Web needs to make money. Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?
I myself do not like ads or tracking, but we need to be realistic and there needs a way to make web sustainable.
How to do that and making sure that monopolies like Google are in check is a valid concern though, but in these conversations is the only point I hear. Ironically Google does not even need these apis because it already has so much data on users, it is primarily for smaller companies.
No, it doesn't. I have no issue with it making money, but that was neither the original purpose of the web nor is it an end goal for everyone using it.
> Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?
This statement is unconnected to the first. The way people just link "web", "money" and "advertising" without even stopping to think that there might be alternatives is exactly why everything online is in such a sad state of affairs.
I'm old enough to remember a day when the "social media" that I used was a set of phpBB forums paid for by one or more of the members because they wanted to host the community. Nothing on the modern ad-supported web comes close to the dynamic of friendship and camaraderie of those community-supported forums—if anything the new platforms are a great place to ruin real-life friendships rather than create new ones.
So, no, I don't think the web needs to be made "sustainable" in the sense you seem to mean. Things were better when people sacrificed a bit to keep their communities alive.
I'm certainly in favor of free software projects making enough money to be sustainable.
It could be zero in some conditions, but in the other cases, I'm also against ads. Fortunately, there are other ways of making money, without compromising the "open source" / "free software" part:
- consulting (including prioritizing new features and fixes)
- support
- providing an actual paid service
- selling free software extensions (and yes, that means someone can recompile the extension and distribute it gratis - that's what happening with OSMAnd+ on F-Droid, but they are still doing fine)
I have an employer who pays me to do thing X. And they don’t care that I also work on thing Y a little bit.
I think there’s lots of software written by people who have jobs and code because it’s fun.
For example, Linus Torvalds made Subsurface [0] as open source. He had a job while he made this. He didn’t get paid for it directly, but it’s not like paying him extra would make it better.
Maximising profits and being sustainable are 2 different things. Museums do not need to make money because they are funded externally.
It is like saying artists do not need to make money. You seem to go to the very extremes.
Absolutely, but as long as adverting is allowed to finance the whole bloody thing we're not going to improve anything. Advertising should be limited as to not influence content and that's currently not what's happing. As it stand, outside of "the small web" ads are the main attraction and any content that may be provided to us is done so to enable advertising, or at least not upset advertisers.
I want privacy pushed so far that the majority of the web is going to have to find financing outside of advertising, be it micro-payments, donation, subscriptions or benefactors. People should pay directly for software, service, like social media, news, email and possibly even search. If we as a side-effect uses these things less I see that as an absolute benefit.
I agree somewhat, but what about poorer regions of the world like parts of Africa or Asia, what is the solution for them? Most of the people there would not or could not pay for every website to use. It would be unfortunate if the web is inaccessible for most people.
Locally produced, given the cheaper labour cost they should also be able to compete in the EU or US by offering a cheaper product, due to cheaper production cost. At least in some areas.
I don't think the current state of the web is doing poor regions any favours by granting the free access to western products, compared to encouraging or even forcing them to build their own infrastructure or products.
Donating Europe's discarded clothing to Africa killed pretty much all of Africa's textile industry. Free access to the online services from the west (or China) is just as much of an obstacle to growing their own technology and media companies.
Edit: Free access to general knowledge, open source software and learning material is clearly a bonus, but it also takes little away from local industry and can help kick start companies.
General knowledge, FOSS, and learning material are also generally freely given without expectation of or often even asking for compensation. The most valuable "content" on the web is generally not monetized[0].
They wouldn't be losing a lot if they lost out on TikTok and Instagram. It would be no great loss if affiliate link blog spam went away.
[0] e.g. https://axler.net/ has multiple free books on advanced mathematics written by a well-regarded author. This kind of thing (and/or lecture notes, syllabi, and homework) is not at all abnormal to find on professors' home pages if you want a free education.
Agreed but it shouldn't be the problem that a browser should solve. The browser is a user client. It really doesn't make sense for browsers to try and enforce or help a certain business model. It's great if the web and web browsers help businesses make money, but it should be a side effect, not a goal for user clients.
Every one of my phones before was rooted with custom os flashed, but now I feel exactly the same a as you, it's just not worth it. Kinda sad how stuff is being more and mored locked down.
Just go to home page https://wpt.fyi/ see chart "Browser-specific failures are the number of WPT tests which fail in exactly one browser." Safari leads by a longshot with over 3800 tests failing only in Safari. Firefox has 1700 and Chrome less which kinda correlates to my own personal development experience.
> The "web standard" part is meaningless considering that most production websites will bundle the files together as part of their build/optimization process for size and loading speed, leaving only a giant chunk(s) that resembles nothing like the original ES modules.
I mean code itself will be non readable, but in modern build ouput chunks are using regular esm modules, at least for Vite, Rollup, Parcel and so on. Webpack might be different story, but still.
Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case parsing user agent is the only option.
From my experience, if things work in Chrome, they will likely work with Firefox too, excluding very new apis, it isn't much of maitenance burden. With Safari every project I work o I discover new Safari quirk or bug. If you can make it work in Safari you can make it Firefox too.
WhatsApp always comes up in comparison to Twitter, but they are fundamentally different. WhatsApp is mostly one on one interaction, while Twitter potentially allows every user to interact with every other user, it's unbelievably more complex to do that at scale compared to WhatsApp, not even talking about all the extra features Twitter has. Search probably being best example of complexity differences.
Out of curiosity what makes e2e encryption impact ordering guarantees? With feed things like ranking (bunch of ml pipelines) etc make it pretty stochastic?
On Whatsapp the ordering guarantees are limited to within the thread and server side timestamps are good enough for the most part to enforce it. Whatsapp/messaging is a very horizontally scalable problem. With feed (assuming) you have a fully personal feed the storage alone is a pain to manage and optimize.
i'd say key exchange. You need to get key information and message in the correct order orelse you won't be able to decode the info.
Now of course you can reimplement an ordering mechanism on top of an unordered one, with lost messages detection etc on the client side, and let the server be loose.
but that means reimplementing that logic on every client codebase.
Chat apps are mostly one on one interaction, it is much harder run an open platform where every user can potentially interact with every other user, not even talking about search and how complex it gets. If Twitter is bloated or not is a valid discussion, but comparison it to WhatsApp is not.
Ironically the one-to-many broadcasts are much easier to implement on a single box than as a scalable service spread across thousands of small container instances.
For me personally I like that it updates Typescript references automatically and makes docker image setup far easier.