It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.
But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s you used to get an email address and some webspace included in your internet subscription. I remember making a small personal website on the 15 MB of web space I got. The URL was a bit cumbersome http://www.my.isp/www/somesuperlonguserid/index.html but it worked fine.
These times are sadly over.
Why did I click that link lol
Remember when sites had webring links at the bottom? Before Google solved it (then destroyed it completely several years later), discoverability used to be a community effort.
Now you gave me an inspiration. I’m eorking with a few other parents to create a local, walled “Internet” for the kids in our estate, and webrings would be a fun feature to resurrect.