Giovanni's blog: 5 things to lighten dependency on web apps

Sunday, June 7, 2026

5 things to lighten dependency on web apps

If you're like me, you've grown up on desktop "programs." In the late 00's this got changed to "apps" because of the mobile market took the leading attention span from computer users (mainly new ones). The first time I heard someone say the word "apps" to refer to mobile phone programs, it was 2011 or 2012. I knew something had changed. Programs no longer had the same pull as they once did, even though they were practically the same thing.<br>It's pronounced "programs."<br>Whenever you hear someone say "bring back this or that," they always sound like a person raising their fist at the sky. I remember someone who used to follow me on Facebook, who would like or share posts that said, "bring back X penalty for X crime" More often than not, they were just a lonely person.<br>So I am not going to say bring back "program" nomenclature. You can call it whatever you want. Even peach rinds. I know peaches don't have rinds, but now it sounds like they do. You might have been thinking of pork rinds, where I got the name, and then thought oranges have skin, and so do peaches, and so whatever skin peaches have, could be turned into peach rinds. But peaches can be eaten whole (except for the seed and stem, so that's not really a separate thing that anyone would ever need to make).<br>But it might sound funny because peaches might resemble, in color or shape, another thing that rhymes with rind.<br>I haven't gotten off topic. This was always probably going to be said. Initially, I wanted to write "5 lightweight programs," but then I thought, what the hey, why not 5 light humored things to write about. Actually it will be liteweight programs and whatever I already wrote. They might add up to 5.<br>In my recent posts, I covered Hugo. I am still working on that. But TCP/IP is a rigid protocol. There have been some clever protocols, both old and new, that can bypass that. If you need or use a lot of bandwidth, QUIC over UDP is a relavitely modernized protocol that uses TLS 1.3. Cloudflare has a great write up on the mechanics of it, and major CDNs use it. If it makes your internet go faster, it can be very appealing. There's also Gemini and Gopher, for the extremely lightweight web, and believe it or not, I already started looking for ways to combine the two. Part of having a very experimental mentality is wanting to mix two completely unrelated things that were never envisioned together. Even TLS and UDP weren't really intended together, but that's how QUIC works.<br>In theory, one doesn't need QUIC for smolnet, or a lightweight Gemini network. But if one had to surf a lot of websites to find something, or if someone wanted their website to be indexed...perhaps there might be use for QUIC on Gemini?<br>Chromium has a library for Quic: https://github.com/devsisters/libquic it was forked over 10 years ago, with over 288 forks:<br>"This repository is sources and dependencies extracted from Chromium's QUIC Implementation with a few modifications and patches to minimize dependencies needed to build QUIC library."<br>And only has one dependency on BoringSSL? Seems light.<br>Is it possible that the original maintainers are working on a fork? Because there hasn't been a commit in that long. There is a browser called LaGange that lets you browse Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/<br>I have used it, and think it's really calm. Now my Hugo site seems less important, but it's not. Getting a blog is still important, because I rust if I don't stay active.<br>You could call this detoxing from heavy social media, but it's more like "lite-toxing.' The terminology isn't great, but I don't want to sugar coat it either. Some amount of digital computing use is ok, but spending many, many hours daily isn't super healthy. Balance is needed. Despite all this, or in spite all this, I looked for alternative mail client. Yes, I have used mail clients before (Thunderbird and Seamonkey)- around 2005-2011. Eventually I got sick of the POP duplicates and switched to IMAP briefly, only to return to webmail because I didn't want to have too many copies of emails when I was already cluttered with a internet connection (that doesn't sound exactly logical, nor does this paranthetical aside). But I returned finally to a desktop based client.<br>Initially I downloaded Sylpheed, because it was only ~7MB. But then I saw Claws, which had support for OAuth2, which would be helpful if I wanted to set up Gmail IMAP. But that took too long, and didn't seem fun after spending a day on the Google Developer Cloud platform trying to create a token.<br>I've heard & seen Claws before because like Sylpheed, they were included in the hundreds of linux distros I've tested. So familiarity and reliability is important. Liteweight is also one of the main reasons I've looked for one, and at 37MB, Claws is not super large either. If it was over 50MB, I probably wouldn't use it.<br>Fortunately, I...