Bonum Certa Men Certa

Black Friday SPAM on the World Wide Web: A Reminder That the Web is a Dying Platform, Languishing Due to Marketing and Misinformation

Gemini does not have this problem, at least not yet

Gemini capsules 2021-11-23
Credit: Visualised statistics by Botond



Summary: The junk that overruns the Web this 'Black Friday' week (consumerism 'on steroids') is a good reminder that the Web isn't healthy for the mind anymore; it's mostly spying on people, trying to compel them to buy particular things or vote a certain way

The "burning platform" which has long been on the demise as a source of information (many 'news' articles or 'reviews' are just paid-for plugs) cannot be repaired both for technical reasons (it's controlled by monopolistic saboteurs) and for reasons connected to infiltration, both by commercial actors and political actors. It's being weaponised and a growing number of people have become aware of it. That's why more people appear to have returned to blogging this past year (no more social control media; even the popularity of YouTube wanes). There's impact on privacy, performance, and accessibility (DRM for instance). Today's "open" Web is just yesterday's Adobe Flash, albeit openwashed a bit. Incidentally, yesterday the Google-sponsored EFF published "Manifest V3: Open Web Politics in Sheep's Clothing" and to quote key parts (it even bit the hand that had fed it): "The security and privacy claims that Google has made about web extensions may or may not be addressed with Manifest V3. But the fact remains that the extensions that users have relied on for privacy will be heavily stunted if the current proposal moves forward. A move that was presented as user-focused, actually takes away the user’s power to block unwanted tracking for their security and privacy needs..."



"Let's try to get more people to move elsewhere, e.g. Gemini for hypertext."As we've stated before, eventually we need to accept that the Web is no longer open and Web browsers are mostly just clones of some proprietary (with DRM) monoculture that harms disabled people and mostly serves the copyright cartel.

Let's try to get more people to move elsewhere, e.g. Gemini for hypertext. Decentralised IRC is good for communication and it's widely supported, it has minimal system requirements etc. IRC networks grew in number significantly after the collapse of Freenode. 89 new networks were recently registered.

According to Stéphane Bortzmeyer's Gemini pages: "There are [as of moments ago] 1820 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1474 of them." And only two days ago we noted that the 1,800 milestone had been crossed.

So it grew by another ~7 per day since then. The momentum is still there!

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