A return to a World Wide Web

Fremantle

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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.

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