With surveillance capitalism reaching it’s peak in 2026/2027, is getting out the Web the only way for the privacy inclined user?

Will Gemini (or cousins) go the way of Linux? Or is it foverer condemned to go the way of Hurd

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    I fail to understand the point of this.

    If the goal is to be able to deliver documents without any JS, cookies, tracking, etc., then why not just deliver documents that way through the web? No one is forcing anyone to put those things on any website.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      Browsers are bigger than operating systems now. One of the points of gemini is to use a very restricted language and abilities, so that developers can create their own gemini browsers easily.

      As it stands now, google exerts enormous control on the web because of how complicated it is to make a browser. Currently mozilla is google’s only competitor in browser engines.

    • Elw@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      Exactly. This is one of the fundamental things that I never understood about Gemini. It’s simply a “web” that doesn’t support some of the features of the modern web that the author finds objectionable. I have no problem with anyone doing that or with the author’s objections but they did a lot of work to do what could have simply been done with a specific set of tools and “rules” applied to the existing HTTP/HTML web.

      • Create a standard for what subset of HTML standards are supported and maybe define some headers for these pages to use to enable crawlers to identify them
      • Build some browsers that only support the standard subset
      • Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard
      • ???
      • Profit
      • macniel@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard

        and how do you propose to impose that? Heck robots.txt doesn’t even seem to be honored!

        • FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works
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          19 hours ago

          Heck robots.txt doesn’t even seem to be honored!

          Eh. I make web pages for friends and family. We don’t want them indexed. In my server logs, most of the big scrapers are pretty good about honoring robots.txt. Google does. Meta does. At least some the AI scrapers do. Pretty sure Bytedance does too but I’d have to double check.

          I’ll see a hit from let’s say G’s bot, fetching robots.txt, and then no other activity. For all the thigns I can shit on G and Meta for, this isn’t one of them.

          Is it universal to heed it? Nah, ofc not. But it’s still more effective than you’d think, given it is voluntary.