Fremantle
· websites ·
lab.artlung.com and a return to a World Wide Web by Joe Crawford, 23 December 2024:
I’m writing this at a coffee shop a stone’s throw from what was the site of San Diego Technical Books. I would go there just to browse and to learn. And yes, buy a book now and again. But technical bookstores are also mostly gone. Things went online.
And for a while, the web was pretty good at replacing mailing lists, newsgroups, and even paper books.
But gradually, the web has gotten worse. Things seemed to have gotten so spammy and troll-filled and the good parts of the web have gone underground to places like Discord and Patreon and Substack and Facebook. Gated by rules or fees or sign-up required.
But that means I can’t find a lot of those things on the web. If I can’t search for it, I can’t find it. It’s invisible. And a private site is fine, of course. We all ought to have the right to create private enclaves for us and a few friends. But if my intent is for a site to be useful to the world, I am often thwarted by the search engine gatekeepers. They don’t want you to visit my site as much as they want you to stay on their site as long as possible.
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam 
samwilson.id.au
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