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.”
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.