Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Question for those knowledgeable about alternative web protocols (gopher, gemini, etc): Would it be possible to create a tool that translates http sites to those formats, on demand? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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We all know how awful most modern websites are in terms of bloat, javascript and tracking. Not only that, but designing and maintaining web-browsers has become such a gigantic undertaking (almost the size of an operating system), that only a few companies have the resources to do it (google and mozilla, and mozilla might not hold on for much longer).

These alternative protocols offer a minimal set of features, and are trying to get back to what the web should've been: static content with images, text, and links, with local applications filling the void for anything more complicated than that.

Lets say I wanted a privacy-friendly way to view a page on a news site. I could:

Copy the URL of the page
Open some tool, (or website, anything), paste that url.
It converts the content in the url to the necessary privacy-friendly alternative format, and I can view it with my gopher/gemini browser (or even maybe a markdown viewer).

I know there are a few html -> markdown converters that can do the last step.

Does anyone know if this would work?

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[–] grudan@programming.dev 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I have never heard of these alternative protocols. Thanks for giving me something new to go learn about.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The Gemini protocol is really interesting. The site markup is so minimal, that people can (and do) create browsers for them from scratch, in a way that would be impossible for html web browsers.

I'm probably in the minority with this opinion, but I genuinely hope web browsers die. Google all but owns the browser, with nearly every browser except for firefox being a skin on top of google's browser engine. This situation is only getting worse, so I really appreciate the efforts of these alternative protocols to slim down and provide a privacy-oriented way to view what should be simple static content (text + pictures).

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The fact that there was a shift in who dominates browser share from Netscape to Internet Explorer to Chrome suggests that the amount of complexity is going to encourage a market monopoly as long as someone breaks the standards in a way that gives them a small advantage. I don't know if the alternatives would have a different outcome, as they may be simple now, but bloat may be inevitable.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Makes sense, although it'd be nice for privacy-oriented people to have this thin-layer that converts any site into a de-bloated version that they can view safely. As far as I know, there isn't any tool that even provides this option right now.

[–] grudan@programming.dev 4 points 1 month ago

It’s a complicated problem. The biggest privacy issues come from the use of JavaScript, but most of the time sites use JavaScript heavily and become unusable when it’s disabled. Other sites will straight up not let you access them without JavaScript.