4 ms·

I thought this was a well-written piece. I would love to see a "return to the internet" movement in 2018. The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn d

I thought this was a well-written piece. I would love to see a "return to the internet" movement in 2018. The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn digital land." And I think this is the way forward. In 2005 or the pre-FB era being a "techie" was a personal distinction. I feel that now most people have become "techies" in varying degrees, either out of necessity or general interest. I mention this because I think I think there's so many more people now that are fully capable of operating their own site or blog than there were in the pre-FB era or the pre-smart phone era. I think one of the greatest joys of "getting online" back in the day was the sense of adventure that the internet provided - strange, funny, obscure, intriguing, informative "websites" lurked everywhere. And stumbling on one of them and bookmarking them is/was a strange thrill. Contrast this to scrolling through a uniform looking "newsfeed" you have no control over. I think something like a "back to the internet" movement just might make it's own momentum.

Htyv 9y ago
Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites. It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites" What giant corporations don't want to build their own sites? >"It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time." There might be a sea change in this though. And I think with things like Squarespace et al you can create a slick looking site for yourself with both minimal time and cost.
ebullientocelot 9y ago
I was very proud of my Geocities page back in the day! It was pretty exciting writing out the url on little scraps of paper at school and passing them out to my friends. An unreadable storm of horrendous style choices, including by not limited to very obnoxious flashing fonts and inconsistent use of WAY TOO MANY CAPITALS--this was MY site and it felt good. Back when I had FB I never had the same feeling from it.
- 0x445442 9y ago
  Neocities still has a number of sites like this and a lot of helpful tooling as well as IPFS support.
togetherasone 9y ago
Would you say that social media is alienating, in the sense that it has routinized man's acquisition of information and knowledge? That the internet should serve as a tool for our own purposes, and not vice versa?
stickfigure 9y ago
The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy. The only way to ensure that your content doesn't get reshared without your permission is to create a tightly locked-down walled garden. If you're really worried, you need some sort of DRM too. And if you're really really worried, you need global laws that ban software that breaks DRM. You can't have private, distributed data. You have to pick.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy." Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation? Content control, copyright and DRM are orthogonal to the issue of privacy. Also I don't really understand the use of the phrase "the distributed internet" to distinguish from "silos" and "walled gardens." The internet is by design distributed. FB while being a walled-garden is still very much "on" the internet.
  - intopieces 9y ago
    >Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation? A website that any old person can access means it's a website that any number of bots can crawl over and aggregate. Now you're basically back where we started with Facebook.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      There's a big difference between content aggregation (done by all search engines) and behavioral profiling (done by advertising companies, including social media).
      - intopieces 9y ago
        Sure, but that fact that the latter is supposedly not done on personal web pages doesn't mean it can't / won't be done on the data on, say, Mastodon instances.
aaavl2821 9y ago
I am not an engineer but also am not a huge social media fan -- I like more control over what i share and the format I use to share it. Instead of using linked in / FB pages / medium, I've been building personal websites for friends and my own businesses, first using Wordpress, but found that just making simple static sites is much easier for me and more flexible. However, Ive had trouble with super basic deployment stuff and i haven't found many resources to help. Ive just been using Cpanel, manual ftp updates, shared hosting etc, but have found this setup is super limiting, and I didn't really know much about hosting options before setting hosting up I just found netlify, which seems great: integration with github, easy ssl certs, free, but just changing the DNS to point to netlify has been confusing, and I haven't been able to fix it. I also setup a site for a friend who was using wix (so terrible...) and can't figure out how to get hosting switched. I feel stupid for not being able to do this, and have been able to figure out how to do a lot of stuff that should be more complex (building web apps, data analysis with Python, etc) but I've struggled with basics of deployment A good set of resources for people who aren't engineers but have some HTML / CSS and programming knowledge, but don't have any devops or professional engineering background would be really useful imo

Htyv 9y ago

Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites. It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites" What giant corporations don't want to build their own sites? >"It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time." There might be a sea change in this though. And I think with things like Squarespace et al you can create a slick looking site for yourself with both minimal time and cost.

ebullientocelot 9y ago

I was very proud of my Geocities page back in the day! It was pretty exciting writing out the url on little scraps of paper at school and passing them out to my friends. An unreadable storm of horrendous style choices, including by not limited to very obnoxious flashing fonts and inconsistent use of WAY TOO MANY CAPITALS--this was MY site and it felt good. Back when I had FB I never had the same feeling from it.

0x445442 9y ago
Neocities still has a number of sites like this and a lot of helpful tooling as well as IPFS support.

togetherasone 9y ago

Would you say that social media is alienating, in the sense that it has routinized man's acquisition of information and knowledge? That the internet should serve as a tool for our own purposes, and not vice versa?

stickfigure 9y ago

The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy. The only way to ensure that your content doesn't get reshared without your permission is to create a tightly locked-down walled garden. If you're really worried, you need some sort of DRM too. And if you're really really worried, you need global laws that ban software that breaks DRM. You can't have private, distributed data. You have to pick.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy." Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation? Content control, copyright and DRM are orthogonal to the issue of privacy. Also I don't really understand the use of the phrase "the distributed internet" to distinguish from "silos" and "walled gardens." The internet is by design distributed. FB while being a walled-garden is still very much "on" the internet.
- intopieces 9y ago
  >Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation? A website that any old person can access means it's a website that any number of bots can crawl over and aggregate. Now you're basically back where we started with Facebook.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    There's a big difference between content aggregation (done by all search engines) and behavioral profiling (done by advertising companies, including social media).
    - intopieces 9y ago
      Sure, but that fact that the latter is supposedly not done on personal web pages doesn't mean it can't / won't be done on the data on, say, Mastodon instances.

aaavl2821 9y ago

I am not an engineer but also am not a huge social media fan -- I like more control over what i share and the format I use to share it. Instead of using linked in / FB pages / medium, I've been building personal websites for friends and my own businesses, first using Wordpress, but found that just making simple static sites is much easier for me and more flexible. However, Ive had trouble with super basic deployment stuff and i haven't found many resources to help. Ive just been using Cpanel, manual ftp updates, shared hosting etc, but have found this setup is super limiting, and I didn't really know much about hosting options before setting hosting up I just found netlify, which seems great: integration with github, easy ssl certs, free, but just changing the DNS to point to netlify has been confusing, and I haven't been able to fix it. I also setup a site for a friend who was using wix (so terrible...) and can't figure out how to get hosting switched. I feel stupid for not being able to do this, and have been able to figure out how to do a lot of stuff that should be more complex (building web apps, data analysis with Python, etc) but I've struggled with basics of deployment A good set of resources for people who aren't engineers but have some HTML / CSS and programming knowledge, but don't have any devops or professional engineering background would be really useful imo