I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.

Are you asking why public libraries exist?

More how they exist.

You want the government to fund the small web?

The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.

There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but something else wonderous.

Yes, that is a most impressive stat, if they can achieve it.

I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!

I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are made up.

You need some fake numbers to really make it believable.

    > The great irony is that the 69.13% of popular posts on Moltbook are by humans and 67.42% posts on Reddit are by bots.

From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.

I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.

Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)

The original idea was there with html 1.0. The lesson we needed to learn was that some think you can't sell stuff to do things if doing them is simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Perhaps md is an opportunity to re invent the web: a browser for just md AND a search engine with an open algorithm that indexes just what is visible.

The funny thing is that HTML was supposed to be a markup language that could be read/written by hand, while making it also machine-to-machine friendly - notably by making some "semantic" features accessible for browsers. One of these for instance is the structure of the document; marking section headers was supposed to let browser to automatically generate a table of contents. Additionally CSS was supposed to let users choose how all this was displayed.

All of this failed - or rather, was undone and cancelled by the "modernization" of the Web. Namely the arrival of for-profit companies on the Web, be it Facebook of the press like the New York Times.

It was a boon as they brought valuable content, but they brought it with their own rules. The first set of which is the ads-supported model, which is by definition the opposite of free content; an ad-supported website is not free in a very sneaky way, and it's not just about privacy and manipulative practices (targeted ads, as if ads were not already manipulative enough). Users are actively prevented from consuming the content the way the want.

The situation today is that very few browsers offer out-of-the-box a way to apply a personal CSS, and I think none will generate a ToC from the headers of a HTML page.

And the "semantic" part - far from specialized and more accurate semantic markup frameworks that were considered - is being completely taken over by LLMs; an insanely expensive brute-force solution IMHO.

The web has already be reinvented mostly the way you suggest, see for instance the Gopher and Gemini protocols, but they'll stay forever "niche" networks. Which could be not so bad, as it is very clear that the Web is full of actors malicious to various degrees. Tranquility by obscurity?

I used gopher before mosaic! And yes the issue is not the tech, but the social engineering of a community. Git(hub) has a community; IMHO GitHub users need to put more cool things on there like blogs.. perhaps..

Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Basically without open source, the rest of the world will have to keep paying a tithe to American companies, and hence tax in the USA.