Bonum Certa Men Certa

Finding Peace With Less

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 07, 2024

Little girl is standing in a window, watching the snow outside

WE are just 18 days away from 'treeday'* and only 3 days away from a significant date for the sister site, but the news has not slowed down (not yet) and we're still catching up with some.

Yesterday we got some community 'scoops' that we intend to cover gradually and patiently. There's a lot of backstabbing going on. We always want to know more. There's more to every story and the "more" is usually more significant than what's on the surface, e.g. cruft like self-congratulatory press releases. We can be reached by E-mail and IRC (or Mumble if voice is necessary; contact us for details).

Yesterday we were also out discussing topics; the main barrier is still a lack of time (or capacity) to cover them fully/properly.

There seems to be a growing consensus (speaking to other editors helps confirm this) that the Web is going in a very bad direction, not just for news sites but in general. One good way to navigate today's Web is to find simple/light sites (not only speed is a factor; they tend to be better at privacy too), preferably use Atom/RSS feeds, and ideally cull all sorts of sites that produce LLM spew, misinformation, or both (LLMs tend to do a lot of the latter involuntarily). Consider what some former news sites became. It's really awful. Meanwhile, some good old news sites went offline. They won't be coming back. All their work is gone forever.

This recognition that the Web is increasingly hopeless (for a number of reasons) is accentuated by the latest nonsense from Mozilla. Firefox is "dead man walking" and Mozilla promotes people from Facebook and Twitter. It lays off the geeks (revisit "Mass Layoffs at Mozilla Announced During US Elections"; it tried hard to change the topic immediately after that). This does necessarily - or at least inevitably - mean that HTTPS (or SPDY) increasingly became little but a "transport layer" for Chrome and derivatives of Chrom(ium).

Gemini Protocol is still a lot smaller (vastly fewer users than the Web), but if we're looking for actual solutions, then we need to seek alternatives to the status quo. We need to become part of the solution. The Web at this point is beyond redemption. It's hard to envision things turning around; "apps" or "webapps" are responsible for all sorts of bad things and they're almost always proprietary. They generally circumvent libraries (information/knowledge), public services, and Software Freedom. For instance, it's harder to do banking today than it was decades ago (experienced people did the important tasks for you), it's hard to know what pushes to you the latest "news" stories (see what happened in Romania; sites are being "tailored" to you by proprietary, secret algorithms), surveillance is everywhere (but they still cannot catch a CEO's murderer in the busiest town in the richest country), cars don't last very long, and computers refuse to boot for no reason other than totally phony 'security' (which is false).

Each year things seem to get worse. Like Andy said the other day, we were promised better and easier lives, cushioned by a technological revolution. Instead everything seems to deteriorate and people say there's not enough time in the day. Despite having washing machines, dishwashers, fewer kids etc. we're somehow expected to work longer hours and sleep even less (and perhaps not sleep well due to worries or phone notifications coming from the corner of the bedroom).

Lately we've seen and shared new blog posts about making life simpler (some are in Geminispace). The broadcasters might call it "dumb", but there's nothing dumb about simplifying things. In coding, this is actively encouraged, so why not in life?

Someone in Geminispace quoted Paulo Coelho the other day: “If it costs you your peace, it is too expensive”.

____

* For the first time in over a decade we didn't put out and arrange a large tree (it's a huge task; it takes several hours). This year's motif is different.

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