Dig Deeper Community Forum

Hello,

I initially requested for my account to be deleted here since I want to spend my time more usefully and I thought I discovered an okay-ish setup to "browse the web", but I really didn't and my account still isn't deleted.

My problem is that almost every piece of software associated with the web just sucks ( ). Google has a search monopoly, so you have to use their search engine. No, Mojeek's index isn't really any good for actual research/ diving deep into a topic. No, metasearch engines do not work as they are most likely blocked (or will be), especially if using a public instance. So you pretty much have to rely on google ("rely on the perpetrator") to get any useful result. But then, the results aren't even all that useful, since Google can just block what they don't like.

The situation with browsers really isn't any different, there are 3 company maintained search engines: Blink, WebKit, Gecko and that's it. Forks are no solutions since they are still dependent on the upstream projects. Yes, minimal engines would do the job too since most web specifications nowadays are just there to kill competition in this space, but where/ how do you find websites if the only place to go for websites is Google, which will obviously push their SEO garbage implementing the newest specification slop? Good indices are also hard to come by, I like fmhy but it's maintained by trannies and lefties so you won't find anything other besides some good streaming sites and torrent trackers.

And most of you might not agree with this take, but the Darknet doesn't really seem to be a solution either. I really like the fact that you are at least able to own your domain, but discoverability is a really big issue with the Darknet. I have searched lots of indexes and "search engines", but most of them contain mostly dead/useless .onion links and are filled with disgusting (dare I say, haram) ads. But how else do you discover onion links if not through indices or Darknet "search engines"? Even discussing/recommending links is very painful, since you first have to know someone to share links with, which isn't happening for me anytime soon. Even if, I just want to get work/ research on a given topic done. And I still haven't been able to find any resources on math or computer science in the Darknet. The only okay index I have found so far is from Nihilist which took a long time: I went from their OPSEC Bible SimpleX chatroom -> OPSEC Bible -> Nowhere -> Darknet Lantern project (Index). It (obviously?) doesn't include any useful information on mathematics or computer science. Other Darknets obviously have the same issue and some solve this through a centralized entity like I2P does (address books), which defeats the whole purpose of the freedom of speech argument (since they can just not include your custom domain) or am I missing something here? So, how is it that all internet tech just sucks so bad? You can not even really watch anything entertaining on the Internet (as you could guess by my previous post) as everything is goyslop with the intention of making the most amount of money off of you.

(I also looked at other protocols as a solution to HTTP/S like gopher and gemini and found nothing useful there either since they are just too small or have the same discoverability problem.)

"Just go fully offline and live your life happily there". I really like to go outside, but sadly I am not able to own any land in the country I live in (EU obviously). If you don't constantly pay the state for the land you own, they come to throw you off of it. So going fully Luke Smith is not possible. No, I can't just go around as a nomad in the woods either, because camping outside (without permission) is actually also illegal in my country (yes, I live in a almost hellhole) and I wouldn't be able to constantly pay fines. Therefore I most likely will have to get a j*b, which requires at least some form of minimal connection to the Internet to learn about stuff, but it seems like there is just nothing good out their on the internet, besides ironically digitized books at which point we could just go analog again. I also like learning new stuff in depth, so I wouldn't want to shut myself off completely.

What do you do to research new topics and learn about them? I am currently working on a Black Scholes options pricing project for example but would like to further research tools (framework, library, language etc.) to visualize the results of my rust library given certain parameters (since rust GUI really isn't it). I have looked everywhere (Darknet, Clearnet, alternative protocols) and can't find a single good result that isn't some SEO slop article or LinkedIn post on must have languages to land X tech job at Y company. It just feels like there are no resources to learn a topic in depth. Or at least any topic of relevance. For a very long time I was a slop developer (Java Spring Boot student backend type slop) and yes, you can find plenty resources on that. But when trying to actually implement something useful, there are no resources at all. Not even something you could take as minimal guidelines. So in the clearnet it is mostly a quality problem and in the darknet it's mostly a problem that has to do with both quantity and discoverability.

So can anyone recommend: good software for browsing, good index/search engine for actually good and useful results? Idc for the protocol, underlying software etc. My observation is similar to digdeeper's who often ends his articles by stating how bad the situation is for all "solutions", but then what am I supposed to use to get anything done?

digdeeper wrote:However, I severely overestimated the situation and way overrated several search engines such as StartPage, MetaGer and DuckDuckGo. The main issue is that all of them lack their own index, meaning they are fully dependent on the violators. The ones who do use their own index have weak results

digdeeper wrote:Pale Moon is still the only decent way to browse the modern web that's actually relevant - but it's slowly rotting from the inside. Firefox is dying and will soon bring down all its forks alongside itself, surrendering the Web to Google whose abomination of a browser is just as worthless.

