When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home.
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I see no reason why we could not bend it back that way. I have some friends that run a mid sized ISP that somehow managed to stay independent, they run fiber to the home and have a large enough customer base that it might be interesting to see if they're open to removing any blocks on symmetrical links for qualified users.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
I've been fighting my ISP for years trying to get an upload speed that is not over TWENTY FIVE TIMES slower than my download speed. It took an FCC complaint for them to even get back to me.
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.
> there is discussion and a sense of community here
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean?
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
I know indie web camp has a thing against hosting services and probably the small web people would also say blogspot and wordpress and wix are too corpo.
So imho drawing the distinction at not requiring payment/login works as an open web definition. And if self-hosting is a requirement for some people, there are other terms to use.
Youtube, Substack, Medium and the like are open-ish. They're far more of a heavyweight platform than a web host or publishing tool. They could become walled with the flip of a switch. And they can be ad-walled which is testing the limits of openness.
I feel like you're describing pretty much every industry ever.
You could be talking about food, or insurance or cars or planes or health or (dare I say it?) politics.
Of course there are well understood commercial reasons for industries consolidating. Primarily because consumers prefer it.
But while your post is good on rhetoric, it still lacks the concrete definition I seek. Specifically what hardware, OS, VM software, site-creation tools, subscription options, advertising networks, payment processors, and so on must I use to reach "Open web" status?
You're describing a world, which is a fair desire. But when I go to the local bakery to pitch an online presence, what exactly am I pitching, and how does this pitch serve the goals of that bakery?
I get the concept of this at a principle level. But how does it play out for you? I mean, to what extent do you succumb to the monoculture because while principles are good, you live in the real world?
So, like, what phone OS do you use? There's not much choice but did you choose Android over iOS because it's more open? Or did you go the whole way and use PalmOS or Symbian? Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly? Do you choose Bing over Google?
I say this not to judge but rather to highlight the wide gap between principle and reality. We live in a real world, and the world consolidates behind a small number of providers because that has proven to be a beneficial strategy. (And yes, those providers can then abuse us.)
But I don't want to choose between 20 political parties, or 10 credit card processors or have to build apps for 15 phone OS's.
The sadness of losing the early days of choice and wildness are not limited to the web. Before that we lost the 20 brands of PC (all with custom OS) that we had in the 80s. Every new industry goes through this process, and every generation misses the wild heady days of its youth.
I don't have a smart phone or a mobile phone .. and yes, I do stay in touch with a good many people via land lines, email, some encrypted apps, radio and IRL face to face conversation.
I pick aircraft for their stability at near ground level flight, Cresco STOL's for example, and or ability to land on water, have high wings, mostly twin props, etc. Quite fond of Robinson R22 and Cabri G2 helicopters.
Typically elections here have 10 or so parties, three or four major parties, several minor single issue parties, and 10 or so independants in many districts. It's a preferential ranked voting system that allows you to 1, 2, 3 your main interests and tail off there if that's all you care to do.
I still largely use paper maps (despite having processed a great deal of digital GIS data into digital mapping pipelines).
So, yeah - we're happy being off to the side and not part of the great urban monoculture.
Props to you, you're further along that track than I am. Running a business has been one of main obstacles to cutting more of these ties. But it's getting there.
Props to my father, really - he's still kicking along, born in 1935, and fairly adept at living in places that lack any modern urban infrastructure.
Although, TBH, he's fallen prey to the clutches of the iPhone (sans any account stuff and pretty much limited to phone calls, text messages, and logging his daily walks).
I am working with smart phones for other people, they're more and more integrated with tractors, drones, boom sprays, ag equipment .. but many people are mindful of routing data and control through { cloud } which often means the US and are still attached to ways of working that can still work when { stuff breaks }, like internet connections, US clouds.
Fuel and fertilizer is a big issue ATM .. there are a lot of people all wanting to seed seperate 4,000 Ha farm blocks ATM - and that ability to do or not do so will have a rolling impact about the world in a few months.
I've been telling everybody around me to prepare for a massive price increase in various must-haves because I don't see how we're going to avoid that.
Fertilizer and fuel are a massive problem and once reserves run out (and we're not that far from that depending on where you live, in some places we're already there) the problems will multiply very rapidly. Trump is the biggest idiot that ever sat in a seat of power and the whole world (but of course, as always, the poorer parts first) will end up paying the price, and if the harvest is bad quite possibly the ultimate one.
> Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly?
I stopped flying entirely.
> Do you choose Bing over Google?
Still using Google but working very hard on moving away from it.
Yes, I too live in the real world and I'm a really annoying customer for banks, insurance companies and my government by insisting they serve me without bending over and adopting some eco-system that I do not subscribe to. I have a need to interact with my bank, my government, my insurance company and my kids schools and I point blank refuse to be sucked into any of their app driven eco systems.
> what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.
I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.
No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape.
The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors.
Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
> These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
This is precisely the mechanism behind the 'eternal September'. And as such outlets dry up HN is attracting more and more of the overflow and will eventually go that way as well.
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
Youtube is a complete accident. If early browsers had simply properly embedded video and there would have been a reasonable device independent standard then we wouldn't have needed youtube at all. Any website would have been able to host its own videos.
I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings.
People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form.
You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on.
If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home.
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I see no reason why we could not bend it back that way. I have some friends that run a mid sized ISP that somehow managed to stay independent, they run fiber to the home and have a large enough customer base that it might be interesting to see if they're open to removing any blocks on symmetrical links for qualified users.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
I've been fighting my ISP for years trying to get an upload speed that is not over TWENTY FIVE TIMES slower than my download speed. It took an FCC complaint for them to even get back to me.
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
Fuck boosting engagement.
There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
"The lesson is not just to resist. It is to grow up."
Barf.
Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
It’s not “dying” but it’s being “killed”? Come on…
Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
> I don't do social media
You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.
And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now [0].
OP is right.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.
> there is discussion and a sense of community here
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
I don’t believe Hacker News is social media, it’s news aggregator/message board.
Social media requires social network effects, where a large part of the draw is the network effect, and that just isn’t a part of HN.
There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
d) forced Messenger and read receipts can be addiction especially given bullshit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 so FB wants to subvert email
I'm fine with people railing against all this. I just want people to quantify it more
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
> As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
This is already happening on HN now via HackerSmacker [0].
I've found a couple HN users who have that have apparently been using it to follow and target me with comments whenever I post.
[0] - https://hackersmacker.org/
Highly annoying. Hn should block that thing from linking.
> You do realize Hacker News is social media right?
No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data.
> unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years
They've been mining every byte of data that's visible on the web for years. That doesn't make every single website on the Internet social media.
Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? Will HN?
> Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children?
I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you?
> Will HN?
I guess we'd have to ask the HN moderators that question.
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean?
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
> Is any site with a login "not the open web"?
This one. The open web is freely accessible to anyone on the internet.
> So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
Yes. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not open.
Thanks for the feedback. So hosting on say Wix is still Open Web?
I suppose, is the converse free? Is a site that allows access without a login Open Web? Like say YouTube?
I know indie web camp has a thing against hosting services and probably the small web people would also say blogspot and wordpress and wix are too corpo.
So imho drawing the distinction at not requiring payment/login works as an open web definition. And if self-hosting is a requirement for some people, there are other terms to use.
Youtube, Substack, Medium and the like are open-ish. They're far more of a heavyweight platform than a web host or publishing tool. They could become walled with the flip of a switch. And they can be ad-walled which is testing the limits of openness.
A world where hyperscalers don't dictate the technology choices of 99.99% of people and totally control distribution.
A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups.
A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed.
A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization.
The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.
I feel like you're describing pretty much every industry ever.
You could be talking about food, or insurance or cars or planes or health or (dare I say it?) politics.
Of course there are well understood commercial reasons for industries consolidating. Primarily because consumers prefer it.
But while your post is good on rhetoric, it still lacks the concrete definition I seek. Specifically what hardware, OS, VM software, site-creation tools, subscription options, advertising networks, payment processors, and so on must I use to reach "Open web" status?
You're describing a world, which is a fair desire. But when I go to the local bakery to pitch an online presence, what exactly am I pitching, and how does this pitch serve the goals of that bakery?
The no monoculture one is the big one for me. And I think 2008 is very generous.
I get the concept of this at a principle level. But how does it play out for you? I mean, to what extent do you succumb to the monoculture because while principles are good, you live in the real world?
So, like, what phone OS do you use? There's not much choice but did you choose Android over iOS because it's more open? Or did you go the whole way and use PalmOS or Symbian? Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly? Do you choose Bing over Google?
