There's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.
It definitely is a thing at least, to pine for the "small web" [0].
I think as well, dissatisfaction with major social networks is pretty widespread, I don't know how often it comes.alongside a pining for something more "artisinal" though.
People pining for the small web are a narrow elite in modern society. They are generally people who frequently use a desktop computer and enjoy reading (and writing) longform text. Most internet users today use a phone for accessing the internet, a platform which tends to discourage the writing of longform text and even the reading thereof. This is why image and video platforms are so popular now, as you can see from people's internet use in public places. And even a text-based site like Reddit has seen comment lengths decline drastically from substantial paragraphs to 180-character quips.
Based on what I’ve seen, most people use their phones (computer is mostly a work thing) as an entertainment device (like a tv) or to communicate with friends (chat and call). The other roles are to be a camera, a music player, a flashlight, and a game console. They only do computing for work and rarely interact with the web (as in hyperlinked documents) for personal reasons. There’s literally no reason to pine for a small web.
It's very difficult these days in the EU. With all the regulations around age verification, the requirement to work with police, having a privacy and cookie policy, a moderation policy, all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom.
Some countries like Germany also require legal contact information (an Impressum). Technically it even applies to sites outside Germany that Germans can visit, though they don't really have a way of enforcing that. So basically if you have a website you're required to doxx yourself. The old web is not just being destroyed by big tech but by the politicians as well.
It's kinda time for a semi-darknet free from all the legislation. Tor is a bit too dark for it but it would be good to have some kind of anonimised hobby net that can escape all this red tape. Basically the free for all that the internet used to be in the late 90s.
> It's very difficult these days in the EU. With all the regulations around age verification, the requirement to work with police, having a privacy and cookie policy, a moderation policy, all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom.
I don't think that's true across EU. Seemingly very non-traditional forums, huge ones, stay online still today, many hosted within EU. Probably Flashback Forum is one of the oldest and biggest forums in Nordics, geared towards "freedom of speech" and still online today.
Sounds like it's very difficult in Germany indeed to host an anonymous or pseudoanonymous website/forum, but Germany is also not the entire EU or Europe.
> Some countries like Germany also require legal contact information (an Impressum). Technically it even applies to sites outside Germany that Germans can visit
I don't understand people bitching about Impressum like its some sort of German-only thing.
I am sure if you looked at the legislation of many countries, you would find similar requirements for companies to identify themselves. Off the top of my head you have Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK ... and probably the rest of the EU/EEA states as well. IIRC it is also a requirement in a number of Asian countries.
In reality requiring an Impressum (or equivalent in other countries) is no different to having to put identification information on a company's old-school letterhead. Its just good manners so that your customers/suppliers can know who they are dealing with.
Personally I dislike the US attitude of trying your damnest to hide any trace of your company's identifying or contact information from your website. ;)
> Its just good manners so that your customers/suppliers can know who they are dealing with.
That's the (widespread) issue, treating personal websites and online communities like businesses. Some are, but that's not something to encourage or assume.
I live in the Czech Republic, where you can buy a SIM card anonymously and build a website without identifying yourself. I don't see a good reason for other countries to not give their citizens the same freedom, and am vehemently against reducing freedom just because "other countries do it".
> I live in the Czech Republic ....build a website without identifying yourself
I am not familiar with Czech Republic law but out of curiosity I asked an LLM:
§ 435 of the Civil Code (Act no. 89/2012 Coll.)
The law explicitly says every podnikatel (entrepreneur/business) must include on all business documents and on information made publicly available through remote access (i.e. their website):
- the company's name (firma),
- its registered seat (sídlo) or place of business,
- its identification number (IČO) — the Czech equivalent of a company registration number,
- and if registered in the Commercial Register (obchodní rejstřík), the registration details including the file reference and section/insert (spisová značka, oddíl, vložka).
This is the summary provisions that was previously found in § 13a of the old Commercial Code (obchodní zákoník) and is now codified in the Civil Code.
Consumer Protection Act (Act no. 634/1992 Coll.) — adds requirements when you sell to consumers online: business's name and address, ADR (out-of-court dispute resolution) body information, delivery/payment terms, and — for online marketplaces — how offers are ranked, etc.
I then did a quick Google to attempt to validate the LLM and it seems this is indeed true, I found https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2012-89 and putting it through Google Translate, §435 is pretty clear that publication of name and address is required.
Yes, I have a business registration and have to include personal details in a bunch of places. But if do things as a natural person, those requirements don't apply (and it's even simpler for people without a business registration).
My original comment was quite clearly about businesses, I wrote company/companies three times.
I was unaware German Impressum applied to a natural person who is not running a business. If that is true, then I agree that is unfair. But I was never seeking to comment on that anyway.
