It's strange that the concept of efficiency seems to have been abandoned. Is consumption of vast computing resources no longer seen as indication of a design flaw?
Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums' previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.
My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.
Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.
But why do people want their text editors to do completely unrelated tasks? Genuine question.
The main differences are:
If a Fedi or BSky instance wants to support connecting to the other side, they should implement both protocols. Bridges are just a duct-tape solution.
I saw an interesting video suggesting that the real motivation is to give megacorps like Google a new business acting as "banks" for identity, i.e. the Internet would get so inconvenient that people would just save their identity with Google (or Meta, etc) and then use them to log in to other websites.
I probably explained it badly, but the video I saw is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw
People in the comments pointed out that those companies would also have the ability to delete or suspend your identity verification if you did something they didn't like (or refused to do something they wanted). Reminds me of the SIN from Shadowrun .
The term "social media" is already toxic. When I started using the Internet, socialising and media were two separate things. Conflating the two implies that every time we say something, we are publishing an article and should care about how many views and likes we get, instead of making a genuine attempt at connection. And it suggests that every reply should be some kind of review of the post it replies to.
In the days of forums, people would just post what came into mind. They were more honest because there was no number next to your comment rating how good it was.
Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many "features" that only benefit the server owners. It's been this way for a long time. Like the "Referer" header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?
Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn't have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user's computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.
Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.
The root of the issue is this idea that a web browser should be an "everything app" that can basically recreate the functionality of any other app on the system. It's total feature creep, and in addition to privacy issues, creates a barrier-to-entry that makes it very hard for people to create new browsers because of the sheer amount of features they're expected to implement.
Using Kiwix you can keep older versions of Wikipedia locally on your computer, so if the online version reaches an unusable state, you can still view the articles as they used to be. Of course, it won't have information about anything that happened after that point, but it could still be useful for some purposes.