Why is the 32-Bit Café (still) making use of the Google CDN?

32-Bit Cafe Feedback & Questions
1

While featuring an article on DeGoogling in the Tutorial Section of the 32-Bit Café homepage, there are still requests being made to servers owned by Google when trying to load the site(s).

I’m just curious and would like to know why the website still makes use of the google CDN and if there are more requests being made to Google’s servers that I have missed

You uncommented:

<script src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.3/jquery.min.js'></script>

Which is good but still there are connections being made to servers owned by google. In particular: fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com.

Could you please elaborate on this?

What has stopped you from self-hosting the fonts? I’m asking this out of my personal curiosity as well as because I’m writing on an article series named “Big Tech Detox” (which still is under heavy construction, let me know If I’m allowed link it here) myself and would like to give my readers some insight on what keeps other people from cutting the ropes to Google altogether. I won’t mention the 32-Bit Café as an example there, only if you are okay with it.

I’ve seen a handful of other pages that feature articles about DeGoogling but still make use of their services and I just want to know why :blush:

from Tuffy with :heart:

PS: https://32bit.cafe/css/themes/default.css seems to be an empty file. Any reason why this is still in use?

2

no, nothing you missed. there’s no tracking, no adsense, no analytics from google. these are from google fonts, which is probably being used by the user-submitted themes. (though i also see now it’s in base.css) when folks send in a theme, they are sending in one CSS file. they can’t attach any fonts.

i personally find that using a service like fonts.upset.dev is best for a multitude of reasons, but i prefer that to uploading fonts. i can easily change on a dime for my personal sites and make visual variety quicker if i’m feeling bored of my layout.

it’s part of our theme selection code. the way we have it set up, there’s always a secondary stylesheet to accommodate the user-submitted ones.

hope this helps explain! when it comes to the user-submitted stylesheets, i suppose the question could be “what can we do to help fellow website owners use alternatives to google analytics, fonts, drive, forms, etc.?” there’s a lot of indie websites, webrings, cliques, etc., that use google forms, for instance – spreading the word and promoting things like tally.so instead of google forms helps a lot!

only thing to be wary of is approaching it as though those folks are “doing it wrong” – nobody is doing anything wrong by using the resources available to them. google has made a lot of people dependent upon them on purpose – it’s hard to counter specifically-engineered UX behavior, especially if it’s been in your tech ecosystem for 20+ years. but! if we approach it from an angle of “hey! just so you know, i really like using [blank] instead of [blank], it makes me feel like i’m not supporting something against my values!” or “did you know you were using google’s CDN and could use this instead?” i’ve found that folks are much more receptive to that than many ways people actually try to passively aggressively call them out, like on neocities for instance. (don’t want to attribute malice to what could just be an oversight or mistake, too!)

now that it’s been brought to my attention, though, i’m gonna switch any stylesheets’ CDNs to fonts.upset.dev. :) thanks!

9 Likes
3

Thank you very much for your reply and answering in detail. What you wrote is pretty much on point. No one is doing anything wrong. It is just my personal preference to not make use of Google products anymore and everybody has the right to make their own decision. I don’t judge anyone for using their services.

I was still using their search engine myself in the past years, mostly when alternative search engines didn’t deliver the results I was looking for but after their enshittification of the search engine itself, I didn’t felt the need to use it anymore.

After reading my post again, it sounds a little bit like nagging to me but this wasn’t my intention at all. Sometimes I have a hard time when trying to communicate my feelings/thoughts. I’m sorry if I offended you/anyone :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Thanks for suggesting tally.so - I didn’t knew about this website but this seems to be a promising service. I will give it a try and may add it to my list.

I’m sure you are aware this alternative to google fonts and there is https://www.cdnfonts.com/ as well as https://www.webfontfree.com/ (Both of the latter I have just discovered recently and haven’t checked yet). There is as well https://fonts.maateen.me/ for bangla fonts.

I have tried to add some links to alternative service providers to the fabulous resource list but it seems like I can’t edit it yet.

Personally I try to host all fonts myself because I think this is the best option for me because it results in less HTTP requests being made and I have less privacy & security concerns by doing it this way as well.

For everyone who does not know how easy it is to host a webfont yourself, you just have to upload a file to your web space and add a line of code to your .css file :slightly_smiling_face:

4

weird! it looks like you have the badges for adding/removing stuff to/from the list. are you getting an error?