It's an efficiency thing, the images are tiny compared to full color - the whole site is made to use as few resources as possible.They operate it off solar power (hence the battery meter) and around an ethos of reversing a lot of modern web design bloat practices. I appreciate them demonstrating the kind of stuff they advocate for with their own site.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

2bpp with lossless compression is an order of magnitude fatter than what DCT codecs like JPEG can achieve, if you're okay with all your illustrations being kinda shite. Even just 16 colors with no dithering would probably compress better.

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

You'd have to take that up with them - they might be interested in alternatives that improve efficiency. I wonder if they like that it's very visibly a deliberate choice to modify the images for size, or if they feel they'd be answering constant 'why do your images look bad?' questions with a reduced color pallet.

For anyone else who wants more info, I think these are cool discussions:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#why_website https://lobste.rs/s/9v0ioj/how_build_low_tech_website

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 weeks ago

It definitely conveys that it looks bad on purpose. There's utility in that signalling.