The good web and the bad web

I find fascinating how tilde.town aims to recreate the internet as it was in its primordials, the late 90s and outside of the browser even older, through ssh and the social services available inside the server. I'm afraid, however, that this is the latest version of the "Good Web," since corporate greed and surveillance basically ruined everything since then.

Nowadays I don't surf the internet without protection any more than I would have sex without protection. Especially when personal data is being shared by 3rd parties in the background more often than we can imagine. However, a small subset of the internet still remains non-intrusive, efficient and fun, all traits that for me characterize the Good parts of the web.

Here's a small list of what they are, and why:

The good web

Tilde.town

A safe home for anyone wanting to express creativity and learn more about Linux and technology, kindly mantained by vilmibm and mods.

Diaspora network

Diaspora is a decentralized social network with privacy and anti-censorship in mind. It feels like a mix between some kind of Facebook and Tumblr, where you have a profile and can view content posted in several instances (called pods) around the internet. Speech is quite liberated, and tracking can be completely removed by choosing the right pod.

GNUSocial / Mastodon

Two "cousin" networks with a user experience similar to Twitter. I myself used to be quite active in one instance until it shut down. Like Diaspora, it's distributed and users are encouraged to add more instances to make the federation stronger.

Although GNUSocial seems to have diminished in popularity, Mastodon seems to be growing everyday. It even has a command-line client, called toot.

Wikipedia

This is the closest as you'll ever get to a truly Free Education or University Degree.

Just learn how to take some of the content with a grain of salt (e.g. breaking news, heavily politicized subjects, some historical figures), and the rest is pretty damn good - and free ($$$).

Archive.org

A treasure trove of files and content extracted from around the web. The closest to a real library as you can get online. Search hard enough and you may even find some piracy (ahoy!)

Also your next source of great Live Music taped straight from concerts.

The bad web

Anything that requires an "app" to access.

Anything that requires Javascript to work (or be presentable).

Anywhere images and "scripts" outweight the actual content.

Last updated on 09/22/20