Assuming that summary is accurate: it specifically talks about businesses, so the requirements presumably don't apply to a personal website, which is what the post you were responding to was about.
Well that's probably because Germany is one of the few countries that actually enforces it. I'm in Spain and I've helped build some websites and none of them had anything like this. But in Spain there's a huge difference between law and enforcement so many laws don't actually matter in practice. Whereas in Germany they do try to enforce it even outside of their borders.
> it's a very naive thing to think that it's just "customers/suppliers" looking at who they're dealing with
Its still no excuse.
Nobody forces anybody to start a business.
If somebody chooses to start a business then they should do grown-up things like having insurance and complying with the law – which includes publishing their business's contact details.
The legal and good manners reasons for publishing a business's contact details far out-weigh any negative ones.
I am sure I am not the only person on this planet who associates alarm bells with small/medium businesses that try to hide their contact details on their website. As a customer it rings alarm bells that they are going to be a pain the neck to deal with if something goes wrong – if a business is trying to bypass such fundamental requirements, then it makes you think about how they feel about e.g. consumer rights law in relation to handling returns.
I am part of three businesses - a partner in two, sole owner of a third. One of those is a real, functional business that has contact details. The other two are just LLCs that exist to be a single point of contact for payments for contract work. Neither serves any function except accounting. You would never hire Devilbunny LLC for anything.
Yet my info is exposed by business registration and I get junk mail left and right.
>all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom
It's bad enough but not quite as bad as you claim. Article 19 of the DSA exempts small websites from the most onerous and expensive rules that big platforms have to comply with.
That's only the DSA, it's only a small part of web regulation in the EU.
Overall there is very little in the way of exceptions for small businesses. Similarly with the EPR / PPWR changes that went into effect on the 12th of August, a lot of owner-operated microbusinesses have had to stop shipping to many EU countries due to the crazy costs of registration (which has to be done in each individual EU country no less, totally contrary to the idea of the EU): https://ppwrconnect.com/blog/ppwr-applies-12-august-2026-who...
Some artists send only one padded envelope to some countries (or none, in some years) and have to deal with hundreds of euros of registration cost for some countries. It's ridiculous. There's 2 little pieces of relief for microbusiness but most of the crazy red tape applies.
The problem with their regulation is that the big ones that were meant to be targeted (e.g. Google and Meta) have plenty of lawyers to sidestep all the regulation, and the small initiatives are all killed because they don't have such capabilities. We're still tracked by Google and Meta everywhere.
And then there was the 3 euro per product type surcharge on small packets, making it impossible for small artists to buy items that cost 20-30 cents a piece. Legislation lobbied for by the big buck chains like Lidl and Ahold.
To be honest I'm now strongly in favour of reeling in the EU project to simply some economic treaties and easy movement of people because they've become a stringpuppet for big business lobby. Definitely not some big federal state (we've seen where that path leads in America)
I share your frustration, but won't restricting the EU only cause barriers to trade to grow?
A surprising amount needs to be unified in order to have fully free trade, and I see unwillingness to lose existing national structures as a big problem in today's EU.
As a socialist I don't believe in free trade above all anyway. Some free trade sure but it should not be a goal, internal protection it's more important. We shouldn't move to the American model.
And I see the EU being corrupted more and more by fascist and extreme right parties from Italy, Hungary, Poland, Czech etc. Even in France and Germany they're on the brink. This is why I think it's important to push back against further integration.
Just send the package. When something is imported, the importer is the one who's liable for all the conformance stuff. If customs stops the package because it's packaging isn't recyclable (this won't happen, but they'll stop it to make you pay taxes) the importer will correctly be mad at customs.
Why are we all complying in advance with the broadest possible understanding of laws?
You can get huge fines as the shipper. If you're sending from outside the EU they don't have a hope in hell to actually collect that but if you're inside they do.
Yes, GDPR with the right to be forgotten and being able to request which of your data is being processed is very hard on small organizations and volunteers.
You get a request for which data is processed from a user and suddenly you have to spend 8 hours in paper archives to find if the weekly charity mailing has ever mentioned this person by their full name.
Have you tried just ignoring the regulations? It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and in the unlikely event you get punished, it will be proportionate - if you're not actively causing harm it will just be formally ordering you to comply.
In previous eras we'd just ignore laws like these. But in this era we have become, as they say, cucked.
I run one. It's pretty good. I don't run any adverts, which confers the advantage that Google doesn't really list it anywhere because they can't make money off the users.
It's pretty easy to do these days. I won't drop a link to it unless anyone really wants to discuss old Range Rovers, but it runs forum software called FlaskBB which is worth a play.
