This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It is still possible to run your own server and set up your own website. Nobody is stopping anybody from doing that. That's literally what all the Fediverse admins are doing. We just all got lazy and decided to congregate around pre built platforms.
MySpace had the best of both worlds. A robust social media platform with tons of customization options, including even altering the css and html of your personal page.
Edit: also, this article is like, 12 years old.
It is, but it's a lot harder to find privately hosted things thanks to advertising ruining all the major search engines.
We just all got lazy and decided to congregate around pre built platforms.
It's not just laziness. The economies of scale can potentially be worth huge cost savings, and higher reliability, in addition to a significantly less burdensome workload to maintain. Especially for smaller sites.
I mean even when I was running my own homelab for years, the FOSS software I relied on was in many ways "pre-built platforms." From the Linux kernel to a distro package manager (and all the maintained packages), I was always standing on the shoulder of giants anyway.
You can, but it’s not how the web is used anymore. If you want to get reach, you’re better off using any of the established platforms. Search engines won’t help you getting any visitors to your website.
From the user's perspective it's not about "reach"; it's about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there'll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there'll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.
The world wide web is more than social media.
And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.
Factually true, but it sure doesn't feel like it most days.
I think this misses the cultural shift around the popularization of the web/Internet.
There used to be a high barrier to entry for creating content. The folks who were capable and willing to surmount that barrier posted stuff that nerds like us enjoyed. It was really hard to monetize (unless porn), so it was typically free.
Then social networks came along and made it easy for everyone to post. Just like normal society, the non-nerds started drowning out the nerdy early adopters.
Certain networks became cool (Twitter, Medium) because cool normies were on there (aka the network effect), and that pulled many nerds of self hosted software.
Other social networks were monetizable and incredibly accessible (YouTube), which pulled many other nerds off self hosted software.
Proprietary networks suck morally, but they're incredibly easy to use and democratizing. That cranks their network effect to 11 and makes the old school web less rewarding.
In my heart of hearts I always knew simplicity and mininalism was but a passing trend.
There was definitely an issue with early software having defaults that were not informed by data but by the creator's opinions, which were often not shared by the majority of people and in some places that still continues (looking at you, KDE).
All this supposedly scientific but hardly reproducible marketing research about decisions and research paralysis yada yada how people hate options and want what everyone else has, tying in absurd bullshit pseudoscience like psychology (especially evolutionary psychology) and so on and making all those crazy assumptions about cultures like that one study about the tribe who couldn't see blue that constantly gets misframed by clickbait farms like design theory on YT etc etc.
And all of it failed to consider that people live in the world they live in, and their preferences are consequences of existing designs, not what led to those designs.
I welcome a world where the average person can interact with the fediverse and take more ownership over the software they use and how they interact with the net.
I've cancelled all monthly subs except Spotify, including netflix and prime, I pirate everything and self-host, I don't use any social media apart from YT, and I use that only with DeArrow, Sponsorblock and uBlock and I will never be okay with ads. If you don't want algorithms in your life, you don't want data harvesting and so on, you don't need to, it was always that easy.
One thing I do disagree with the author on, I hate capitalism so I hate all those corpos and their shitty bloated super-optimized-for-engagement websites.
Oh, cry me a river. For decades corporations were abusing their position. I admit, in recent years it got out of control. But what's stopping you from running your own server? You want your data to be private? Run it on your own rig. Scared of your ISP spying on you? Use VPN. I know it got worse than it used to be like 20 years ago but this is how life works. Things change, learn to adapt.