I say this not to judge but rather to highlight the wide gap between principle and reality. We live in a real world, and the world consolidates behind a small number of providers because that has proven to be a beneficial strategy. (And yes, those providers can then abuse us.)
But I don't want to choose between 20 political parties, or 10 credit card processors or have to build apps for 15 phone OS's.
The sadness of losing the early days of choice and wildness are not limited to the web. Before that we lost the 20 brands of PC (all with custom OS) that we had in the 80s. Every new industry goes through this process, and every generation misses the wild heady days of its youth.
As a legit answer,
I don't have a smart phone or a mobile phone .. and yes, I do stay in touch with a good many people via land lines, email, some encrypted apps, radio and IRL face to face conversation.
I pick aircraft for their stability at near ground level flight, Cresco STOL's for example, and or ability to land on water, have high wings, mostly twin props, etc. Quite fond of Robinson R22 and Cabri G2 helicopters.
Typically elections here have 10 or so parties, three or four major parties, several minor single issue parties, and 10 or so independants in many districts. It's a preferential ranked voting system that allows you to 1, 2, 3 your main interests and tail off there if that's all you care to do.
I still largely use paper maps (despite having processed a great deal of digital GIS data into digital mapping pipelines).
So, yeah - we're happy being off to the side and not part of the great urban monoculture.
Props to you, you're further along that track than I am. Running a business has been one of main obstacles to cutting more of these ties. But it's getting there.
Props to my father, really - he's still kicking along, born in 1935, and fairly adept at living in places that lack any modern urban infrastructure.
Although, TBH, he's fallen prey to the clutches of the iPhone (sans any account stuff and pretty much limited to phone calls, text messages, and logging his daily walks).
I am working with smart phones for other people, they're more and more integrated with tractors, drones, boom sprays, ag equipment .. but many people are mindful of routing data and control through { cloud } which often means the US and are still attached to ways of working that can still work when { stuff breaks }, like internet connections, US clouds.
Fuel and fertilizer is a big issue ATM .. there are a lot of people all wanting to seed seperate 4,000 Ha farm blocks ATM - and that ability to do or not do so will have a rolling impact about the world in a few months.
I've been telling everybody around me to prepare for a massive price increase in various must-haves because I don't see how we're going to avoid that.
Fertilizer and fuel are a massive problem and once reserves run out (and we're not that far from that depending on where you live, in some places we're already there) the problems will multiply very rapidly. Trump is the biggest idiot that ever sat in a seat of power and the whole world (but of course, as always, the poorer parts first) will end up paying the price, and if the harvest is bad quite possibly the ultimate one.
> So, like, what phone OS do you use?
Nokia N800.
> Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly?
I stopped flying entirely.
> Do you choose Bing over Google?
Still using Google but working very hard on moving away from it.
Yes, I too live in the real world and I'm a really annoying customer for banks, insurance companies and my government by insisting they serve me without bending over and adopting some eco-system that I do not subscribe to. I have a need to interact with my bank, my government, my insurance company and my kids schools and I point blank refuse to be sucked into any of their app driven eco systems.
I'll take it to court if that's what it takes.
> what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.
I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214
The idea of open web only works when only a small portion of the population access the internet.
Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
No, the analogy does not hold. All free male citizens of Athens participated in Athenean democracy of ancient times, which achieved serious successes. All citizens of Switzerland participate in the direct democracy, and Switzerland is in a pretty good shape.
The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors.
Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
> These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188182
This is precisely the mechanism behind the 'eternal September'. And as such outlets dry up HN is attracting more and more of the overflow and will eventually go that way as well.
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
Youtube is a complete accident. If early browsers had simply properly embedded video and there would have been a reasonable device independent standard then we wouldn't have needed youtube at all. Any website would have been able to host its own videos.
So it is dying.
I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.
[dead]
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
What is the point of playing guitar any more? You're not going to be another Elvis. You're not going to be another Robert Plant or Paco de Lucia, even if you play equally good. The world is choke-full of excellent guitar music recordings.
People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
Your metaphor doesn't apply. It's not pointless to create a new site because better ones exist. It's pointless because it will get scraped and summarized/remixed for someone else's profit, if the few sites people use for discovery even deign to index it. And the people who do consume it will be too lazy to read it in its original unsummarized form.
You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
What one earth are you talking about? What ever was the motivation for creating a new site? How has it changed?
Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on.
If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
I am happy to ignore the scrapers (I block them wholesale) and will probably move to something even more drastic in the near future.