this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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First of all: what's "Kitten"?
And my own take is, it's constantly evolving. And there are a lot if different use-cases out there. We might not have one specific, hypothetical solution. But similar things might exist. And it's always also a question of supply and demand.
I'm always fine with niche solutions. Since I'm not even sure if my interests align with what's popular with the masses.
But I think this is likely more a societal issue than a technical one. People want convenience, consume content passively. They want to be inside of filter bubbles and golden cages, with the occasional tickle of disagreeing on emotional things in the comments and siding with other users. What they don't value is freedom, or privacy, or doing something productive that requires more than 30s of attention. So naturally, we get platforms that cater for that.
I also think the Fesiverse is a very nice attempt at laying a groundworks for more a more ethical and sustainable communications platform. But it's far from perfect. And it struggles with a few of the same dynamics that are inevitable with social media.
I think the internet as is, is a solid choice. It's been made to connect people (and their computers). And it's initially been used for that. People put their stuff online because they had something to say, it required effort, so it was more quality content where the effort was justified somehow. Oftentimes it wasn't with commercial interest, but for fun. And you could tell if something mattered to someone.
Subsequently, the internet got commercialized, the general public was onboarded. And now we have something that's just about attention, manipulation, advertising and making money.
But the technical infrastructure is still basically the same. And we kind of still have net neutrality in a lot of places. Hosting got cheaper, the software and tools are abundant these days...
But yeah, demand is low, media literacy is low. People have become lazy and careless. And I don't think there is a good way to change this with regular people, at least not in a grassroots way. I'd be easier to impose that from the top down, with regulation and education. But that's where large and powerful companies are, and their motivation is in diametrical opposition to that. Plus we're combatting human psychology here and the way our society works. It's just a hard problem, so it comes to no surprise to me that we can't solve it, all we can do is take small steps in the right direction.
And I just don't understand some things. Like the Cloudflare thing. I've never used Cloudflare. My servers are completely fine without it. And I don't even get a lot of load by the crawlers, and neither am I paying for the traffic or electricity used by that. All I ever have to do is pay attention to security, since I get a lot of brute-forcing attempts, spam etc. But that's always been bombarding my servers. And there are lots of better ways to deal with it than tunnelling everything via one large and unappealing company...
Kitten is a new devkit to create self-hosted, peer-to-peer web applications, using HTML/CSS and Javascript. I can't attest how well it works but it's a step in that "small web" direction.
Because, like, Gemini is cool. But sometimes you want something more than just a capsule.
It's both, in a vicious cycle. At the same time that big tech herds passive people into walled gardens, it also passivises the people inside them even further. And those walls are not just between different feuds - they're also between customers and developers, making sure that each knows their place as serfs and vassals of big tech respectively.
The main problem with the current internet is that it has no mechanism against a commercial/hostile/corporate takeover, like the one that we saw. As you said it was made to connect people and computers; it is not like this any more.
(Sorry for not deepening the subject further. I'd need to get into political matters to do so, and doing it in this comm leaves me a sour taste in my mouth - as if distorting an environment supposed to be refreshing into the same stuff we see in 90% of Lemmy. )