Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.
- tell me you’re literally making shit up without telling me.
Yeah I had to do a ‘wtf’ then as well. We had ‘users’ before we had internet -_-
Exactly, “users” goes back to the main frame days of the '60s when the users were all part of a company or university.
While I have no doubt that that etymology is completely made up, Wikipedia is not an “actual, reliable source”.
Wikipedia is not an “actual, reliable source”.
Why not? It has been more reliable than most anything else for more than a decade.
What is a reliable online source for you?
Wikipedia is not itself a source. It’s a way to get a summary of a topic and to get the actual sources
True but that is its strength and makes it a defacto source.
The references provided to back the statements in the articles are its real raison d’être.
Combine that with its editing practices, and we have the reason it has maintained its reasonably good quality for so long.
It is not always the answer, but it is the best place to start looking for the answer.
It was linked to as an “actual, reliable source” when it is likely a tertiary source at best.
I did skim the references and there was nothing to support any other claim on the etymology. If I missed something, please let me know.
As I said before, it is not perfect, but it is better than anything else.
It’s certainly more reliable than “ar.al”.
@sik0fewl why not?
Here’s why Wikipedia itself claims not to be a reliable source - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source
Wasn’t this the intention of the web originally? I’m sure I remember reading about netscape and people hosting their own websites locally…
That was the original plan. One thing that screwed with it was ADSL with very low upload speeds.
If you are self-hosting, you need a symmetrical connection as you are sending the site to everyone who visits. If you are using the net only to consume (download) it is not as important.
Or Australian post-adsl2, which still has slow upload speeds, I have a gigabit plan which is basically 800/44
100mbps up would cost $250 instead of my $130pm and would cut the download by -67% to 250mbps.
Yep. Not being symmetrical when on fibre in insane.
The sad part is you would be better off with 200/200 than either plan listed, and it would be less work on the network side to provision.
True, the ability to effectively serve content was outpaced by the ability to make harder to serve content. But not anymore! For people with good connections anyway.
Wouldn’t it be great if the FCC (or whoever) forced ISPs to only sell symmetrical service?
It’s not possible everywhere. Copper line physically can’t be for the end user, same with satellite and rural broadband. Fibre is pretty much the only thing that can be symmetrical. Unless you get some symmetrically shit ADSL.
True but we lost 20 years in the process.
The pushing/rolling out tiny upload/ big download ADSL over symmetrical dsl was a deliberate decision on the part of the Telcos. I worked in the telco network space back then.
In the late 90s/early 00s I had a 10m/10m cable connection and was able to host multiplayer game servers from my apartment.
I moved out of the cable area, and it was 20 years before I had 10m upload again. So the game servers died and these days self-hosted multiplayer games are basically nonexistent compared to corp hosted games that shut down when they want you to move to this years version.
This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen lately. I assume whoever is behind this is relatively new to the Internet, because the “small web” has been how the Internet has worked for decades now. We’ve been able to have our own web presence nearly since the web was invented in the early 90s, and affordable self-hosting has been available since the late 90s. Furthermore, the claims on that site that “all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web” is so divorced from reality it’s astounding. The Internet largely relies on open source software and frameworks that have been developed over decades by volunteers.
If you want to have your own “small web” presence on the Internet, there’s nothing that’s stopping you. You could’ve set that up a long, long time ago using open-source software on cheap hosting providers. The problem with the so-called “small web” is that you usually also want to interact with other people when online, and that’s why things have gotten centralized over the years.
This is brilliant. You’re promoting something here to which you didn’t provide a (very visible?) link. I can’t find one, anyway. I guess I’ll just use my imagination and context to think about what OP might have been posting about.
The whole subject line is “the link”, as it is in every other post to external resources. At least I guess that the page I just read after clicking the link wasn’t just my imagination.
If you’re using a non-feature-complete mobile app your milage my vary - but that’s not OP’s fault.
