Web Matters

Linking the web

Permanent links have moved to the new web directory.
See also: entries tagged web and internet.

Major news sources:

Some blogs:

And an unrelated cool site: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (Digging through the Geocities Torrent)

Social media

Discord - So Your Favourite Chat App Sucks Now (28 June 2023) Why Discord sucks, and how to find something that doesn't. See also: Online Spyware Watchdog coverage of the same.

Two three posts on what the loss of Twitter means for the world (I'm not being dramatic):

And from not so long ago:

Fediverse

The Newcomer’s Guide to Mastodon, from a Crusty Old-Timer (8 July 2023) Tips on How to Ride the Elephant

Threadiversal Travel (28 June 2023) A guide for Lemmy, Kbin and general Reddit off-ramping

Tumblr

Facebook

Facebook scrambles to escape death spiral as users flee, sales drop (30 September 2022) Meta has lost about two-thirds of its value since peaking last year as the business continues to get pummeled on multiple fronts.

Couldn't help but notice this sentence: Facebook’s business was built on network effects — users brought their friends and family members, who told their colleagues, who invited their buddies. Doesn't that sound rather like a pyramid scheme?

Imagine the End of Facebook (7 October 2021) Less than a year after this post, it's not so hard anymore. See above.

Facebook's war on switching costs (28 August 2021) Key point: they're called network effects when they make the service better.

Content management systems

Ethics and law

History

Formats and protocols

FTP Fadeout (25 September 2020) The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent.

The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol (11 August 2016) Twenty-five years ago, a small band of programmers from the University of Minnesota ruled the internet. And then they didn’t.

Last but not least: always bet on text (13 October 2014)

Browsers

Here’s Why Firefox is Seeing a Continuous Decline for Last 12 Years (11 September 2021) All of this. So much. And people begging us to start using Firefox again are only adding insult to injury.

And an old link: New Internet Explorer 7 Tax :) (13 June 2012)

Programming

Indieweb h-cards (11 April 2020): Using microformats to build a profile page

And some older links:

Performance and robustness

Two flavors of disaster:

Javascript:

Bloat:

And more:

Culture

And some really old links: