Where have all the websites gone?
Where have all the websites gone?
It feels like all the cool websites from the late 2000s are gone. But maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it is us who vanished.
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I agree with the author for the most part, but I don't think it's just "us." I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There's still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren't for networking I'd have no idea they exist. When I type "build a website" into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?
Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they'd be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
I think it's a more global movement.
When I was recruited at my university in the early 2000s, every teacher had an ftp-accessible space with an http address like myuni.edu/~myname. The more techie ones did html, the fancier ones even added css. Muggles would export html from a Word document.
Then one day, the IT department decided to replace this with a "learning management system". A wysiwyg platform with dozens of modules for videoconferencing courses, homework submission, online exams, and so forth.
Except that the user (the teacher) no longer has control over his or her personal space.
Having worked in a university web team back in the day, these user personal spaces got dropped for various reasons. Teaching staff would push back on increasing password security, so accounts got hacked continuously. People would upload malicious applications through cgi-bins and the like. Maintenance costs skyrocketed. The cost of keeping these going because of these reasons were just not justifiable anymore, and it was much easier to provide them an account on a WYSIWYG system that could be secured, patched and maintained by an external company.
With the rise of online learning portals that included these features as standard, it became less justifiable. Why pay for two products, when one would do.
What we really need today is NextCloud images that are so easy to set up that anyone can run one on their computer, phone, or a cloud hosting service with just a few clicks. And adding in federated services would be the next obvious step — first store all your own stuff where you can access it and share selected bits with others, and then have a small pool where you automatically see the stuff others in your groups have made public.
A problem I’m having these days is that a LOT of resources I used around the start of http never got indexed by Archive.org and are now offline. But people still have that stuff stored locally, and would likely be willing to share if they knew others were interested in it.