Happy Friday Everyone,
tldr: What times has the modern web frustrated you by forcing you to create an account or use a platform you don’t want to?
A food truck that I love, and learned by serendipity that it serves the public more than once a week… Has thrown me into a fit of rage. But not the truck itself.
Coming to Lemmy has been an overall benefit for my psyche and has helped me overcome some executive function issues I’ve dealt with throughout my life. I have enjoyed chatting with many of you, and am glad that corporate social media platforms are now all gone from my life.
Less algorithmic ensnarement, more thoughtful interactions with community members among other positives. I’m sure that many of us are also the Linux weirdo of our respective spheres of influence. It has also helped me encourage others to be more mindful of the technologies they use and has resulted in deeper friendships.
However, living in today’s world, it is impossible to go more than 2 feet or several links without being met with a Linktree, Facebook page, Instagram, or some larger company to gatekeep.
I’d imagine this food truck would not get nearly the publicity they do without utilizing the most common ways people interact with their pocket electronic boxes… But when I forgot the password to the Facebook account, the displayed automated message implied I was abusing the reset password feature and that I was blocked from doing so.
It made me wonder, what ever happened to people having their own websites?? I’m in the intermediate age where I didn't grow up with dial-up or less-abstracted computing systems, but remember how ubiquitous personal sites were.
This has made me want to get into spinning up my own website. I have acquired a domain name as well as a server for storage hosted by a provider. I do not want to start with anything complicated, nor do I intend to use a corporate service like Wordpress to host this site. However, because I am new to this, I don’t want to accidentally dox myself or do something idiotic with the server.
Since this is not a technology page, I would like this post to open up discussion about your own frustrations with local businesses being inaccessible without a larger big brother platform like Meta or Google gatekeeping the advertisement and accessibility of a service.
Thanks and stay cool and weird,
-G
I completely agree that TikTok is a garbage deliverer! Also disappointed that most businesses don’t take the route of looking into how to effectively show information to people on Google…
Will look at the Astro documentation, and for now, am just trying to become literate with HTML and CSS. I’m very Python and MATLAB dependent, as for me, the syntax is readable, unlike Rust. C is more familiar than other lower-level languages (I don’t know if assembly languages are the only languages referred to as LL… But Python is certainly more abstracted than C)
It took me awhile to get used to using only Vim, but I hated having to install a different IDE for every PL. Spyder isn’t a bad IDE in retrospect, but I didn’t know what the console was, how a debugger could be useful, or really even how to navigate a file tree embedded into the application.
When you grow up with too much computer abstraction, you fall into the trap that Microsoft wants people in the education who don’t have relatives with computer literacy to buy into. I get that I’m trading lots of convenience to use barebones tools, but it is AMAZING when I’m forced to use proprietary software, as the understanding that emerges in how the pieces fit together is enormous compared to hitting the equivalent of buttons on a PCB that have already been preprogrammed for you.
I have used inferences to help parse large HTML manuals, and the search functions like CTRL-F are quite useful in some documentation. But unfortunately, not every designer agrees on the amount of depth that should be put into an explanatory medium for their software brainchildren.
Thank you for your comment, I appreciate the community building. It’s very difficult to bring more people into the software sphere because of the elitism and snobbery of knee jerk reactions when people quite literally grew up with abstracted computing paradigms and are unable to break out of that thought because of the equivalent of burning books by controlling what search engines show their user base. The ability to rewrite text automatically with convincing garbage is very disappointing.