The Dork Web

I've been running Tales From The Dork Web (https://thedorkweb.substack.com/) since January on Substack. In some respects TFTDW is a bit like Tedium. So far it's been a pretty good experience, but I keep expecting the day to come when it turns into Medium.

I think neither model provides a catch-all solution. Whatever mode of interaction with an audience fits best hinges entirely on a myriad of factors, both technical and non-technical. Human communication, whether digital or analog, is a continuum. You could have a discussion via snail mail letters, online mailing lists, letters published in a paper, blogs who publish as if corresponding through letters, pamphlets and manifests, digital forums are a lot like message walls where people tack on strings of post-its, sites such as HN or Reddit are ultimately aggregators of links - numeric identifiers - turning them in catalogues of sort of content elsewhere,... and then there's the myriad of news sites churning out a continuous stream of succinct missives about any topic under the sun like a ticker tape, or a news strip. There's two aspects to comments. There's the technical aspect of a HTML form, processing submissions, compiling a list of submissions, and then integrating those as an assembly into a larger context: below an blog post, an article, a link, a video, a piece of audio,... There's the content, published information, itself. That is, the origin item as first put out there by an original publisher, and then the ensuing flurry of opinions, additions, corrections, jokes, nonsense, unsolicited self promotions, and so on. The complex interaction between those aspects, medium and message, has been the subject of fields such as communication theory and media studies.…

I always liked Gopher for its simplicity and therefore efficiency. Check out also Gemini with Deedum, the gemini browser for Android too :) more reading: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet

The "smol Internet" movement is what you're looking for. Returning to smaller online communities using things like Gopher, Gemini, fediverse, pubnixes, etc. https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet

If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data, you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device that gets handed down through generations and only activated one a decade or so? Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500 years, without replacement parts? It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade, some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on. I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even advanced military or nasa tech allows for. https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/the-100-year-computer

As someone rooting for [NetSurf](https://www.netsurf-browser.org/) (and any other remaining independent browser engines) to survive, I wonder if they'd be better off not supporting Javascript at all and simply focusing on good support for modern HTML and CSS, so it can at least be used to read documents. If Javascript is what finished TenFourFox, maybe attempting to support the full weight of modern Javascript and web apps is a trap. Let the big browsers try to be an entire operating system. Ultimately I'm coming to think that Gemini may be the best hope for a simpler internet that individuals can contribute and manage. - https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet - https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html Personally I love the Lagrange client on desktop, and the Ariane Android client. - https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ - https://oppen.digital/software/ariane/