Seirdy

I find people who agree with me for the wrong reasons to be more problematic than people who simply disagree with me. After writing a lot about why free software is important, I needed to clarify that there are good and bad reasons for supporting it.

You can audit the security of proprietary software quite thoroughly; source code isn't a necessary or sufficient precondition for a particular software implementation to be considered secure.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/60818

Lots of people have been spreading the often-unnecessary advice to add a Permissions-Policy response header to their sites to opt-out of Google's FLoC, and some have been going so far as to ask FLOSS maintainers to patch their software to make this the default. When discussions got heated to the point of accusing webmasters who don't implement these headers of being "complicit" in Google's surveillance, I felt I had to write this.

Everybody: please calm down, take a deep breath, and read the spec before you make such prescriptive advice about it.

FLoC is terrible, but telling everyone to add a magic “opt-out header” in every situation conveys a misunderstanding of everything you need to know about the opt-in/out process.

Lots of people have been spreading the often-unnecessary advice to add a Permissions-Policy response header to their sites to opt-out of Google's FLoC, and some have been going so far as to ask FLOSS maintainers to patch their software to make this the default. When discussions got heated to the point of accusing webmasters who don't implement these headers of being "complicit" in Google's surveillance, I felt I had to write this.

Everybody: please calm down, take a deep breath, and read the spec before you make such prescriptive advice about it.

FLoC is terrible, but telling everyone to add a magic “opt-out header” in every situation conveys a misunderstanding of everything you need to know about the opt-in/out process.

A search engine that's optimized for surfing/discovery rather than finding specific information. Focuses on simple, non-commercial, hobbyist sites reminicent of the "old web" without much CSS/JS.

Most “alternative” search engines to the big three (Google, Bing, Yandex aka GBY) just proxy their results from GBY. I took a look at 30 non-meta search engines with their own crawlers/indexers to find actual alternatives.

Feedback + additions welcome.

I've been using a self-hosted webmentiond on my own site for about a month and a half, and I've loved the experience so I thought I'd share. Deploying is easy; it's just a single statically-linked binary and an assets directory for the web UI.