Cue detection of “realistic” human activity on the UI and preventing streaming if the server determine this activity does not match a human enough pattern.

I’m exaggerating on that one, but… that’s not even that implausible these days.

My point was, dancing this dance with “big website”, whoever it is, will always be an endless uphill battle.

People don’t realize how much shit youtube/google ignores over time, for whatever reasons (but mostly because it’s cheaper to ignoer I’d guess). With most major consumer VPN providers, this is very easy to detect. Adblockers are easy to detect. Tampering with the website structure? Believe it or not, quite easy to detect when someone hide a component or change a title or a button.

If they decided to seriously get after people that circumvent geofencing, people that block ads, people that change the interface to their liking, or people that plainly use alternative websites, they could easily. And it would require far less effort on their end to keep things complicated than it would require on our end to keep things working at an acceptable level.

As a person with skin surrounding his skull, I don’t really get why that’s an issue.

If it winks you should start running.

Little did you know, he have ten mattresses in a second room, that cycles regularly and are steam cleaned. Maybe.

That’s not a flashlight.

That’s a bit crowded. Is that a makeshift night stand? Clutter!

Instead of opening your 200MB web browser to see this page, can I interest you in this 200MB separate app to see this web page embedded in a data collection app?

Can’t wait for the “Jarjargasm” category to pop up… in places.

It was just a soke ;)

No, fuck you

/j

The interactions with developers and players

I don’t want to have interactions with developers, nor other players. Cramming “social media” above the game advertisement itself is… something.

Kick back and relax, is what I’d say. If you’re minimum wage, it’s not your problem.

Not anymore anyway, they’ve been dissolved in the soda bin.

Let alone the issue that moderation remain troubling, even on the fediverse. I ended up having two different accounts because some things I follow are blocked by servers where there are other things I follow, who blocks the previous ones.

So much for openness. If the only solution is to spawn my own instance to get something workable, there’s no way this will take off with the general public.

We can. Individual sites still exists. Simpler pages still exist. In some way, wikipedia is a large project that’s mostly “old school” (despite many attempts to change that). Old communication tools still work, mail can still be done with ease by small or even individual providers. Forums are still a thing in some communities. RSS to get informations about many sites in one place still exists and never stopped existing (it’s surprising how many recent websites still implement it). Some people still use IRC and newsgroups on a daily basis.

I’d even argue that google search, the old, simple, easy one, still exist. Look up udm14, set this in your browser, and your done. And contrary to the apparently largely accepted trend, this one still gives great results.

Firefox, despite recent attempts (that will probably keep coming) can still be trimmed to be a basic browser for the most part. Large surface to open an HTML page, bookmarks, tabs on top (fancy), and nothing else in the way. I don’t know how long this will persist, but it’s still possible.

There are many things that are still around, the presence of huge behemoths in the front row doesn’t change that. The only difference is that using the web in this manner requires a bit of involvement and a bit of work. When it was the only way to do things, people got involved and spent effort to do so. Nowadays, with large services providing one click stop to seemingly everything, most people won’t put up the effort to look somewhere else. And they don’t care about the consequences of this centralization on privacy, bias, censorship, etc.

But a lot of the old web is still available. Heck, even old reddit is still around (although the content itself is still reddit).

And it is a simpler life. Taking back control of our digital activities requires some minor involvement, but not being crushed by the endless content and notification machine is real nice in this overstressed world.

I have my NAS on a private VPN running on my own server. The NAS have my music (roughly 2/3 from physical media, 1/3 from various DRM-free source). I use it with a simple mobile app (CloudBeat) that can work in both online and offline mode where you can download what you want ahead of time by ticking a checkbox.

It doesn’t cost much: the VPN server do other stuff and is cheap to begin with, the NAS have some maintenance cost for storage, but that’s like a drive every two years top, content never change of disappear, it doesn’t slurp my bandwidth constantly, etc.

Even factoring the cost of a separate backup, since the whole setup store a bunch of other stuff and services, it’s probably more cost efficient too, if you don’t consider the initial setup cost.

And if needed, I can “lift” some content from streaming services too and put them there.

The only reason paying for a streaming service still exist is convenience, at the cost of bending over whatever craziness they come up with.

"What about the president?

- What about the president."

Remember this meme: “you mess with Ratatouille, you get Stabatouille”.

Yours maybe.