>Why should someone else get to control what my software does on my machine?
For the same reason someone else gets to control the layout of a magazine you buy. The browser is yours, but the page you're accessing is not. It is the creative expression of someone else, why should they not have the right to express themselves freely? Why are you insisting on absolute creative freedom and editorial control over other people's property?
I mean, ignore javascript entirely. Why should someone publishing to Gemini not be able to set the background and font on their site? Gemini doesn't even allow even the tiny bit of individualism offered by the old web.
>Seems like a pretty punk-rebellious attitude to me.
You're view is literally rebelling against other people's freedom because what they do might not suit your tastes, and you don't feel others should have the right to violate your sense of aesthetics. Wanting to control everything isn't punk, it's textbook authoritarianism.
But I doubt we're going to see eye to eye on this.
> But I doubt we're going to see eye to eye on this.
It does seem unlikely - our perspectives are so different! - but it's an interesting conversation. Thank you for engaging.
You seem to be conflating the concepts of property ownership and copyright. We're not disagreeing about the idea of controlling other people's property, but about whose property it is.
The magazine example is a good one: the publisher owns the masters, and retains the copyright, but the copy of the magazine - the physical object I bought - is no longer the publisher's property, but mine, to do with as I please. If I want to mark it up, cut it up, or dust off my decades-obsolete paste-up skills and entirely redo its layout, that's my right as the owner of that copy of the magazine.
The same is true on the web. The original page, on the server you own, certainly is your property: but when I visit your site, and my browser downloads a copy of the page, that new copy, stored and processed on my computer, belongs to me. You retain the copyright, but you do not own the copy, and I am free to munge its bits in any fashion that suits me, because I own it.
> Why should someone publishing to Gemini not be able to set the background and font on their site?
It would be contrary to the purpose of the medium. It's like complaining that a haiku magazine won't publish your sonnet, or a podcast site won't host your videos; that might well be a fine thing to do, but this is not the place for it.
> Gemini doesn't even allow even the tiny bit of individualism offered by the old web.
Yeah, it's maybe less like the old web and more like "what if the old plain-text Internet, and the BBS scene before it, had developed into a hypertext medium?"
For the same reason someone else gets to control the layout of a magazine you buy. The browser is yours, but the page you're accessing is not. It is the creative expression of someone else, why should they not have the right to express themselves freely? Why are you insisting on absolute creative freedom and editorial control over other people's property?
I mean, ignore javascript entirely. Why should someone publishing to Gemini not be able to set the background and font on their site? Gemini doesn't even allow even the tiny bit of individualism offered by the old web.
>Seems like a pretty punk-rebellious attitude to me.
You're view is literally rebelling against other people's freedom because what they do might not suit your tastes, and you don't feel others should have the right to violate your sense of aesthetics. Wanting to control everything isn't punk, it's textbook authoritarianism.
But I doubt we're going to see eye to eye on this.