How do we get people to build proper websites if tech rights groups don't?

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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!

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Looks like the site in question was built with Wix. Wix is one of the most abominable closed source SaaS systems out there, and I’m far from an open source purist.
I inherited a site built in Wix that I had to reverse engineer because the designer had gone AWOL without providing the owner with login details.
There was no easy way to download the site, and I had to resort to painstaking stuff in the browser dev tools to retrieve everything because it was so javascript heavy, and a single page with maybe 10Kb of textual content came in with something like 500Kb of bloat in the source code.
The last government’s Digital Boost initiative was actually promoting these offshore website builder services to NZ businesses.
I get it that not everyone’s an expert in the latest CSS/HTML. I’ve got a reasonable grasp of both, but I’ve still paid for software to make it easier to generate a design more quickly, as I’m a coder, not a designer.
At lest I get standard HTML and CSS out that are not dependent on specific infrastructure, and it is actually built with an open source CSS framework. I can run the CSS through purgeCSS to get rid of unwanted bloat, so if I have an encounter with a proverbial bus, the source codes of sites I build should be fairly intelligible and retrievable to anyone who knows HTML/CSS.
I get why people might want to use website builders, as it lowers initial cost and skill required, but I think there needs to be education about the output they produce.

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Preach. This is a perfect TL;DR for my detailed grizzles. Do you have any thoughts on what such education might look like in practice?

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Good question, I could go on about separation of content, design, and function, semantic markup, but for most people that won’t mean anything.
Some sort of analogy to something people can relate to probably helps.
One analogy I use when talking about websites is cars and art, but I’m not sure that addresses this specific issue.
I tell people a website is more like a luxury car than a glossy magazine.
A magazine just has to look good, but a website is actually a combination of engineering and aesthetics.
Something that looks nice superficially isn’t necessarily well engineered, and that has performance and privacy implications.
Most people wouldn’t want their car fed by a steam engine that could only be fed with fuel owned by one company, includes all the engineering to also function as a tractor, and as a result has fuel economy so bad, that you’re constantly having to refuel, and tell the car’s manufacturer where you bought fuel every time you do so. If you wouldn’t accept a car like that, why would you accept a website?

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