I thought about using AI because I am getting sick of this entire adventure to just learn something new, but I also very much agree with this comment as I really like to think for myself when I read for example:

moeloli wrote:This shit is just going to atrophy and lobotomize your brain.

Even if this were not true, AI is not sustainable at all. Not only for the environment, but as a business overall, so I don't really trust it.

Sorry if this is another useless schitzo ramble asking for specific suggestions (which I know this community doesn't really like to be asked) but I am just very pissed off with the state of the "Internet" (or maybe what it has become) in general.

Yandex is okay and a lot better than Google, BTW. Use it through 4get. It's not a perfect solution, but acceptable in this suboptimal world.

Other than that you answered yourself. The modern business model simply doesn't reward anything good. It rewards data collection, ads, addictive UI design, etc. It is kind of a miracle ANYTHING good at all exists. But even something like TOR was developed to help the CIA hide. The few other things like I2P or Monero manage to stick around because there is enough autism power to keep them going. But the supply will run out at some point. These people usually have to work a shitty job, and spare some time for their hobby project - or they beg for donations that never come.

The solution is to take over the companies and states and ensure everything that is made actually helps humanity. Free market solutions and modern politics simply do not work to bring the necessary change.

DELETED BY USER.

The reason software associated with the Web sucks is because the design of the modern Web itself sucks. There exists no alternative search engine that will work better than the mainstream ones and no browser that will work better than the mainstream ones because Google effectively controls the web standards. As to what I personally use, the only search solution that works for me is hosting a metasearch engine on my own server. For browsing I mostly use mitigated palememe (with all its drawbacks), icecat for fallback (if a website displays properly in lynx I use that but it's rare these days). The real solution is to just archive any useful source of knowledge locally. I have saved lots of ebooks, wikis, documentations, scientific resources etc. offline. For AI I run a local LLM with ollama.

It's a combination of corporate greed, the increasing capabilities of surveillance, and normies only caring about convenience and what everyone else uses. The web wasn't designed with privacy in mind and cannot be private, and then there's the insane scope creep of the web and the idea that everything must be connected to the internet and that browsers should be able to do anything an OS can. Unless the modern business model change and all the corporations have a change of heart, neither of which will ever happen, the internet will only continue to get worse and worse.

There are no decent search engines or browsers anymore but a self-hosted metasearch and Librewolf are the least worst for now. I don't see Ladybird or Servo ever making any real impact. For AI, trash it.

It's not that merely internet software sucks, but that almost all computing sucks by design. Most suits and government lackeys may be dumb and incompetent, but no so much as to undermine themselves in their own field.

Let's remember that if we take the 1930's as the beginning of modern computing, the relay machines of that time were designed by short-sighted engineers who thought this would allow big corporations, governments and over-budgeted research institutions to do more stuff better (because surely it's the unholy trinity who needed more power), not for Joe and Jane or even interested hobbyists to calculate the square root of PI on their homes. Even if we go back to the US of A the ENIAC project was mostly done as yet another tax dollar grift to replace the multi-billion dollar bombsight scam which was an exercise in wasting the biggest amount of money possible to deliver underwhelming tech that was already available for pennies on other countries. Then after nobody could find an use for the supercomputer it was delivered to Los Alamos to do things which we are not generally allowed to know, and possibly serve as yet another money sink replacing three-stick mechanical integrators like the FERMIAC, so there's plenty of reason to believe computers weren't quite exactly honest business back then.

There were also plenty of shenanigans involved in the memory-holing of plugboards, mechanical, analog and electric-analog computers which did most engineering calculations (mostly integration and differentiation) infinitely better than mainframes for a fraction of the price, but apparently integer math was so important that you should be forced to pay 100,000x and not be allowed other options (but they later realized it wasn't so important and added floats lol).

When transistors where "invented" by Bell Labs through the time-honored art of stealing and rebranding expired patents on negative resistors and oscillators for crystal radio (arguably even the carbon microphone is a transistor), mainframes and minis were obviously still largely confined to big companies and universities. It doesn't even take a grand conspiracy to realize most of these were looking for either cut and dry bean-counting schedules or job-generating programs and didn't want to rock the boat in any other direction, so when people like Doug Engelbart at SRI came up with a possibly useful program like a screen-sharing word editor that wasn't bloated he got unplugged, but when he came up with something substantially less consequential like a flipped-over trackball everyone cheered like he had discovered the fountain of youth.

