Kitaab

I Keep Coming Back To www

computing blog todo

published 2023-07-18 17:20

updated 2023-11-13 17:21

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I've had a long relationship with the web. I like to say I grew up on the internet. I spent a lot of time as a child trawling gamedev forums, music blogs, image boards and flash game websites. That internet no longer really exists in any meaningful capacity. But this is not a mourning post. I've already accepted that the internet I grew up on has vanished.

Asides from the internet, I love experimenting with alternative networking protocols. I've played with so many over the years, I can't even remember all of them. But I keep coming back to HTTP, good ol' fashioned clearnet internet. I'd love to experiment with mesh networks like LoRA, or other more smol-net things like the Solar Protocol.

I think part of my disdain for the web also comes from it's ubiquity. It's easy to default to a web developer if you studied computers. Being a hipster at heart, this bothers me. I know it's my own fault I'm a DevOps Engineer, and I suppose it's at least one step removed from being a Web Developer. I still enviously eye those doing generative art, embedded programming, compiler and PLT design, and otherwise futzing around on the boundary between hardware and software. Perhaps largely because I currently don't have the skills and experience to understand or do what these folk accomplish. I look upon it as sparkly magic, and it's cool.

Time and again I get drawn into networking, and the internet is networking royalty.

Pros to talk about:

  • The communities and information available here
  • The "collaborative" spirit of the web
  • Accessibility
  • A landmark node of the plura-verse
  • The internet is getting cool again, there's a whole lot of cool networked tech going on right now

Cons to talk about:

  • Ads, surveillance, ever creeping tendrils into modern life
  • JS, and gatekeeping culture
  • Bloated websites, Chrome only websites, etc
  • it's plagued by corporate dominance, spam and junk
  • The industry is built around hype
  • My experience being a "web developer"

Misc:

  • is p2p really a desirable end goal?
  • Ownership in open networks (vs Urbit, for example)
  • The medium is the message
  • Networking vs CollapseOS / UxN

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