had a dream there was a fox and raccoon who travelled together to commit crimes on houses with large yards and quiet streets

i also had a dream that @aescling had strongly held beliefs about tagging. i didn’t quite agree with them so i spent some time browsing the internet for an essay i remembered reading previously. this involved looking at a couple of personal homepages with great design and lots of interesting thoughts and content, the sort which don’t really exist anymore in reality. alas, we have lost our way

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the reason the internet is so shit right now is that the job expectations of your average hobbyist website maker have been steadily increasing for the past two decades and nobody has time to maintain an interesting resource on the web for free anymore

@Lady Hmm.
Fanwikis are still reliable. Is that an exception to the rule or an exceptional audience?
(Or am I wrong and fanwikis are increasingly losing reliability.)

@gaditb i think many fanwikis do have sustainability issues and high administrative turnover, they’re just structured better than most to be able to tolerate that

the downside is that fanwikis can largely only ever be written from a neutral point of view, because subjective/innovative/interesting interpretations can’t tolerate constant contributor turnover as easily

@gaditb fanwikis definitely can not support essays in the genre of “here is what i personally think and why i believe that, with references and citations”, which is the big gap in the internet’s information resources right now

@Lady @gaditb fanwikis have also greatly declined on average in their ability to be independent wikis—the manpower for writing is still thereish but so many of them are on fandom bc no one can host

@Satsuma @gaditb strategywiki has started pitching in to help with hosting some of the other ones but that's a very single point of failure situation as well

@gaditb @Lady yeah was very excited when fallenlondon.wiki moved off fandom, but i am like 85% sure that the game company offered to help with the migration, at minimum and may just be straight up hosting it

@Satsuma @gaditb @Lady y'know, it's probably not the worst thing that self published ebooks are a totally viable way to distribute opinions now, though I do wish we didn't rely so much on Amazon for them

@Lady @clayote @gaditb yeah amazon is maybe worse than fandom tho i agree epubs are a nice format

@clayote @Satsuma @gaditb epubs aren’t bidirectional hypertext tho so kind of not a great substitute in some ways

@Lady @clayote @Satsuma "bidirectional" LTR+RTL text direction
or
"bidirectional" describing the hyperlinks in some way ([link] implies [backlink])
or
other?

@gaditb @clayote @Satsuma i mean that you can link OUT of epubs but can’t link INTO them

@Lady @clayote @Satsuma Hmm.

I agree but also didn't you argue otherwise previously?

glitch.cat.family/@Lady/113070

e.g. "The Inform Designer's Manual, 4th Ed., ch. I § 1 p.25/65" (I dunno. That was just the nearest epub I had on hand.)

In a more traditional-resolveable-URI sense, this feels lile it OUGHT to be solveable,

@gaditb @clayote @Satsuma well at this point i think we’re arguing more over what constitutes the internet (or more appropriately the Web)

the traditional view is that the Web consists of resources which can be accessed, viewed, and navigated between using a standards-compliant web browser. links into epubs are NOT web links because contemporary web browsers do not support viewing or navigating within them. this is not necessarily to say that it's impossible to create a stable URI/link/etc into an epub that a different application, like a dedicated epub reader, could understand. i wouldn’t be surprised if there were indeed standards for this! but these aren’t web links

the web gets its strength from the fact that any webpage can link to any other webpage and users can traverse those links entirely in their web browser. resources which contain hyperlinks, but which can't be linked into in a way navigable by web browsers, are taking ADVANTAGE of the web but not fully CONTRIBUTING to it, and aren’t, traditionally speaking, proper web resources

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