Cory 
This is pretty brutal https://how-i-experience-web-today.com
Brian Baldock šØš¦@cory ughh my Pi-Hole didn't help me with this adventure!!! No wonder people are sour when the dopamine spike includes rage buttons.
@midknight the internet is in really rough shape for everyone without an adblocker ā at least where larger sites are concerned.
@cory hopefully with the re-emergence of the blogsphere we will see a rebound from the days of old. I'm waiting for the Java Applet rebirth... NO I am not but it was that moment of wow for me back in the late 90's. HotDog Editor and all at my fingertips figuring out if I had all the attributes in check for each tag surrounding my content. It's becoming all filler and no killer sites. I am hopeful for a change.
@midknight I really think we're seeing a regrowth of blogging and a bit of the weird web. It's pretty clear that the corporate web is openly hostile to users and relentlessly extractive.
It's not even reasonable free services in exchange for data ā it's that plus all that data being used to train AI models of dubious utility.
@cory I like seeing the regrowth as well.
Concerning the free for data, it was always the wonder back in the mid 2010's with the push for Big Data... Now we know what they did with it.
We are the product until we divest and create our own product.
@midknight it's all the more reason to be wary of commercial web products ā if the business model and value isn't immediately clear to users it should be avoided.
Iām much more heartened by personal sites, volunteer efforts and small web-based businesses that don't aspire to scale to some imagined infinite growth.
It's stunning how fast we went from opposing web scraping to centering the entire industry around it.
@cory Even the clarity isn't all out there on the table. You and I know full well that the metrics and sub-data being analyzed is used for other things. Data currency is broken down to the cents and micro-cents with companies creating penny markets for absurd points.
The understanding is do we benefit from it in anyway. Are we just all in the lab and going through the paces and will all get the cheese in the end?
@midknight we're not even getting cheese anymore. It's all a hellish attention trap that everyone feels compelled to participate in. You can't leave the platform because everyone is there, they've been there for years. It ends up being a sunk cost where you can't bear to leave a platform that's become utterly unusable and hostile.
@cory True friends and acquaintances keep in touch or find you. Or at least I hope so. I try my best to keep up that practice for birthdays and special events in their lives to know I am thinking of them wherever we are in the world. That was the only value at this moment outside Mastodon that I feel those other sites helped me. The rest is just a blur.
@midknight I like to think of my address book as the most important social network. I love Mastodon, but I do my best to shoot off notes for birthdays and check in over chat (whichever one folks use ā I *wish* that weren't all so unbearably fragmented).
You're right ā IMHO ā that that's the best and healthiest approach.