![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So apparently Omegle only just died this year.
( alluding to the heavy details )So, that sure is a thing.
(thread)
okay, no, actually, I think it's actively harmful when a page is intended to display static information - text and images you can't edit - and requires javascript to do it
any website building tool which functions that way is actively doing harm
no we will not explain
( *proceeds to explain* )
yes, we hate these things because they're rubbish
but we hate them more because they're born out of indifference and callousness at best, and active hostility at worst
rewatching Devine Lu Linvega's Strange Loop talk about computing and sustainability and thinking about the one deleted tweet they mentioned
I think Twitter, Mastodon, the microblogging Fediverse, they are utterly unsuited to be archives - they are all networks in the moment, conversational spaces with just enough persistence that you can catch up on what someone said yesterday, maybe last week if you're determined
and you can download your archive but it's just a huge mess - it's not sorted or connected, you can only find a thing if you already know what it is, and you might never find the context
that's part of why we are starting to repost things on our dreamwidth blog
sometimes we want the things we say to last more than a week
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At a formative age, we read a 1981 science fiction novella by Vernor Vinge titled True Names, about a population of hyper-hackers doing operations around the world and maintaining the secrecy of their identity to protect them from being controlled by others through elementary magic spells computer exploits.
...come to think, it used "the Internet as a 3D immersive space" as a narrative device eleven years before the publication of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash made "the Metaverse" a meme. Kinda funny.
Anyway, in retrospect, that novella really encouraged us to think about security of identity in a substantial way. (At least, once we started caring at all.) This is a story in which an action which restricts your identity to three million possible candidates is considered high-risk. The concept of what could expose personal information becomes very broad, when you're thinking about that level.
And then you get into the stories about people identifying physical locations by nothing but the background scenery, or incidental environmental details. Like that time Tom Scott challenged people to identify where he and Matt Parker watched an eclipse from, and they got it within feet.
On that level of investigation - the, to be frank, "ten thousand people decided to stalk you" level - we are shit out of luck. If we wanted to be secret at that level, we would have to burn the name "Packbat" altogether and start over. But ... increasingly, we are very careful about landmarks in our photographs, we don't talk about trash pickup schedules or the weather, and we do not name streets. We will say we are in the mid-Atlantic region - we will even say where within on occasion - but we do not want to be specific enough to phone book.
Because it's 2023, there have been a lot of harassment campaigns that jump from Internet to city streets, and we don't want to make it easy.
Yes.
(Sorry, we're in a mood today, so we're just ... making a blog post. This is an essay in the most I-don't-know-where-it'll-go sense.)
On a very basic level, a comments section represents an aggregation of interpersonal connection. It represents an audience being heard not as hecklers, but as annotators, commentators, afterwordists. It connects Vienna Teng songs to AO3 fanfics, connects Paul Simon songs to those cherished dead who loved them, connects dodie songs to survivors seeking peace. It tips off machinists to better techniques, lets nonfiction writers know that their conclusions are heard, articulates shared reactions that they can be felt together. They are those rare moments when a movie is felt so strongly that strangers linger together in the lobby afterwards to process what just happened to them, made omnipresent.
They are communities. Sometimes ongoing communities - the second place we came out as trans was a comments section. Sometimes transient ones - we do not even know the name of the stranger for whom we wrote a review of a Negativland album in the comments of a music video.
No-one would tell you "don't read the comments" if you had no reason to read the comments.
...there are spaces where abuse runs rampant. There are rooms in which the loudest bigots in existence seek to crowd out all other voices. We are harmed by these comments because they betray us in the font of our connection with others.
Sometimes those represent people being under attack - a doctor who does not have the time or knowledge to manage a YouTube comments section, whose pro-trans comments went viral in just the wrong spaces.
...okay, all of them represent people being under attack.
But a lot of the time, those toxic comments sections represent a community whose leaders chose or accepted that toxicity.
Yes, read comments. But don't read them on hate sites.
We're thinking about making a new personal website for ourselves, and thinking about the way we avoid buying physical things most of the time, and suddenly we remembered a concept that computer software developers talk about: tech debt.
