Ask HN: Is “lowtech” and “up to date” mutually exclusive?

22 points by sunsipples 5 years ago | 4 comments

I'm getting older. I like wood fires, boats, a slow ride on an old motorbike, growing my vegetables and reading.

I have said before, this is as close to social media as I am willing to step. I really do like RSS feeds but reading them is a battle of brevity and inundated with images/video/advertising/tracking.

I have no problems with seeing an advert. I do not want them tailored to me personally. I am also very aware that some sites depend on the money from ad clicks to keep afloat (how do I avoid them?).

I have switched to a stripped down, locked down, image/js/tracking/google/facevook/social media blocking Frankenstein of a firefox setup. I am amazed how much more is required to show less online at present.

I regularly use elinks but still rely on the broken mess of jibberish I am sometimes presented through my firefox browser.

Does such an option/service exist to identify text only sites within a search or strip all the mess away before I have to get it?

An addon or business/app/subscription who can filter my search/selection and just send the text body to me would be great, would this damage the content providers to the point I become the evil information thief?

Am I actually able to stay up to date with my low tech preferences?

CaptArmchair 5 years ago |

Here's a tip: look into the Smol Internet movement.

https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...

So, the premise here is that the Web is broken as well. And it's broken at various levels. There are various ways of dealing with this brokenness. You could move towards a text-only browser all together (e.g. Lynx, elinks) but that solves things partly.

Smol Web takes it a notch further. It's doing away with most modern affordances, and resorting to the absolute basics to share information. It even does away with HTTP altogether, and reprises to "old" protocols such as Gopher and Finger, or it devises new protocols, such as Gemini, which are entirely plain text and stand out in their simplicity and terseness.

In a way, Smol Web fits in a larger retake on computing as it happened in the 80's and early 90's. Before TBL invented HTTP, and Marc Andreesen went on to develop Mosaic and Netscape.

It's definitely not for everyone as it lacks any and all convenience / services you'd find on the Web (search engines, social media,...). And it's in no way or shape a replacement for the Web. Still, it's a breathe of fresh air to navigate the calm stillness of a plain text only hypertext.

sunsipples 5 years ago | |

this is beautiful, thank you for your response.

throwaway81523 5 years ago |

It's not easy but Firefox reader mode handles most sites, and very aggressive adblock settings also helps. In some cases (my local newspaper) I've written custom proxies to strip out the crap (makes the site load a heck of a lot faster, and uses far less mobile bandwidth).

sunsipples 5 years ago | |

thank you, these might be next steps for me.