my area on connectivity, in order to be an active participant in the
net instead of being just a passive consumer: I have static IP
addresses and run all my own infrastructure - DNS, FTP, and SMTP in
particular.  I even hold my nose enough to run an HTTP server.  And I
never, never, *never* do anything involving real money "online" - no
banking, no shopping, no "e-transfer"s, nothing.

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