>People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

Mastodon is actually part of the "HTTP as a secure application delivery protocol" and is no longer part of the "HTTP as website document delivery" team.

To me that seems the biggest split: self contained application versus hyperlinked documents.

I am ignorant of the underlying mastodon protocol, but couldn't there be a (mostly) HTML-only frontend for mastodon, or something like that?

I really hated that about twitter too, that for reading a goddamn SMS-lenghty tiny text it couldn't just have been "prerendered" on the server, no, you have to fetch a million things and watch different spinners before you get at it.