I just had the most frustrating experience with the homepage for a local group who really ought to know better than to make everything totally depend on DataFarming corporations. I was going to contact them privately to express concerns, but the only ways to contact them are;
-
accounts on LockedIn, FarceBook, InstaGrim
-
a contact form that depends on Goggle scripts
-
a link to a Goggle form, for volunteering
DataTraps - web form services provided by well known DataFarmers - are highly unethical. Especially when those forms are for collecting people’s most sensitive personal information (name, contact addresses, location etc). Given everything we know about the business practices of DataFarming corporations like Goggle and FarceBook, we all need to be discouraging people from exposing data to them, not pushing them to do so, for our own convenience.
I get that it’s pragmatic for an organised group to have a presence in Walled Gardens, so the group is more discoverable to people stuck in them. But there’s no reason to promote that presence from your own homepage, especially without offering any way of contacting the group using common carriers; like a mobile number, email address, fediverse address, or chat address (eg XMPP or matrix). This effectively forces people to have an account in a Walled Gardens to communicate with the group, which at this point, given everything we know about these Walled Gardens and their anti-social business practices, is clearly unethical if it can be avoided.
My intial concerns were about the homepage itself, which is built as a jsite (JavaScript site) not a website. A website is a set of online documents formatted using the latest specs for HTTP/ CSS3 etc. So basic contents like text, images, audio and video can be interpreted by any web browser (even a text only one). A jsite does little or nothing unless the visitor allows it to run JavaScript instructions on their computer.
If this JS is Free Code, it can all be copied freely to a site’s webserver and downloaded from there. But many jsites also require our computer to run JS instructions from other domain names (or “third-party domains”), many of them also controlled by known DataFarmers like Goggle and FarceBook. In the case of www.repaircafeaotearoa.co.nz, I’m expected to run JS instructions from no less than 9 third-party domains, and probably more, and most of the core functions of the homepage require instructions downloaded from these domains.
This is bad, but at least with repaircafeaotearoa.co.nz there’s some semblance of a website visible with all JS turned off. But another jsite it links to, www.repairnetworkaotearoa.org.nz, literally serves me a blank page if I don’t allow it to run JS instructions on my computer. This is not a website!
Imagine you subscribe to a newsletter from a community group. But in order to get it, a courier has to come to your house with it in a box, massively increasing the resource cost compared to posting it.
You can’t just accept the box at the door though. The courier has to come into your house and follow some instructions, and so do a bunch of other people who work for companies totally unrelated to the community group you want the newsletter for.
This is the offline equivalent of a jsite. Make JavaScript optional!
