by mariteaux

I’m a big believer in implementing as little as possible to get the task at hand done. I’m as minimalist as it gets. Proprietary, open source—ultimately doesn’t matter to me so long as it gets the job done as simply as it can.

So why in fuck’s name did we give everything away to the web?

Imagine this scenario: you’d like to pass a ZIP of MP3s to a friend. What are your options? Well, not Discord, which has an 8MB upload size limit without paying for Nitro and thus supporting terrorism. You can use Mediafire, MEGA, or similar such sites, which throttle both your upload and download unless you throw more money at them. Or perhaps you can use Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox—and support giant corporations.

Or maybe—we can use the protocol we had for this back in, oh, 1971 or so. Called FTP.

Or, if you really need to keep it secure, you can use the separate, secure version, called SFTP.

Really think about it for a moment: anyone can host an FTP server, using any sized drive and OS and limited only by your normal internet speeds. There’s no file size limit, and provided you have physical access to the server, it’s dead simple and lightning fast to get files onto it. Again, if security is paramount, SFTP is as secure as SSH and works about the same. Only hangup is it needs a dedicated client (because overstuffing web browsers full of features is a real problem, you see), so most people would look at an FTP link in confusion and helplessness.

So instead, giant messes of files are instead hosted on skeevy and skeevier file hosting sites that throttle users and waste your time and, potentially, deliver on-click ads and viruses. Their UIs are consistently terrible, cluttered, and ugly. They’re slow. They can’t be crawled and archived. They don’t deserve a penny for reinventing what we’d already figured out long before the days of Netscape.

With the eternal wave of normal, everyday people hopping onto the internet since 1995 or so, we’ve successfully managed to train the general population into thinking everything on the internet is either done through a web browser or, maybe, through a video game. Websites and “programs”—usually web browsers in their own right—have one-by-one replaced the older, quicker, simpler-to-maintain programs using their own protocols—see FTP, IRC, NNTP, dedicated email clients, and so on.

In their place, we’ve given everything up to HTTP and the web, a damn strong resource in its own right, but made to fill gaps it was never meant to fill in the first place. The web is good for delivering information, static files, and facilitating interaction based on those things. Blogs are a good example of something the web is good at. Some social media, notably Twitter, make good use of the web’s capabilities.

Instead, we’ve now turned it into a streaming box, a games machine, a file transfer service, and a chat platform, all by stacking on more and more totally unnecessary technologies like WebAssembly, which several indie dev LARPers have assured me will revolutionize gaming as we know it by enabling yet another one-size-fits-all solution for a variety of devices that all work and can be interacted with entirely differently. And I guarantee you that, even if one or two major titles adopt it, no one else will.

The web doesn’t do everything. Instead of building native apps to properly use the power of each separate device and the efficiency of different protocols, we leave it all up to the web. We’ve managed to build an internet where the same shitty service is being delivered through Chrome, not-Chrome, embedded Chrome, and Chrome on Android, and takes advantage of none of their strengths as a result, and in fact, comes with all the ads, shitty, mismatched UIs, and nonsense the web’s enabled in its wake.

So here we fucking are. That’s why I have to struggle to send Radiohead albums to sushi every damn time.