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).
You said you’re not allowed to use a horse on freeway and it’s not a fair comparison. But I think it is exactly that. Freeway is where the majority of traffic is and it’s analogous to some of those major platforms where everyone is nowadays. You can use a horse and go to any place as long as there is land. It’s just not practical to do it.
Yes you can make a website anyone can access but how will they find that website? You’ll need to inform the people in the web, and that’s dominated by those platforms. When people did the reddit blackout thing, reddit removed the posts and moving to lemmy, so without those posts we can’t expect people to know about alternatives. There are probably so many websites that host contents for users to post and such, but how many have we heard about? How many can we find with an internet search?
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.
I agree with you and the original guy – the web is still just a collection of interconnected computers, and it’s still open and mostly inexpensive anyone to host a website on. The trouble for the individual is the maintenance cost, especially if their site sees high traffic. But that brings us back to the idea that you’ll pretty much never see the same userbase as the large social media platforms.
This isn’t to say that the power held by Google, Meta, Snapchat, or TikTok to direct information any which way they would like doesn’t need to be dismantled. It’s just that the web is still free, in the sense that it is just a road to another computer, and you can still prop up a house with an address on that road for relatively cheap.
But the person above said
Aren’t they pretty much saying the exact thing that you’re claiming nobody is saying? That in practice it’s still easy to create your own website, but nobody will use it because 99% of people are on social media platforms, instead
I dunno maybe I’m missing something.
I would go even further and say that if anything it is more possible to not only make your own website but your own servers for just about anything. Cloud computing makes it ridiculously easy to host whatever I want. And no, I don’t have to go to Amazon or Google for it, there are cloud providers everywhere.
Exactly. The main thrust of my point isn’t “the big corporations are okay,” as some people are insisting. My point is that the INTERNET ITSELF is not being made un-free. I don’t like the lying. People are conflating social media platforms with the INTERNET ITSELF. And that’s just incorrect.
It may be suboptimal that billions of users have flocked to a few social media companies, but that does NOT mean that the big corpos have “centralized the web” in some fundamental manner. Everything about the Internet has grown, since the 1990s. Even tiny web platforms have more users and more growth than someone’s piteously small website from 1997. Even if an “independent” website can’t ever achieve the numbers of a large social media empire, is that really what any sane person wants? As far as I’m concerned, large social media platforms are useful for what they’re useful for, and otherwise just serve as a basket for all the normies to sit in.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the normies didn’t even fuck with the internet. They had their own baskets to sit in, and be advertised to, back then. Shopping malls, cinemas, television, department stores, hair salons, etc. That’s where people gathered to get ripped off of a bunch of money, be propagandized at, and spew dumb opinions. Stupidity was just as rampant then as it is now. People just clutch at their pearls and blame corporations for public idiocy, because we can all peer into the massive aquariums of stupidity that are the social media platforms.
Those platforms didn’t invent mass stupidity. They just profit from it.
This feels like you want to rant about something else.
You’re making the assumption anyone not happy with the current state of the internet must be some asshole that got de-platformed for being a Nazi.
You’re also assuming all of this is about wanting people to have to see the things they say.
All of which is a strawman argument.
Fuck those people and their whining about whatever hate nest they were in before being banned from Reddit, but that’s not the only thing happening here. And seeing as you’re from lemmynsfw, I feel like you should know better than to assume that. I mean, hell, why are you here on the fediverse at all if those corporate controlled spaces are so agreeable? You know the Nazis aren’t the only things those platforms eject, censor, or manipulate.
Being against corporations and the centralization of the internet under their umbrella on a few platforms is also about the way that ends up shaping the rest of the web and the standards that go along with it. The internet being primarily shaped by board rooms instead of people, basically. That was always at least somewhat the case but it’s gotten dramatically worse.
And then Elon Musk buys the platform and ruins it. Let’s not act like the people pulling the levers on this shit are always the actual developers or customers or contributors or whatever else you want to pretend makes a corporation do what it does.
Also, what’s on those platforms? What, or who, gives them their value? Who makes the content that drives people to them? A well designed app is worthless without content. Who makes it?
They invested time and money to build a thing, human users are what made it worth a damn, then they make money on those user’s work. So when those human users are fucked over by a board that needs to see the line go up, they have every right to be upset.
This gives “just start your own business” vibes
Also, there’s literally no need to respond to the “but nobody will come” point, because you just made it up. That is so far away from what anyone is complaining about. Seems like you just made it up as a way to misrepresent the anti-corporate position and easily take them down.
There are people in this thread making that complaint…