Gemini
Firefox has definitely gone downhill and after learning about user.js files my faith is even weaker. I run ublock origin to keep advertisers from monitoring what I'm doing, I run https_everywhere to keep my isp from monitoring what I'm doing, and I run umatrix with a javascript whitelist to block all the rest of you fuckers. Apparently it isn't enough.
I used to have an large and well-curated hosts file to block entire domains, including the hundreds of URLs associated with facebook and google, but firefox moved to DNS over HTTPs making this obsolete (they claimed it was in the interest of my security to send a list of my every dns lookup to cloudflare). Comcast complained bitterly until they setup their own encrypted dns server so they could continue to collect and sell your browsing history.
User.js example 1 example 2 is a firefox configuration file designed to disable all the bullshit mozilla adds to your browser. I encourage you to take a look at this list because it's insane what you have to do to try to run the browser safely.
I recently ran into the gemini project which is an attempt to fix the web by starting over. The specification is as simple as they can make it but requires a suitable client
Gemini is focused on text with very limited markup and no support for inline images. In fact there's no support for any compound data at all, you send a request, the server sends you a single uncompressed block of data and closes the socket. You can specify links in the markup to other gemini pages or to http content like youtube but it's up to the client how to handle them. My client just opens my browser to view videos and images. The limited markup is designed to prevent tracking but I have no romantic attachment to usenet or gopher. It seems like if they made the markup slightly more complete and allowed linking to self-hosted images (static jpegs and pngs or webp files only) it would greatly increase popular appeal.
I don't think this project will go anywhere (and hackernews is conflicted on this as well) but it is refreshing and the more I read about it the more I want to setup my own server.
For a client I'm using castor and AV-98 though you can find html proxies if you just want to poke around.
I like the idea of calling a mulligan on the internet and starting over with the view of redesigning things to make it very difficult if not impossible for the marketers, scam artists, and nation states to track, manipulate, and monetize you. I'm also very interested in scrapping the entire html markup language and moving to something sane. Solderpunk's explanation why he didn't want to use a subset of http and html makes sense. (gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi)
I setup a gemini server - agate. If you want to play with gemini you can check out my server at gemini://trousermonkey.net. If I can find the energy I might even write something to extract my blog into gmi files that can be hosted there.
The infrequently updated blog.