Bonum Certa Men Certa

Techrights Statement on Paths Ahead in the Era of News Drought and Widely-Waning Web

Summary: We're striving to get into a habit of publishing about a dozen blog posts per day; in order to do this we change our strategy with immediate effect

YESTERDAY we wrote about the need to pause and rethink how we do articles and how we curate Daily Links. We've since then experimented with a new approach and published about half a dozen articles with many recent references in each.

This site is turning 17 in a few months. It did change (it evolved) a lot over the years. Daily Links turned 15 this past February and IRC turned 15 about a month ago.

It is with that in mind that we:

  1. Pause our old approach of gathering news links (too low a signal-to-noise ratio in them).
  2. prioritise writing new articles, even if that means fewer batches of Daily Links
  3. Prepare videos where video presentation is more suitable and desirable than textual form


We're in the privileged position of enjoying greater personal freedom than ever before (when this site started in 2006 I was still a Ph.D candidate working on my thesis, later I worked part time and then full time). We'd like to make best use of time to promote Software Freedom and to advance justice, with greater focus on science and technology matters rather than "pure" politics.

Social control media is in disarray at the moment (several large platforms are collapsing, not exactly for the same reasons). We hope that many of the escapees will end up self-hosting and, better yet, adopting Gemini.

In recent years we've been producing over 3,000 blog posts (with analogous GemLog posts) per year and we should be able to do over 4,000 a year if we adopt the correct strategy. Priorities need to change somewhat. We have some exciting (to me us least) plans for the next 5-10 years; they're not limited to the World Wide Web, so the fate of the Web does not matter so much to us (we're resistant to the Web's demise; all our articles are in IPFS, GemText, plain text and more). We have hitherto identified where a lot of time was being (mostly) 'wasted' and we will work to correct those older habits and hopefully exceed a dozen blog posts per day once the dust settles.

The Web is getting smaller (yes, we've provided evidence over the years that it is shrinking over time), search engines rapidly deteriorate in terms of quality (the reasons for this merit a discussion some other day, in isolation), and newsrooms collapse at an alarming rate, with editors forced to resign from widely-known news sites almost every week. These trends seem irreversible for "business reasons". There's no point fighting those trends. No single person or company can change that.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Speed of GNU/Linux
The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
Links for the day
Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
Links for the day
Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025