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grayestofghostsThe internet (or, well, maybe, mostly social media) is quickly becoming unusable for me because of the rampant amounts of antisemitism literally everywhere. It is honestly worse than my experience with transphobia online and I say this as a trans person.
My other thought right now is about the indieweb as an alternative and there seems to be significant problems to the point that I'm thinking of writing an essay. As with most things in tech there seems to be a major disconnect in what people want and what tech people want to do. So much of the face of the indieweb is retroweb material built by high school and college kids who can design beautiful retro aesthetic layouts because, frankly, they have so much free time on their hands and no real responsibilities. We know right now probably more than ever that grown up adults with jobs and such have interesting things to say and especially because the indieweb does not generally have straightforward monetization opportunities, they should be able to publish simply without sacrificing all of their precious free time.
And in saying this I think there needs to be more focus on really simple text-based websites that people can just bang out if they have something to say and just need somewhere to put it. The competition with non-indie sources is really fierce for this niche but I think at least some people can be pulled, especially given the privacy garbage happening on social media. While I know the back end of, for example, Ao3 is quite complex, the front end being well-formatted text shows that sites that are simply well-formatted text are worthwhile in themselves. I feel like Zonelets is probably the most complexity one can realistically ask of people, and even that might be too much because it is still Javascript. But still having packages like that for people who aren't super tech-minded to be able to deploy simple, text-based static websites that are usable on mobile to a host of their choice should probably be the priority.
My other thought right now is about the indieweb as an alternative and there seems to be significant problems to the point that I'm thinking of writing an essay. As with most things in tech there seems to be a major disconnect in what people want and what tech people want to do. So much of the face of the indieweb is retroweb material built by high school and college kids who can design beautiful retro aesthetic layouts because, frankly, they have so much free time on their hands and no real responsibilities. We know right now probably more than ever that grown up adults with jobs and such have interesting things to say and especially because the indieweb does not generally have straightforward monetization opportunities, they should be able to publish simply without sacrificing all of their precious free time.
And in saying this I think there needs to be more focus on really simple text-based websites that people can just bang out if they have something to say and just need somewhere to put it. The competition with non-indie sources is really fierce for this niche but I think at least some people can be pulled, especially given the privacy garbage happening on social media. While I know the back end of, for example, Ao3 is quite complex, the front end being well-formatted text shows that sites that are simply well-formatted text are worthwhile in themselves. I feel like Zonelets is probably the most complexity one can realistically ask of people, and even that might be too much because it is still Javascript. But still having packages like that for people who aren't super tech-minded to be able to deploy simple, text-based static websites that are usable on mobile to a host of their choice should probably be the priority.
