Erik Moeller
A common refrain is that the web is _turning into_ garbage because of LLMs. But that's not really true. It's just that the garbage is _drowning out_ everything else, especially in search engines that themselves have decided to go into the garbage generation business. What can we do? We can promote the #IndieWeb right here. Highlight the good, perhaps obscure websites and blogs you come across, especially the ones that aren't loaded with ads & trackers. The web is still full of awesomeness. 40 comments
RolingMetal
@eloquence @bufalo1973 The little counter is gone if you use Mastondon as a progressive web app :)
Liam O'Sullivan
great idea, bookmarked! probably not lesser known, but to help get the ball rolling… @cstross ’s blog 
naught101
@eloquence We need something like digg, but federated. Decentralised searchable social bookmarking, with content driven by humans, not ad-optimised algorithms.
Roamin' Chemicals
@naught101 @eloquence I wonder if there could be some kind of crowd-sourced curation system for search engines. Like a browser extension where people could click a button marking things as spam or quality. Maybe you could then filter Bing (ala/via Duckduckgo) such that you didn't get as much llm/ml garbage. I don't know how this could be done privately while still having a way to deal with bad actors abusing the system, or if people could ever hope to keep up with the deluge of trash, though
naught101
Yeah. There's a bit of conversation on this over at https://mastodon.social/@naught101/109701742342424279  
Nini
@eloquence Webrings and directories are the way to go, whatever gets us around the grey gooification process of LLM-generated content flooding everything.
Troed Sångberg
@eloquence They wouldn't exists if we didn't have more or less shady ad networks that pay them for the (unintended) exposure. One solution is thus to make ad blocking so ubiquitous that their business model disappears.
Burrowing Skylar 🦉🏳️⚧️ :lisp:
@eloquence we're just returning to the era of general-purpose search engines being no good
Discovering BTS⁷ - 마리온
@eloquence agreed. I'm quite picky about the sites I visit. There's a lot of great things to share and expound upon. I try doing that here and on my blog. People simply need to tune onto a higher frequency. 
Beko Pharm
@eloquence oh hi - that's exactly my wheelhouse 👋 Yes, the web is still full of awesomeness. It's just no longer found on page 3 of G-Search. BTW: The IndieWeb does have a webring and many have still have blogrolls that can bring one to the most amazing places. …also, many started adopting ActivityPub as well 👌 
Jer-Bear, Snakes-for-Hair
@eloquence Look into competing search engines that aren't Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo (which is powered by Bing). I ended up picking one that actively tries to filter out SEO/AI spam sites. It also lets me filter out specific domains from my searches, which is a feature I didn't know I *needed* until I got it. Very happy with the switch 
Jer-Bear, Snakes-for-Hair
@crashglasshouses @eloquence My choice is Kagi Search. I'm not affiliated, just a happy user, so I didn't want to plug them unsolicited. They are a paid search engine (I'm paying $10/mo), which is a weird concept at first, but makes complete sense once I think about how the business model of free search engines has directly led to the destruction of their quality. https://www.kagi.com 
vctr
@eloquence #webmadethis Check out https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ a solar powered website, full of articles about sustainability in tech and especially low tech solutions to modern problems.
Bennett
@vctr @eloquence This is now a link sharing thread. #webmadethis 100r.co - a blog from two artist's/open sources devs that live in a sailboat, developers of the UXN emulator 32bit.cafe - indieweb community that regularly runs events and has free services (such as email and a pubnix) Jinteki.industries - cyberpunk media related link aggregator namelessrumia.heliohost.org - a personal wiki for rumia, tons of internet history and Touhou stuff
WorldsEndless
@eloquence I love this 100%. I'm not sure I have seen the effects of LLMs yet, but focusing on the good and filtering things has always been the task; it is just evolving a bit, right? 
TopKnot
Pop-ups and massive ads were making the web garbage. And then I started using Firefox on my Android devices and Bam!
BuffaloResearch
@eloquence   
F. Maury ⏚
@eloquence Your post is very insightful and it made me realize my PoV about LLMs was incorrect/not mature enough. Thank you. 
Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸
@eloquence when I read this, I think, "Wow, we really are going to go back to the early days when influential people curated Links pages and knowing where to find the best Links pages for various topics was your key to discovering useful information." Finding information on the early days of the Web, but especially the early Internet in general was a very social exercise. If you knew who to ask or who to go to, you could find just about anything you wanted.
robosocks
@eloquence this is why I miss StumbleUpon. You could say "I like turtles" and it would just let you fall doen a rabbit hole of turtle related content, not always showing you the same top 10 websites' articles about turtles.
Natris
@robosocks @eloquence you could say "I like turtles!?". I just stumbled wherever it sent me. Way too few turtles 
Julianoë
@eloquence also this kind of statement makes it look like there was not bots, trolls and content farms, spam, SEO squatting and other form of flooding the internet with content-shaped manure. bad actors did not wait for LLMs to flood the web with shit.
Petra van Cronenburg
@eloquence That's nice, but it doesn't help against the major developments. I do research in my job, for example, and it now takes me three times as long to find reputable sources. A few scattered private tips don't help much. This is where politics comes in, we need independent searches.
wet noodle
@eloquence Hey I have a fun lil website I work on with my music and art and links to many other fun indie sites! |
Gregory's Server
To that end, I'm going to try to get into the habit of sharing cool, perhaps lesser known websites and projects under the hashtag #WebMadeThis. Perhaps others will do so as well. <3
Here's a first one, for fans of #retro computing:
https://deepsid.chordian.net/
This is wicked cool web-based player for C64 music (8-bit #chiptune stuff). It takes a while to explore its features but I'm just blown away by the love & attention to detail behind it.