Oh I love these kinds of Macbooks. I should hope I can find one of mine with a still working battery and a drive that's inside it.

Oh man, thats exactly it. EVERYONE wants a quick Fix a tip a cheat etc no one wants to actually learn shit or finds the reward in hard work. Its frustrating and destroying their brains.

So many folks have forgot how to explore. Myself included

I'm afraid it is true for all of us, more or less visibly. We've all been lazy and the cost is high... and quick. Contrary to real hard work, which is very slow to reward anyone.

Totally, and RSS has been shoved under the rug for years. No one I know knows what it is at all. And like you said theyre addicted to fb reel streams and theres no changing that.

So many folks have forgot how to explore. Myself included. Ive had to retrain my brain. Gemini has helped with that, just exploring capsules on there is really fun. But its so hard explaining to Normie's anythibg they can't find in 1 gooe search.

Human curation (the art of selecting and sharing valuable resources) was always at the hearth of RSS and of blogs at their peak (before they became a marketing playground in which most only looked for ways to monetize 'their audience' and/or milk every single cent out of them)

No surprise either that Google and the likes of it are trying so hard to get rid of both RSS and human curation (blogs or otherwise) so they can push humanity aside of the process of accessing to info/knowledge and instead promote their own algorithm (and now, their AI) as the way to access info and knowledge.

Maybe we could start a thread sharing worth reading blogs that still offer RSS, there are a lot less but there are... Sadly, I'm willing to bet it would not take of as already so, so many of us are addicted to being fed content (even quality content, btw) without having to search for it. Fingers crossed I'm wrong.

I do enjoy RSS on capy reader, its finding more of those blogs !

Please do!

Maybe stating the obvious, but have you tried using RSS to read only the blogs you're interested in?

Yeah youre right, I guess just a way to stay only on those sites and not get sucked into corpo or slop sites is the hard part! Kagi has smolweb search but its not quite great.

Some Gemini clients can render images inline. Lagrange does so if you click an image link on a capsule. and there are discussion forums. bbs.geminispace.org immediately came to me, but while searching for that site I found Station .

The creator of Gemini also made a web server that might help you do what you're looking for, or if you want it to be more period accurate to 2004, I am also aware of some projects of maybe that kind of nature.

I guess it just depends on what you want.

Is there anything else thats slightly more like the web in ~04 ish?

standard HTML+CSS is more than enough for me. They work everywhere with no extra software required, they do all I need, and no one is forced to use JavaScript or whatever dynamic type of content is used to track people and force feed them ads. I certainly don't use those ;)

Unless you need something very specific that I missed in your post, maybe it's worth considering?

This is absolutely perfecth. I will live here now. Thank you.

Can I crosspost this to ysk? I feel like I want to spread the word ..

What exactly are you looking for in a protocol? Better discovery? Distribution? Semantics? Security? HTTP hasn't changed a whole lot since 2004 (HTTP 1.1 even got an update in 2022 since it lives side by side with HTTP/2 and the new HTTP/3), and HTTP+TLS is really pretty good at transferring static and semi-static content.

Kagi is my favorite search engine today

It depends on the problem. I host my personal site on Gemini first and HTTP second (via a proxy). The way I fixed the LLM issue on the HTTP side was to setup my proxy to require a cookie. Without the cookie you get my Terms of Service agreement.

I'm still working on a Gemini solution. I think Identities with a set value in an optional field might work.

Stop with the mystery, it's not a Scooby-Doo episode.

Warez?

I didn't think about this. Thank you, friend

You seem to be interested in selfhosting so I encourage you to learn and follow the other comments but... ... I'm here to remind who needs to hear this that there should exist small communities where the average member doesn't give a flying TCP packet of what "coturn" is. Using smolweb technologies doesn't need to imply operating the infrastructure.

You can run Yunohost on you local wifi and access it via the internal IP address that your main router assigns to your device.

But xmpp is not very helpful in such a setup as external access from the outside internet is not possible that way. You would need to configure it to be accessible on a public IP and also buy a domain name for it.

As a beginner it might be easier to rent a VPS somewhere as a lot of the technical details will be solved already.

A friend of mine is a cybersecurity teacher... maybe I should reach out to him. I've just switched from Ecosia to Brave for my search engine and it seems to be returning helpful options thus far. Is there anything smaller than setting up my own XMPP server that you'd suggest as a beginner option, or is it better to just dive into the deep end and read like crazy?

Oooh okay so not installing it on my laptop, got it. What do you mean a domain name, like do I need to purchase a .com from Porkbun or something like that? And what do you mean by local network, like my wifi?

Yes you can try Yunohost on an old laptop but it will replace the existing OS.

Prosody (xmpp) specifically is meant to be used with a domain name etc, and the setup to run it on a local network only isn't so easy (and relatively pointless as it is a communication tool).

I went to college for computer engineering, and what I learned in college has been pretty much entirely irrelevant to my self-hosting hobby. That said, there’s a ton to learn. The good news is that all the information on this stuff is available online for free, you’ve just got to have a good search engine that doesn’t give you slop and you should spend a lot of time reading. That’s how I got into it.

Services like Yunohost are a great place to start, but setting them up will still take some searching if you’re a beginner. Generally you can find services anywhere on the spectrum between “one-click setup” and “bare metal machine you can customize to your heart’s content” so you can navigate that spectrum as you learn more. Just try to always be security-conscious, research the security ramifications of whatever you’re doing.