The first post of a blog site is always difficult for me. Well, any post is difficult for me due to the Meandering Electric Ham (MEH) inside my head, but the first post seems important for setting the tone, giving your audience something to gauge their expectations against. I thought I would start by explaining why I am here.
I hate the Internet.
Let me rephrase that; I hate what the Internet has become and I blame us for allowing it to happen, so I want to try and join a movement that is attempting to give the power back to the users as a way of atoning for my own failure to stop this privacy-violating, human-exploiting, misinformation-generating dumpster fire we are calling "the Internet."
The Principles of rtfm.lol
Before we begin, it is probably important to mention some basic truths that seem to serve me well.
- If an organization has the ability to exploit a resource for profit, they will
- A fine for breaking a rule is a license fee for the wealthy.
- It is okay to be wrong. It is not okay to stay that way.
- Payment does not equal ownership, but it should.
- Transparency for the organization. Privacy for the individual.
Things have gotten pretty bad and I will probably explore that in a lot of future posts. I'm not interested in brow-beating anyone with my ideals, but as time has worn on in this corrupted Fragmented Future, I find myself having a visceral reaction to just how far into the pit we have fallen. I bought into it for years, despite my own distrust of any profit-seeking entity, despite my hesitation to adopt new technologies that promised so much for so little. It feels shameful to admit that I was fooled by mind-hacking capitalistic strategies that were wrapped in a pretty bow of user convenience or cloaked in a trench coat of "safety," but as they say on the Hacking Humans podcast, "we don't get fooled because we're stupid; we get fooled because we're human."
There is light, smol as it may be.
All the smol things
When I started considering a return to blogging after more than a decade hiatus, I found that my goals had changed from what they were in my younger days. Back then, I kept a LiveJournal and re-published on a few other sites because I wanted to get noticed and possibly get paid to write for a tech publication. I wasn't interested in web development, so any service that offered to make publishing my content as easy as possible was what I wanted. These days, I have lessons learned from being burned, I know at least some rudimentary coding in a few languages and have a drive to not only create human-generated content, but to have more control over the environment in which it is published due to a variety of online practices I now disagree with.
Enter the smolweb movement.
Being new to this, the smolweb movement appears to be a nebulous collection of like-minded individual content creators that are simply fed up Web 2.0 and want to return to Web 1.0. The more I read about this movement, the more I realize my interests align with it.
There are guidelines for creating webspaces that are "smolweb or small web compliant" but there seems to be a fuzzy agreement about what that means. For example, I would not consider rtfm.lol completely smolweb compliant, but it does make an effort to be.
My own take on what it means to be a smolweb developer follows:
- No "Growth at all Costs" bullshit. Scale is not a goal. Analytics are not a goal. Data harvesting is not a goal.
- Accessibility and accommodation are priorities. The site and content should be usable on older hardware, alternative browsers and work for individuals using screen readers. Presentation should take neurodivergences into consideration as much as possible.
- Code should be clean, concise, correctly implemented without bloat. It should also be open for review and corrected when necessary.
Sophomoric though it may be, it is still a framework within which to begin operating. In fact, I do not think rtfm.lol fully complies with my own framework at the moment, but it will as I experiment and learn what works and what does not.
It should be noted that my take does not necessarily agree with, say, that of Adële of Smolweb.org or others participating in the smolweb/small web movement and is not meant to be contrary to theirs in any way. This is simply my current understanding as applies to my amateur skill set, and I continue to learn a lot from the communities, none of which I have officially joined in any capacity, yet. I need to continue learning and see how I grow to better see where I might fit.
The general ethos is this; Content for humans by humans, without exploitative bloat. The only reason a modern laptop needs a minimum of 4GB of memory to allow a user to look at a website without wanting to pull their hair out is the god damned bloat of Web 2.0. I come from an era in computing when the objective was to get the best possible performance from the least amount of hardware, not the other way around as is so commonly encountered today.
At the moment, I remain flexible with the future of rtfm.lol, hesitant to define it too rigidly because that tends to get me into trouble. A few core tenets are necessary, I think, but I will need to allow room for things to grow naturally while keeping my purpose in mind. Every clay pot starts as a useless blob, I suppose.
I appreciate you reading. Since I am not interested in implementing a comments section on these posts (yet), you are welcome to email me your thoughts, should you be inclined. Talking to people smarter than me is a good thing.