And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they’re using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit’s CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.

On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it’s easy to download the entire website as a single archive.

So they’re not really that smart…

I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn’t make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that’s a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.

Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.

Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn’t have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the “conspiracy” you’re talking about - but it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.

But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.

And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.

Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.

On the other hand, it’s also really sad to see what they’ve become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.

The good Google is dead. I’d love to see them get completely buried.

This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.

Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.

Good. Operating systems should be neutral. The people who make them should not be allowed to dictate the terms that others use to interact with their platforms.

This is my fear as well. Neoliberal policies are exactly what have made the extreme right so strong and powerful over the past decades. When people have no means to get forward in life, they resort to despotism, which is exactly why the poorest parts of the USA are so strongly in favor of Trump, while the wealthier parts are still clinging onto the liberal train.

Like I said in other posts, this is a good day for the current term, but if the Liberals aren’t serious about making life better for real Canadians (not the super-wealthy ones), there’s a good chance that this is only exacerbating an inevitable collapse.

Ironically, Trudeau hanging around for a long as he did may have saved Canada. If this election had happened in the middle of last year, the Conservatives would have probably won and combined with Trump, it would have been a disaster. Possibly the smartest/luckiest thing he has ever done.

Conservatives still winning over 40% of all votes total. Definitely a very bad sign.

Agreed. Incumbents always do worse in the next election. Makes me shudder to think what the result of the next election is going to be. Trudeau’s latest term was really bad and they got no punishment for it whatsoever thanks to the gift from the south. And Canada seems to be moving further and further away from proportional representation. So who will voters swing to next election?

Great result for today’s Canadians. Terrifying result for future Canadians.

I didn’t read the article, but I presume this is under the DMA which has provisions for increasing fines for repeat offenses - something like 10% of global revenue or something like that. I’m also a bit discouraged by how small the number is, but there is still some hope that it will either increase or get them to change their practices. But it is quite frustrating how slowly it’s going.

In fact, chances are that Apple is going breaking the law until the last minute so they can squeeze every penny they can out of this scheme until they can’t do it any longer.

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin’s puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider’s service.

I don’t understand why we’ve forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I really wish we’d start seeing government regulation that says “you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service.” I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

Wow, these new TLDs are terrible! ICANN has really lost it this time!