Obviously the internet itself IS a government funded, government "invented" enterprise, so they would look for a service that is easily centralized and controlled. I think I read that American and Soviet labs had shared X.25 internet and would use it to exchange data (lol), but X.25 had a lot of overhead and obviously didn't bring in enough $$$. IP, DNS, http, etc. Were all created as a watered-down version of already existing technology because someone somewhere thought it would create more jobs, allow for more control or make more money off of it that way. Google, Facebook, Reddit and such are merely the latest batch of alphabet soup funded semi-private, semi-government, semi-crime ring enterprises that were allowed to take the lead, break the law, rewrite the law, do aggressive mergers and make money off of other people's misery, while all other competition can jump off a cliff.

On the other hand, there are still many underground alternatives available, and it has only ever gotten so bad because of the passive acceptance, indolence and naivety of the average user. Most institutions foment this by disregarding all ethics, so the good employee/academic/goon solves the problem he is told to solve without ever thinking about the consequences for more than 5 seconds.

The situation with browsers really isn't any different

Dillo and Netsurf both work just fine if you're willing to make sacrifices. Most forms are just there to paste GET data onto the URL, something which you can do manually if you look at it very attentively. The GET data is everything after the "?" with tag=value pairs separated by ampersands '&'. I've also heard that you can brute-force most sites with cgi's by looking at the source code and sending the requests manually, though obviously at this point you should also be able to avoid the botnet by becoming a bot yourself: Writing some dumb script in python+Selenium to fetch the site with a headless browser.

Discoverability is a really big issue

This doesn't merely apply to the dark web. Most people are stuck in the "better mousetrap" mindset where people are supposed to magically find about them just because they have good ideas. Funnily enough, it's the perfectionists with the best content who are the most afraid of publicizing. And I don't mean using Google ads or any of that garbage. It really doesn't cost much to send articles to independent zines, e-mail people who you think may be genuinely interested in your work, write proper link indexes or at least notify them you exist etc.. The companies everyone hates drop billions of dollars proactively marketing themselves because they know it works.

I can't just go around as a nomad in the woods either

Because it's illegal? I get that this can be difficult, but unless the country you live in has exactly zero homeless people then chances are it isn't impossible. There is a whole subculture dedicated to "Stealth camping" even in super-densely populated places like the UK where it's also illegal afaik. There's the usual advice about going off-road, not using bright lights or colors and not going in a straight line that will save you from the worst of it. More important than that is making sure you remain at least cash-neutral and don't dig yourself an early grave from exposure to the elements or eating gas station food. I don't idolize Luke nor think of going full hermit as a particularly strategic lifestyle since I think every corrupt organization would be glad to have their enemies hide out in their shacks knitting sweaters all day, and you're bound to get caught unprepared and without support if the reclusive lifestyle ever becomes popular enough to hurt their taxpayer funds or you happen to stand between them and some exploitable natural resource.

good index/search engine for actually good and useful results?

You can almost always brute-force results by looking up the citations or links on a page, even on Wikipedia. I normally use search engines only when I'm bored or as a last resort. Otherwise you can use traditional query databases such as sci-hub and libgen. Don't underestimate how much useful info you can get out of a naive query on some database of crummy old books or whitepapers.

On the other hand, nobody is stopping you from making your own computer, at least until you try marketing it. The only non-standard ISA available on mouser.com is the ancient 6502 and WDC derivatives, yet people are still willing to pay 10$ for that under-powered piece of crap simply because it's infinitely better than anything Intel, ARM or RISC-V could come up with. You can also buy stack-based processors from greenarrays though they're quite expensive. Or you can buy used computers. Or make your own mini from discrete transistors. Computers are overrated imo.

In order to remain economically viable, companies will add frivolous features to their devices and software to appear cutting-edge and exciting. Marketing and advertisement campaigns leads to individuals feeling they must purchase these products in order to not miss out on features that might make their lives better.

It appears we've reached the peak of practical technological growth, the only features left to implement are more data-collecting trackers, bloated animations and contrived mechanisms labelled as AI.

Example: I use a weight tracking mobile application APK from 2018, which is very snappy and quick. The latest version, however, is incredibly slow and frequently annoys me with pop-ups. Ironically, Android warns me of compatibility issues with the former.