OK. Given that self-hosters are maintaining two PCs already, I suppose that’s fair.

As an RSS user since the early days, there’s something I never get: why is this something that people are hosting? Are you really all consuming so much news, so much of the time, that you need to do it simultaneously on two devices? That sounds like news overload to me but what do I know.

Personally, I catch up once a day for an hour (or two). Seem more than enough and means I only ever need an RSS client. Right now: the Feedbro add-on in Firefox desktop.

As for tips and tools, RSSBox is a useful one. IMO if RSS were more popular this is the sort of thing that would be built into the client.

This is just hyperventilation. There’s no scam, there’s no conspiracy, it’s just the (sad) way the system works.

The angry vituperative tone here just makes me disinclined to read closely. Seriously, if you want convince people, this is not the way to to do it. It’s a shame because you seem to have some valid points.

please do it in the politics community in

To spare you the trauma of hearing an opinion you don’t agree with? Contemporary US politics in a microcosm!

It was not me who made the comparison.

Indeed, this is just the pragmatism-vs-idealism debate.

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist. In my view, by asking for everything you are more likely to get nothing. It’s not worth it. It’s irresponsible.

this sounds just like the pre-election arguments in favor of Democrats.

Yes, and excellent arguments they were. What a different world we might live in today if just a handful of idealists had decided to suck it up and vote for the Democrat instead of the third-party purist who made their heart sing.

if this slice approaches zero, then why it is better to stay with Firefox rather than moving on to more radical solutions?

Because history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage. We already have an excellent browser made by a flawed but generally admirable company. If there are problems, the solution is to fix them, not to burn it all down.

Unfortunately it’s more complex than that, because of the issue of the rendering engine. If Firefox-based browsers disappear, the W3C (which controls web standards, including questions of privacy) will be de-facto controlled by a cabal of corporations. The last voice that cares even slightly about our privacy will be gone.

Opt-out telemetry is bad, overpaid executives is bad. The alternative is worse.

So perhaps another anecdote is in order. I currently running three instances of Firefox (different profiles) on a low-end Celeron laptop. I don’t usually shut them except sometimes by mistake. What I do do is close tabs, if only for simplicity’s sake (because idle tabs are unloaded from memory anyway). I’m experiencing no sluggishness issues.

Sure. Personally I just close the tabs, tho.

Also, can I ask why you’d leave your browser open for weeks?

This just begs the question, Why do you not leave it open?

Your point is a bit off-topic but I for one agree with you.

Actually, it doesn’t just benefit “geeks who use NoScript”. The original audience for accessibility was disabled users, which is why some of the best websites ever made are for government agencies. But sure, they don’t count much when there’s a deadline to keep. I know what you’re talking about, I know that progressive enhancement and respecting WCAG etc is just time-consuming and time is money. I was in the meetings. But it’s also just hard, for the reasons you describe, and few developers have ever been able to do it. Maybe precisely because the skillset straddles different domains: not just programming but also UX and graphic design and information architecture. The first web developers were tinkerers and lots of them came from the world of print. Now they’re all just IT guys who see everything as an app. Even when it’s in essence a document.

This seems to be the argument that the web was designed for documents and that we should stop trying to shoe-horn apps into documents. Hard to disagree at this point, especially when the app in question is, say, a graphics tool, or a game. I still think that, in the case of more document-adjacent applications, a website implemented with best-practices progressive enhancement is about as elegant a solution as is imaginable. Basically: an app which can gracefully degrade to a stateless document, and metamorphose back into an app, depending on system resources and connectivity, and all completely open source and open standards and accessible. That was IMO the promise of the web fulfilled: the separation of content from presentation, and presentation from functionality. Unfortunately there were never more than a tiny minority of websites that achieved this. Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.

I was once skeptical about WASM on the grounds that it’s effectively closed-source software - tantamount to DRM. But people reply that functionally there’s not much difference between WASM and a blob of minified JS, and the WASM security can be locked down. So I guess I accept that WASM is now the best the web can hope for.

This is somewhat defensible. PDF is the de-facto alternative to HTML for documents. The web is also full of JPGs and nobody claims that the browser should not render them.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.

Fair points. Talking of revolution was indeed a bit vague.

Perhaps I am just more conservative in temperament. I focus on the value in keeping things and improving them. Software lends itself to iterative development where the result can still end up being revolutionary. So my intuition is that if there’s a problem with HTTP then let’s solve that problem rather than throwing the whole thing out and losing all its accrued value. In this case 3 decades of web archives and the skills capital of all the people who make it work.

Sure, HTTP is suboptimal, and as a sometime web developer I can see that HTML is verbose and ugly and was only chosen because XML was fashionable back then. Even the domain name system suffers from original sin: the TLDs should come first, not last!

Human culture is messy. Throwing things out is risky and even reckless given that the alternative is all but certain not to work out as imagined. Much safer to build upon and improve things than to destroy them.

This analysis strikes me as a nice mix of cynicism and revolutionary thinking. In my own analysis of history, cynicism has never achieved anything except worsen what it claims to hate. As for revolutions, they mostly never even happen, and when they do happen they achieve nothing except heartache and backlash. The only way forward that actually works is slowly, one step at a time, building on what you have.

This will be easy to hate on, but let’s be careful not to get carried away.

Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there’s no good option and you have to accept the least bad.

Yes yes, I know all that. The fact remains that a permanent IP associated with an individual is personally identifying information. Even the variety in browser requests counts as such according to the GDPR, and that is usually pooled with lots of other users. This is clearly a level above that. It’s why, for example, I would not use the VPS for proxy web browsing: zero privacy.

What’s the downside you see from having a static IP address?

What’s the downside to having one’s phone number in the public directory? There’s no security risk and yet plenty of people opt out. It’s personally identifying information.

I don’t know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.

Exactly.