wxboss

I completely agree with your assessment especially with how most social media these days really dumbs down the entry level effort needed to participate in discussions.

And to your point, participating on a BBS (which usually requires a more specific interest and consequently a similar engagement level) will generally reward you with a community that is more civil, friendly and worth frequenting.

I use Jshelter alongside Ublock. They’re a good combination.

Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.

AOL was 'everywhere' especially in the mid to latter '90's. Their advertising push coupled with so many hours of free Internet access upon installation made them an early titan of Internet service access.

The open source community (or movement) is about, well..open source that many of us here benefit from and greatly appreciate. While everyone is free to agree or disagree with the personal ideals of any developer who has made their positions known, it's not fair to discount the importance of someone's historical contributions just because their current opinions seem incongruent to our own.

"JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations."

"During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser. There was a desire in the flourishing web development scene to remove this limitation, so in 1995, Netscape decided to add a scripting language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

I think you're confusing the reasons behind the initial intent of JS versus what it has evolved into almost 30 years later.

On a semi-related note, the Hale-Bopp comet was an amazing event to witness.

Everything is moving so quickly these days, and the exodus from other failing sites along with the expectations of those transitioning from them is creating a crescendo that is just unrealistic.

So many people have been working very hard to keep up with all of these new and increasing demands (and they ought to be credited for that), but what is lacking is patience for those working behind the scenes.

They’re doing a great job, but, for God’s sake, give them some slack!

It's for people who want to keep their network traffic private from say their ISP or other sniffers.

On the desktop, I use Whonix which does utilize the Tor Network. That being said, I rarely use the Tor browser outside of it.

I find myself waking up in an even stranger world than the one I left the night before.

It's one thing to understand that while surfing the Internet you expose yourself to being monitored, it's quite another to take a walk around the park and have someone trying to 'sniff out' your movement and potentially your identity.

Are there people who don't really understand the implications of this?

Google and Apple have built out their own private 'little internet' by turning the users of their products into their own personal nodes that they have access to and control.