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."
I remember when it was common for ISPs to give you web hosting as a standard feature. I think my first ISP included 5MB, which was a lot considering most people were still on dial-up.
The web is still open and distributed. Its just that everyone decided to concentrate in a few areas (reddit, twitter, Facebook, etc) and the thing that excited us about the internet back in the day (the web) has become an ai generated, Chinese dropshipper ghost town or appified.
It doesn't help that more popular websites all became the legacy ui for mobile apps.
I'm also saying this as someone who doesn't really go to web forums or websites anymore and mostly uses apps for things since I'm on my phone a lot more than on a desktop or laptop when not at work.
I do go to web forums for my hobbies (brewing and growing things) but either those websites tried to optimize for mobile and became unusable on mobile or they haven't optimized at all and its like reading text for ants.
And yes you can make your own website today but the signal to noise ratio of your single website among everything else out these makes the chances of anyone visiting you remarkably low.
Seconded. I really like the fediverse. It has just a little of that wild-west old web feel. Just need people to make a geocities instance with family vacation photos and the like again.
While not entirely correct when reading the meme literally my feeling or interpretation is that the โdistributionโ applies to what youโre saying. The web used to be a lot โflatterโ and egalitarian. Anyone could make a crappy html site for their family web page and everyone ran the same bbs software for hobby or other interest group forums.
But just like you said, the concentration of power in these megasites is huge. It really crushed what the web used to be - but they arenโt the only problem. The search engines that led us to these smaller sites no longer work the same or have vanished alongside the proliferation of SEO and preferred sites thanks to ad revenue. So the chance of a smaller site getting seen are next to zero. No ad revenue, no traffic to drive ad revenue, and too niche or low-budget to compete with SEO sites.
It isn't difficult to optimize for mobile if you know what you're doing. It's downright easy if you use a mobile first approach to website development.
I guess. But doing forums on mobile is also aggravating af. I might just be too used to desktop displays when it comes to forums. I really hate contracting/expanding web pages. I hate workflows for typing on mobile devices.
This is why I support places like Neocities. It isn't great if you want to make a website for your business, but it is great for just making and maintaining a small website for fun.
Or is it? One access point to many posts, regardless where they are hosted doesn't sound decentralized. The backend might be, but the UX doesn't feel that way.
The web also used to be a minefield of gore/CP/snuff videos/porn links.
To the point clicking a hyperlink was a gamble between seeing what you wanted to see and seeing a child getting their heart cut out by the Mexican cartel.
Edit: Do y'all not remember the early days of the internet? After AOL but during Google's infancy? The internet was the literal wild west. Everything was permitted and it was hard af to block shit you didn't want to see. So if you saw a hyperlink, you had no fuckin idea what was on the other side of it. It could've been anything from a Rick roll to a fuckin snuff video. Not to mention the websites back then. Funnyjunk.com showed gore regularly. Live Leak was a normal viewing occurrence. You could even be scrolling on a forum site and accidentally watch the most fucked thing you'll ever see.