Making the case for richer HTML in ActivityPub
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[email protected]replied to julian on last edited by [email protected]
First, it’s disturbing to find a “threadiverse working group” hosted inside a centralised exclusive walled garden (community.nodebb.org is a Cloudflare site that restricts access and undermines transparency). A threadiverse working group should be aligned with the core fediverse principle of decentralisation. It signals unfitness to lead the threadiverse. I will not be subscribing to this exclusive community or following it.
As for the topic at hand, we must separate the good ideas from the bad.
The good:
- Embedding the whole article in the post – great idea for many reasons:
- the web has become mostly exclusive (Cloudflare, paywalls, tor hostility, loss of netneutrality), thus most links being shared are to places that restrict some demographics of people.
- enshitification of the web means everyone visiting the link will have to fight with dark patterns, tracking, cookie walls, popups, and countless other shitty downgrades on everyone’s attempt to consume content. By copying the content to an accessible enshitification-free post, everyone commenting can enjoy equal access to the content
The bad:
- Enrichening the HTML risks bringing enshitification into the threadiverse. Of course there would be tooling that makes it easy to mirror a webpage into the post in an automated way. The garbage on the webpage that downgrades everyone’s UX will be replicated. Users are lazy as fuck. Instead of cleaning up the garbage they will just let it ride and burden everyone else.
- Try looking at websites in
lynx. The web has become a shitshow of chasing the shiny and breaking our basic need for reading text. It’s inherently exclusive because those on capped internet connections cannot afford the bandwidth for eye candy. A text-based client should be able to function well and interact with all the content. It should be accessible from an a11y standpoint.
- Embedding the whole article in the post – great idea for many reasons:
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First, it’s disturbing to find a “threadiverse working group” hosted inside a centralised exclusive walled garden (community.nodebb.org is a Cloudflare site that restricts access and undermines transparency). A threadiverse working group should be aligned with the core fediverse principle of decentralisation. It signals unfitness to lead the threadiverse. I will not be subscribing to this exclusive community or following it.
Hi DiyRebel,
Just so I can follow, isnt Cloudfare the domain registrar? Why does it reflect badly, in your opinion, on a project?
Im not necessarily disagreeing with you, just wondering why having that company involved in the domain, 'tars' whatever is hosted via them?
