The people holding up the internet

Jesus this was hard to read, even on the single page mode.

The format makes the page difficult to read and the page feels annoyingly machine-generated (apologies if it is not), but the point is solid. Fortunately, there is a link at the beginning to read the whole thing in one go.

Loadsharers was esr’s attempt to address the problem from the 2019/2020 time period. Interestingly, his list of recommended folks to support includes Paul Eggert (mentioned in this page). Sadly, Dave Täht’s list is offline following his death, but it is archived.

I found this post quite evocative. It felt like a digital museum exhibition, and honestly I'd like to see it translated from this format into the physical world to present this data to people who don't usually think about these things. It would be great as an exhibition at the CCC for example, or maybe in some Museum of Technology/Computing.

I really liked it, despite how sad it made me.

It felt like walking in an abandoned building with the name and accomplishment of a few good-willed people who held important artifacts of tech; and how little recognition they got.

About 1/4 the way through this stopped rendering correctly for me and all I could then see was a large amount of empty black space.

what was the point? I had to skim, couldn't even handle reading the single page mode.

I felt that this was well pitched towards non-experts, and your average crustacean here might find it too simplistic. For me, the scroll worked well, and it helped the story along. Examples of packages from these maintainers likely on my system were helpful, too.

Unrelated to the article itself but I do wish websites would better respect the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media feature.