lifning

๐Ÿ—ฆ old and unimproved! ๐Ÿ—ง

  • gender? 'ardly she/'er!

if you read my header image, i'm sorry


๐Ÿ“ blog
lifning.info/
๐Ÿ’ช demogroup
hell-labs.itch.io/
๐ŸŒ fediverse
snoot.tube/@lifning
๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ website league
beam.phosphor.buzz/@lifning

NireBryce
@NireBryce

is that until 2014, you could choose your display layout by choosing a different client.

want a grid of smaller feeds, separated by website? there's an rss client for that. or, was.

want a non-columnar Twitter layout? they existed.

want all your chat clients in the same view, including Slack via irc? pidgin and other clients could do this.

now we have webapps because companies want metrics and shorter development cycles and don't want their ads blocked at the client level and want to use tracking cookies. there's good reasons too, but I don't think they're ever just the good ones outside of scrappy small developers.

web 2.0 wasn't round corners, broadband, and a performant web. that was a side effect. web 2.0 was the web transcending the browser. Unlike what the cryptocurrency boosters say, we're already in web 3.0, a reaction, a regressive contraction. The web we're currently trapped in is the web of the browser and the browser alone.


Catfish-Man
@Catfish-Man

Years ago, on twitter, I described being an ex-Adium-developer with no power to stop the slide into walled off webapps as being able to "see forever while being chained to the floor". It's easy to see what could be when you already built it once and it got taken away.


ireneista
@ireneista

it is also super important to keep saying this, because there are people who don't know it, whether because they were kids at the time or because they just weren't paying enough attention or spending enough time online to notice the change


ireneista
@ireneista

... because if we allow corporations to decide how much polish things need to have to be worthy of public attention, that bar will always be set high enough that only corporations will be able to meet it


garak
@garak

The metaphor the US military uses is "burning more calories" and it is absolutely a tactic which is effective in a variety of theaters. If you have more resources, then you try as much as possible to shift the fight into axes that require more resources. Even if you have to spend 4x as much, if you have 10x as much to spend (which corporations do compared to communities), then it's Winning.

For example: from the outside, it sure looks like a lot of Google-backed Web Standards exist solely to give Mozilla lots of busy work. The more resources they have to invest making Firefox following Google's goals, the less they have leftover to follow Mozilla's goals. Which considering Mozilla's recent mismanagement probably isn't so necessary anymore, but like... between Dart, and Native Client, and The Image Format Which Shall Not Be Named, they were trying to a browser inviable unless its dev team had a quadruple-figure headcount. Thank goodness NaCl and Dart got righteously dunked on by asm.js and TypeScript, respectively.

For a view from the inside, see "Fire and Motion" (2002) by Joel Spolsky. Description of how Microsoft intentionally-ish keeps its Windows API treadmill going fast fast fast so that everyone else tires themselves out trying to keep up.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

One of my devices is a DevTerm and I wish I could easily modify the layout of websites. It has a 1280x480 display and it's nearly impossible to use most websites without everything getting smashed into the middle of the screen. This is one of an extremely few devices that needs a horizontal layout, or at least no insane side margins or arbitrary content width.

And then there's some services where I'm stuck with a first party client that assumes none of its users will ever have a screen smaller than 1080p, so the enforced minimum window dimensions are too big to fit the whole app on the screen. And all that space it requires is being wasted on whitespace to look nice on a larger screen. :/

"browser alone"...I think that the way web mobile browsers strongarm people into using apps needs acknowledgement here. fb's web mobile updated for me two days ago and now it's unusable

in reply to @Catfish-Man's post:

in reply to @ireneista's post:

Incidentally I think the things that killed Adium-like clients were

  1. Protocol vendors got better at cryptography. "API keys" were not a thing in 2003, we just reverse-engineered the protocol and pretended to be the official client
  2. iOS (and to a lesser extent other mobile OSs) not supporting background tasks (for pretty valid battery life and memory reasons) meant you couldn't keep an IM session running without involving a server as an intermediary, and that server time costs ongoing money and maintenance.
  3. "Presence" and the entire concept of "being online" changed with phones in our pockets