Like, the thing is, if you write code, then now you have to maintain it. If something changes in the computers that use the code, the code can break and you have to deal with that. If something changes in the problems the code must address, then the code may no longer fit and you have to deal with that. Writing code is work, but now that it exists it continuously produces more work, and that work doesn't happen on a schedule of you just feeling like writing code one day - it happens whether you like it or not. The upkeep costs come due no matter what.
And we're thinking about making a new personal website, and what to put on it ... and it's the same problem. Unlike a blog (where posts happen and then settle into the archive) or a microblog (where posts happen and then get buried in the churn of the past), anything we put on a website we have to upkeep. What ingredients we use in a recipe changes. We write new PICO-8 chiptunes. A webcomic's site hosting dies. These are changes and, to us, if we make a website, it's supposed to be correct, not just a historical artifact.
So ... yeah. We're thinking about making a new personal website. But it probably won't have a lot on it.
From Teen Vogue: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs: Why is it so common?" by Lauren Michele Jackson.
A good discussion of how racist stereotypes about black people play into and are reinforced by the use of GIFs of black people to represent strong emotions. Short quote under the cut:
( Read more... )About a year and a half ago, some folx came up with a new Internet thing that's sorta somewhere in between Gopher and HTTP/HTTPS in terms of complexity. We learned about it last month.
Firstly: we don't know what Gopher is. It sounds kinda impractical.
Secondly: for some reason, the Gemini folk call the HTTP/HTTPS internet "the web", as if their own collection of URL-addressed hypertext pages is not a web? We're going to call it a web, because...
...well, because it's a lot like the web we knew ... idk, in the 1990s or early 2000s? In bad ways, obviously - nothing about Geminispace is immune to inhabitance by anyone from casually bigoted jerks to fascists - but in good ways as well, and a lot of the good is innate to the design. Like Dreamwidth or AO3, this is a space primarily focused on text, where sites load quick and take little in the way of processor or memory to view, and a space that's not designed to sell you stuff.
A lot of spaces are trying to sell you stuff. Twitter and its clones - Tumblr, too, and I think Facebook - are trying to hook you in and keep you fascinated for hours, either because it makes them money or because (in the case of Mastodon and other Fediverse things) they just want a Twitter that's not Twitter. News sites are almost entirely ad sites and just incidentally happen to have the text and a few images from a news article somewhere in there. (And also crash constantly on our iPhone 6, because they've decided anyone using one is too poor to bother accommodating.) YouTube lets people upload videos and both YouTube and Twitch let people stream videos in the hope that they can serve video ads before, during, and after.
Geminispace ... feels like Eric Burns-White's old Websnark page, or like Linus Åkesson's website, or like ... well, exactly what it is: a lot of pages from people who want to put things in the world for others to look at, and who aren't really interested in gaming the system to be heard more widely. Weblogs, special-interest essays, weird server-side game things (remember Food Chain? that kind of feeling) ... it is a web where (most) things load immediately and site formatting is basically "I wrote a bunch of words and put it on a page for you". I don't know if there's anything else in our entire life that's felt like that, and Geminispace feels like that, at least for now.
We don't have any access to Geminispace as authors of words. It is a space which you access either by having the money and technical knowhow to configure a server for it or by asking someone else with that money and technical knowhow to let you use their server space - and that probably still requires technical knowhow, and we have no idea how much because they haven't said and they're the kind of people who assume everyone wants to program their own browser. It's less accessible than the fediverse, and we wouldn't be on the fediverse if we didn't happen to follow the Twitter of a sci-fi webcomics artist who happens to host her own instance and decide that we were were willing to gamble on her as an instance host.
And yeah, a lot of Geminispace people are on the fediverse, apparently, but we don't know them. And a lot of them seem to be the type who think "blocking other instances is Sabotaging The Fediverse" is a reasonable idea, when it is in fact so patently wrongheaded it's confusing.
Anyway, this is at least the third time and third space in which we've talked about being fascinated by this thing. We kinda wish we could let the open source devs know what impression their protocol is leaving on folks who are proud of making a buggy port of that Daleks game we played as a kid in PICO-8 and still don't know how to compile anything.