I mean, I would describe most forums in the same way, and yet they persist as well. The main thing is not the details of the interface, but the fact that the systems allow creating your own community, and discord has made this significantly more accessible and hosts a huge number of smaller, closer-knit communities.
I don't recall most forums being particularly welcoming either or very good knowledge bases. Probably the main difference is the default for visibility of non-members, which does make a little bit of difference but I think if you want to maintain a knowledge base you should run a wiki, if you want a community then a forum or discord guild is the way to go, and discord is way easier for most people to set up.
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.
In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate.
Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar.
I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
Yes I noticed that chat apps have kinda taken over the role of social media. At least for the usecase of staying in touch with friends.
I'm sure why too though, it's because all social media push these algorithmic feeds on us meaning we get bombarded with shit we didn't choose to follow.
With chat apps we can once again communicate with just the people we want without all the crap being shoved in between.
In theory you could do this with facebook but the defaults matter and they defaulted to sharing very widely. With chat it's obviously and understandably bounded (at least unless a member of the group takes a positive action to forward/copy messages elsewhere, which is not generally very socially accepted to do without some level of permission or least a good reason).
Having played both there's a lot of overlap in the social side. You can find games with randoms or join social match plays with little friction. From what I've heard, it's not that easy with other racket sports like tennis.
I agree the skill gap is wider in padel, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you want to play with.
Yes I don't understand why Claude code needs to be a terminal app.
It doesn't compose with any other command line program and the terminal interface is limiting.
I'm surprised nobody has yet made a coding assistant that runs in the browser or as a standalone app. At this point it doesn't really need to integrate with my text editor or IDE.
I think you’re being a little pedantic here. Even if we assume "senior" is an arbitrary title, the article is still a useful description for how to be effective as an experienced engineer. The title is the least interesting part of it.
It’s only useful if you consider a single anecdote useful. For every OP’s example I can come up with at least 2 where you follow their advice and it goes south, most likely there are thousands engineers who can do the same.
It’s a typical pat on the back/confirmation bias article so whoever identifies with this specific opinion can feel good and close the tab with “yeah, I’m a real senior”.
The problem is that the alternative is usually only sites created only to chase affiliate revenue. At least on Reddit, there’s a _chance_ I’m reading something from someone genuinely sharing their opinion.
Uh, sure, maybe in a professional setting where you’re getting paid. But this was unpaid volunteer work. If, as a community, we start enforcing professional grade standards on people who are just contributing their free time to give us neat toys and tools, I kinda worry it makes the whole thing the whole thing less fun or sustainable. And if that happens, we probably stop getting these free toys altogether.
I heart-fully disagree. Being professional crosses the bounds of paid work and unpaid work.
It doesn't take much work to not leave a gigantic pile of trash behind you.
If anything, it's an even more a self-responsible thing to do in the OSS world, as there isn't a chain of command such as in the corporate world, enforcing this.
It's selfish to engage in group relation with other people building something without the conscious decision of continuity.
A job worth doing is a job worth doing well. Maybe I'm just a gray beard with unrealistic expectations, or maybe I care about quality.
Think of it as a non-profit club. If you volunteer to be the treasurer, are you then free to ignore everything and do whatever you like, just because you aren’t paid? Of course not. It’s the same with being a software project maintainer; you have willingly taken on some obligations.
If I put some code out on the internet and some other people find it and start using it, they message me we talk and I start adding things they suggest and working with others to improve this code. Then one day I wake up and don't want to do it anymore. At what point did I become obligated? When I published the code? When I first started talking to others about it(building a community)? When I coded their suggestions? When I worked with other coders?
If I strike up a conversation with you, and suddenly I don’t want to talk to you anymore, then what, if any, obligations do I have? Can I just stop talking mid-sentence and begin to completely ignore you? After all, I did not promise you a complete conversation.
Or did I, by engaging in a civil conversation with you, implicitly promise to abide by the normal social rules of etiquette, as far as I am reasonably able?
It is similar with software. If you, say, put up a web site (or even just a README.md) containing blurbs about how useful your software is, extolling its virtues, you are implicitly promising future updates and support, to the best of your (limited) ability. If you need to step away from the project, you are expected to do so in an orderly fashion (again, to the best of your – possibly limited – ability), announce it publicly, etc.
If you have no web site, but you have given similar indications in conversations, the same principle is applicable, but you have fewer people to notify.
> Who get to decide where the line is?
If a user can reasonably feel let down by your actions, or can reasonably feel that you have misled them, then I feel that a line has been crossed.
It's not like this kind of thing doesn't happen in the professional world - in fact, quite the opposite. The incentives to cut corners in a company are if anything greater than in open source, with pressure from management to meet the next deadline.
