Video download link | md5sum 1ffaa87fe55e0100ed5dbb980bf2c37f Future of Techright Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: We're no longer just a Web site; in fact, we encourage others to look beyond the Web, which despite the media not talking about it has rapidly waned (many sites have already turned into "apps")

TWO years ago we adopted IPFS. We also adopted daily text-only bulletins, which are connected to how IPFS is used. Months later we added Gemini and thought it would be compressible enough to disseminate all the articles in the site as a one-gigabyte download for offline reading. This is still doable, but packaging that for navigation and viewing can be a bit of a technical challenge. It's a large job.

The Web is rotting. Many sites go offline and social control media hubs shut down with barely a notice/recourse (such as data migration). Expect this trend to accelerate in the coming years because the press perishes and bloat gets promoted (stuff like Rust). Promising to stay online for another 10 years is hard enough; what's even harder is keeping a promise to keep active all this time. 18+ years later Tux Machines still publishes 30-50 new pages per day and a year ago I became a lot more active in my personal blog, which I had almost abandoned because of focus on Techrights.

"The way we see it, the Internet is there to stay for a long time to come, but the way it is used has already changed profoundly."One upside of the lockdowns, for us at least, is that they gave us time and will to move Techrights to more protocols, emergent protocols. In fact, last night we wrote about the future of the Web site and some IPFS-related work. We're excited to have finally started the long-promised upgrade of systems and services. It's well overdue and "better late than never" as the saying goes...

We've seen more and more articles lately predicting the imminent doom of social control media. Some predictions said the same about the Web at large (many people use social control media not via the Web, either). The way we see it, the Internet is there to stay for a long time to come, but the way it is used has already changed profoundly. For instance, the proportion of the Internet usage that's strictly World Wide Web rapidly diminishes (much of the media still conflates those two things). To put it in perspective, here's a chart from over a decade back:

Image source/credit

By 2013 the Web was already below 10% of raw usage:

The Web and the Net are very different

As per this year, breakdown by company looked like this:

GAFAMWeb?

These are American censorship companies. They represent surveillance, not free speech.

In any case, people who value their freedom online would look above and beyond the Web. Nothing lasts forever. The Web is over 30 years old; it's nowadays bloated, full of DRM, and only a small set of browsers (Chromium clones) are "properly" supported by "modern" Web sites (mostly JavaScript).

IRC predates the Web and we make extensive use for it. For people who aren't online in IRC we publish full logs in IPFS, Gemini (GemText), and HTTP/S (HTML). ⬆