but wait there’s these spaces
Image description:
Young woman helping an old woman as she reminisces about the old web, “The web used to be open and distributed! Not closed and concentrated in the hands of a few companies!” The young woman, “Sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed.”
Hot take: the actual Web still is free and open. At least it is, as of this writing. Anyone can register domains. Anyone can pay to host a website. And they can put whatever they want on that website, as long as it doesn’t violate laws against incitement, harassment, copyright (not even applicable in all nations), and a few other things.
When people complain about “the big evil corporations” and how they’re “controlling the Web,” they usually aren’t being very intentional and specific with what they’re saying. What’s going on lately is the fact that “the big evil corporations” have constructed large platforms, which have large user-bases.
The free and open internet was never supposed to include any kind of a guarantee that you’ll have a massive platform, with a massive audience. As an example, let’s say you’ve been “deplatformed” from YouTube for uploading videos about firearms, in a way that violates their increasingly strict rules about that subject.
You don’t have to be happy about it. You don’t have to agree with the policies. You can hold the opinion that it’s unfortunate for that platform to have those particular standards.
What you can’t do (at least, not with any true honesty) is claim that your removal from that platform is somehow an example of the Internet being “closed” or “not free.”
The Internet is as free as it ever was. You can make your own website, RIGHT NOW and upload your videos to it. You don’t need permission from anyone, and you ABSOLUTELY WILL BE ABLE TO FIND A HOST WHO WILL HOST YOUR CONTENT. Those are facts. The Web IS still absolutely free and open.
The problem is, people have decided (for reasons which are entirely mysterious to me) that they are entitled to all the services and benefits of these large, pre-existing platforms. People think they’re entitled to have someone else pay for their hosting, provide them with access to a large audience of potential subscribers, and provide them with free tools to upload and manage their content. In reality, nobody is entitled to any of this stuff. If you don’t want to play by Google/YouTube’s rules, or you don’t want to play by Reddit’s rules, or you don’t want to play by anyone else’s rules…well, they can kick you off their platforms. And there’s literally nothing wrong with that.
To belabor the point, you are absolutely free to make your own fucking website. That part never changed. That part does not seem likely to change. Would Google/YouTube/Alphabet like to see that situation change? Would they like to have a controlling interest of some kind, in terms of who can actually upload stuff to the Web? Maybe. Probably, even.
But that’s not the case, for the moment. Right now, we have a situation where large social media platforms exist, and it’s obvious that there are benefits to navigating their landscape. But those social media platforms are NOT synonymous with “the Web.” They are discrete platforms, unto themselves, which are ACCESSED by use of the Internet and the Web. There is no intellectually sound basis for demanding that these platforms act as you might wish them to act. You don’t own them. I don’t own them. The government doesn’t own them. They can set whatever rules they want, and I can’t think of any valid reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to do just that.
Even though they’re “big bad corporations,” they paid for the labor and resources to build their platforms. Nobody else owns them. Therefore, once again, they have every right to enforce their own rules, run their own algorithms, and anything else they want to do, as long as it’s within the law. And, for the last time, if you don’t like it, YOU ARE FREE TO MAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING WEBSITE.
Note that I’m writing this on a website that is partially defined in terms of being deliberately outside the current mainstream social media structure. It doesn’t have as big a userbase. That’s a fact. Maybe the Fediverse will eventually have a massive audience. I would hope so. But that’s not something any of us are ENTITLED to.
That’s like saying you’re still allowed to use a horse as your only mode of transportation.
While technically true for some but not all places, in reality it’s just not a practical thing anymore as it has been displaced by motorized transportation and social media being where 99% of the people are, respectively.
You’re allowed to try to make people notice a website with no social media presence in the same way as you’re allowed to run for congress as an independent with a budget of the necessary registration fees plus $5.
I feel like that’s not a fair comparison. You can’t ride a horse on a freeway but you absolutely can host a website that anyone in the world can access instantly.
Back when the web was “open” and “free” and not dominated by social media, the 99% of people, the millions and billions of users, weren’t using it. It’s not like your Geocities page in 1999 had a billion visitors (despite what your “one billionth visitor” blink tags proclaimed). Even after it got added to that popular web ring for like-minded netizens.
I feel like people have forgotten what the old web was really like and that most communities only had a handful of active people. You can still do that and in fact there are thousands of such small independent websites and communities in forums and platforms like this. Hell, a bunch of the old forums and IRC channels etc. from back then are still running and some actually have more users than ever just because of more overall internet adoption.
It’s a bit sad that Google SEO favours large platforms and garbage medium blogs over smaller personal websites but search was mostly shit back then too (metacrawler ftw).
Still acting as if everyone’s complaing that “but no one will go to my website”
Maybe you’ll realise soon that no one said that, and that the actual complaint is that setting up any kind of functional website is expensive.
It’s really not… A domain name is what… $5-10 per year? Web server software is free (nginx, apache, lighttptd, pick your poison). You could run a website on your phone. It doesn’t need much hardware or network requirements unless you start hitting thousands of users.
A static IP helps but dynamic DNS is a thing. If you need more juice or you’re located somewhere that NATs IPs, a public web host is like $5-10 a month if you’re getting ripped off.
It costs more to get a streaming service subscription.
Hosting a popular webapp with tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users interacting with complex backend code and a database (see Lemmy) gets more expensive but it always was and it’s now cheaper than ever.
Edit: I should point out that I’m pretty anti-corporate and I’m not defending the current state of social media or search results. I’m just also agreeing with the guy who pointed out that the web is still open and you can host a website on a potato.