blackbirb.dev

what this is????

A sheet about making the web more private, more secure, faster and decentralized — and the place I publish the side projects that come out of trying. Written by b3nnu3, doing this since 2009.

None of what is wrong with the web happened by accident. A page that asks permission before it renders, weighs four megabytes, lives in one of three clouds and counts you while you read — every one of those is a decision somebody made, on purpose, in a meeting. They can be unmade. This is me unmaking them in public and writing down what it costs.

weight is a decision about who gets in

Four megabytes to deliver nine hundred words. A spinner where the text was supposed to be. That weight is someone’s marketing budget, and it is charged to your battery, your data plan and the phone you have rather than the one in the mockup.

Most of the web is read on cheap devices over bad networks. Building for a desk with fibre is not a technical oversight, it is a guest list.

consent theatre

The banner is the confession. Nothing that only wanted to hand you a page would need a dialog first, and nothing honest would pre-tick legitimate interest on behalf of eight hundred vendors you have never heard of. Two clicks to read, forty to refuse. That asymmetry is the product.

There is no banner here. Not because I found a clever exemption — because there is nothing to ask you for.

three clouds, two CDNs, one login

Centralisation works right up until it does not, and then it does not for everybody in the same minute. The lock-in is not the invoice — it is that leaving costs you the audience you spent years collecting on somebody else’s property.

This sheet is on Uberspace: shared machines, pay what you think it is worth, no dashboard trying to upsell you a region. That should not feel radical. It does, and that is the problem.

measurement as rent

Being counted is what most of the web charges for reading. Usually not even for a reason — nobody opens the dashboard. The tag was in the template, and taking it out was never anyone’s ticket.

I took it out.

what runs here instead

cookies

none for readers

analytics

none

third-party requests

zero

fonts

self-hosted

logs

none, app or server

source

codeberg.org/b3nnu3