As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.

The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.

The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.

As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.

In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access

A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...

I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name.

Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>

I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.

Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?

As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though.

Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.

The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise.

Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.

I enjoyed the article, but I’m skeptical of the “democratize via hardware + networking” path. Most people won’t run a Pi, manage updates/backups, or debug home networking, and that’s fine (as you note).

But I do think we’re reaching a turning point on the software side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is trending toward 0. I’m not naive enough to think every grandma will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to “build me an app to do XYZ,” but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell an assistant: “My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research tips to reduce it.” -> it not only replies with tips, it also proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders, charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes (“add a weekly trend graph,” “don’t nag me after 8pm,” etc.).

This doesn’t fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back toward co-owner and participant.

I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.

It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.

The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple way of running their own node for content hosting.

That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.

The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.

I kind of resonate with a lot of things in the article. My own personal view is that we should make hosting stuff vastly simpler; that's one of the goals of my project, at least my attempt (self promo)

https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse

The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

I think the main issue with federated apps is the identity and moderation. Without identity verification is hard to moderate so you end up with closed systems where some big CO does the moderation at an acceptable level

Unfortunately the transparency of the IP stack means that unless u want whole world to know where u live via one DNS query, you'd need to use a service to proxy back to urself. And if ur paying for remote compute anyways, you could probably just host ur stuff there. Any machine that can proxy traffic back to you is just as capable of hosting ur static stuff there.

This guy has been around long enough to know about NNTP, which is the original distributed people-focused web, but talks about how HTML is some kind of barrier to entry.

HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure

It's all over the place.

I really like this model for individual services.

The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into.

Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful.

I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others.

But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.

We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be technical, financial or related to public services. But as individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in ways that it might matter.

Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.

I agree with the point that big companies have persuaded people that only they can offer ease of publishing content. most of my friends publish on Facebook, X, Instagram etc.

I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker.

So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).

[0] https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/

This is all fine and dandy for websites but what we’ve really been locked out of is email.

You can’t run your own email server. All other large email providers will consider your self hosted emails as spam by default. It understandable why they took this stance (due to actual spam) but it is also awfully convenient it also increases their market power.

We are now at the whim of large corps even if we get a custom domain with them.

I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content.

This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.

I welcome everyone who wants to imagine a better web. One with less control by greedy mega-corporations and data-sniffing state actors. I am not sure how such a web should look, but I am pretty certain we will need it sooner or later. Otherwise we may end up with "hey, we were in the 1990s generation, we knew a free web - now this has been replaced by walled corporate gardens controlled by a few superrich".

> Tiny computers are like tiny homes

They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.

Co-ownership of the hardware is a social not technical problem. Think of questions of trust, responsibility, who has power, who and how contributes, how decisions are made, etc, etc

one note. Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. Maybe if you go back far enough you can say you don't think regional ISPs are "big" but those companies are all gone now

I don't wanna brag but this is pretty much the premise behind my soon-to-be-published scifi novel:

https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/

A web we own better mobile responsive.

It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.

I mean, you do have a point, and I'll quite agree with it. The only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium, or whatever.

Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?

I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that.

You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.

I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on his phone, scroll for a bit and close it.

The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind

I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run.

Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.

If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!

The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.

Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.

I like how it's not mobile friendly.

Very much enjoyed this. Always am shocked that my colleagues on the humanistic/writing studies side don't have a larger contingent actively contributing to web and publication technologies/specs, ceding so much of that space to folks with design backgrounds; they still don't really invest enough time into understanding networked writing

> Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content

Simple to use software... this would be grand!

> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)

Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.

They still manage to screw things up.

Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.

Usability needs to make a comeback.

I personally think the trend we witnessed with clawdbot where people ran to buy mac minis or other ways of self hosting ai agents is going to be a huge wind in the sails for generally hosting things at home.

I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions.

And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.

BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.

Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.

Bro just found fediverse

This is silly nonsense.

>I publish this site via GitHub Pages

Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic, etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to offer the service you're using.

Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and that means you'll need to work for free, too.

I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.

[dead]

Who is this we, kemosabe?