💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~mathpunk › gemlog › 2023 › theweb.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 19:35:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've made it no secret among my friends that I plan on leaving the corporateweb in its entirety. I've sworn off all corporate social media. I don't use gmail, yahoomail, or outlook. I do still use a business-run email, with runbox. This is because I needed a "real life" email I could use with friends, family, school, work, etc, and I'm not able to self-host yet. I plan on keeping the runbox email to use as a backup when I do self-host, as I understand it can be quite difficult for a whole number of reasons. I don't even watch youtube anymore. I think that's the one people are most impressed with, but truth be told it was fairly easy. Whenever I try to open a video, it either opens in the busted youtube vanced app and refuses to play, or opens in a web browser and detects I have an adblocker and refuses to play. Either way, youtube did the hard part for me.
"Corporateweb" isn't exactly a well-defined term, and there are plenty of websites out there that pretty obviously do not fall under whatever shadow that term casts. Many consider places like Neocities and the Fediverse to be part of the smallweb, or small internet. But it's quite hard to exist on the web without ever encountering the corporateweb, at least as I define it. Advertisements are everywhere, and they're dangerous. Supposedly, you're 183 times more likely to get a computer virus from regular advertising than from porn. I should probably cite sources when I make claims like that, but this is more of a "stream of consciousness" gemlog. I'll be diligent about it some other time. Not only are advertisements dangerous, but it's almost impossible to completely avoid trackers. Everyone and their fucking grandmother uses google analytics, or google fonts, or spying pixels. I have a tracker blocker and I still can't block them all. To exist on the web without ever encountering google, just google, you have to sequester yourself away to small corners. You could use the Fediverse and just make it a rule to never follow links, ever. You could check out Neocities sites, a lot of which are hand-crafted. I miss hand-written sites. We should have more of those.
It's just too much effort. I don't want to be sent news stories and have to double check to make sure I'm not being sent to some site with thirty separate trackers. I don't want to go to sites that swear up and down they don't have any tracking and still have to worry about whether or not they might secretly have spying pixels. I don't want to have to avoid exploring.
I could write out so many grand, ideological reasons for avoiding the HyperText Transfer Protocol, and you'd be right to point out that the problem isn't necessarily the protocol itself, but how it's used. But the problem is there's so few people who use it WELL. I don't want to have to avoid exploring. At the end of the day, I don't want or need any reason to leave the Web except one: the Web isn't fun anymore. It's a maze that's simultaneously overcrowded and empty. Modern sites are fucking impossible to navigate, and when you DO go exploring you get hit with more ads than content, and when you DO find content, a lot of it is blatantly bot generated, or just fluff that's meant to get eyes on the page to see ads. Having to relegate myself to small corners in order to avoid that shit just isn't fun.
Gemini is fun. Gopher is fun. Spartan is fun. The collection of things you might call the "small internet," including the parts of it that do, admittedly, exist on the Web, is fun. I can't recall the last time I spent hours sitting in front of my screen, just reading people's thoughts and ideas or exlporing their personal pages, without coming away from it feeling like I had wasted my time.
I'm not gonna say I'm 100% done with the Web, because I'm very likely not. But why should I go somewhere that isn't fun?
Many people who are way smarter than me have already talked extensively about the problems with the modern Web, as well as many possible escapes/solutions. Though I have much to complain about, I think something Gemspace needs is more content that isn't about Gemini or the Web. For those reasons, I'm going to try not to post about this topic frequently. Wish me luck in that goal!