Like fuck all the proprietary junk and versioning, and just have a bare bones HTML ASCII extranet designed to be simple and without any bugs to patch? Obviously a naive question.

But seriously, the 56k dialup world with Napster GeoCities and AOL Instant Messenger was better. Add capacitive touch screens, current data throughput infra, and lithium batteries to 1999 and we are peak Matrix internet territory. Yahoo and net navigator were better than chrome stalkerware and google digislaver fascism.

  • Lumidaub@feddit.org
    201·
    3 days ago

    You can. What makes you think you can’t?

    The thing is that there’s no demand, not least because there’s no direct interaction between users. People yell bloody murder if a game doesn’t have some sort of multiplayer component and static content is single player internet.

    • rodneylives@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      Demand? What?

      You can just have a site that says things. You might just get a trickle of readers, and that’s okay. Not everything has to try to rule the world. You can contribute this little part of it, that might amuse or inform some people, and not pile up yet more value to a terrible corporation like Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or (while I’m ranting) Fandom.

      Plain HTML doesn’t break. You don’t need to update frameworks. It won’t make the user’s browser consume a ton of their RAM. Even if your image hosting goes down, the text will still be there. The biggest problems with HTML are external. Google giving attention to Reddit over your site, or de-prioritizing it if it’s not “responsive to mobile,” and web browsers choosing not to reveal by default what terrible resource hogs big sites can be. Check about:processes (on Firefox at least) some time, I’ve seen Youtube, Facebook and Twitter consume over a gigabyte of memory by themselves, apiece. (Nota bene, Mastodon consumes a lot too.)

      It’s okay to be small. That was what the World Wide Web was envisioned as, its motto: Let’s Share What We Know.

      • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I mean, this is all true. But these web sites which mostly work fine and are fine with small audiences already exist - and yet OP is here, on Lemmy. Apparently the demand actually doesn’t exist - ie, OP is choosing not to visit these sites because they find them less enticing than sites with js.

    • √𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      It takes a critical mass of like minded people.

      That is not really the point here. The actual question is more about stopping the evolution of hardware and software deprecation, like creating a minimum system that is never updated.