I completely agree with your assessment especially with how most social media these days really dumbs down the entry level effort needed to participate in discussions.

And to your point, participating on a BBS (which usually requires a more specific interest and consequently a similar engagement level) will generally reward you with a community that is more civil, friendly and worth frequenting.

I use Jshelter alongside Ublock. They’re a good combination.

The open source community (or movement) is about, well…open source that many of us here benefit from and greatly appreciate. While everyone is free to agree or disagree with the personal ideals of any developer who has made their positions known, it’s not fair to discount the importance of someone’s historical contributions just because their current opinions seem incongruent to our own.

“JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations.”

“During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser. There was a desire in the flourishing web development scene to remove this limitation, so in 1995, Netscape decided to add a scripting language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

I think you’re confusing the reasons behind the initial intent of JS versus what it has evolved into almost 30 years later.

It’s for people who want to keep their network traffic private from say their ISP or other sniffers.

On the desktop, I use Whonix which does utilize the Tor Network. That being said, I rarely use the Tor browser outside of it.

I find myself waking up in an even stranger world than the one I left the night before.

It’s one thing to understand that while surfing the Internet you expose yourself to being monitored, it’s quite another to take a walk around the park and have someone trying to ‘sniff out’ your movement and potentially your identity.

Are there people who don’t really understand the implications of this?

Google and Apple have built out their own private ‘little internet’ by turning the users of their products into their own personal nodes that they have access to and control.

Most Americans don’t want to think for themselves. They would rather someone else do that heavy lifting for them.

However, it’s important that people have the freedom to reason for themselves and make choices accordingly without some governmental entity mandating a certain thought trajectory. People shouldn’t surrender such fundamental human freedoms to their government.

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm

This is a great point that you bring up. I subscribe to an IRC channel that has bridges to both Telegram and Matrix. My feelings at this point, is that the weakest link is going to be of the most concern. But how all this technology interoperate with each other and how they actually handle privacy/security together is a question I cannot answer.

I have a bad feeling that this will not end well if it’s left to run its course.

What happened to the days when people just took a chance and tried something new and waited for the results to come in? What do they have to lose by giving Mastodon or the Fediverse a try except a certain amount of time and effort? The idea of having to analyze everything and scraping data from user bases before making a decision to freely jump in and give it a try is getting a bit absurd.

I’ve been using eBay since 2007. I just don’t see any benefits to using Amazon over them.

However, I did use Amazon back in the day when they only sold books and I couldn’t find what I was looking for in local bookstores. But Amazon has changed for the worse since those bygone days.

I started delivering newspapers when I was 10 years old. The problem I inevitably ran into was that certain people didn’t want to pay for the product and I was out the money I had to pay to initially buy the newspaper for them.

When customers refused to pay for their subscription, I stopped delivering their newspaper.

While nobody wants an Internet behind a paywall, there does need to be a certain equilibrium between content and services while maintaining the ability to fund and perpetuate them.

But, I agree that the whole modern ad and marketing system is completely rotten.

Debian