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> free webspace is dead Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting w

> free webspace is dead Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting with free plans, and stuff like Github pages and Netlify for those with a bit more tech skills. Way better than the times when you had Geocities and such injecting ads into your site. > the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it) No need for those to build a website. Any cheap Android phone can do it. > ftp is dead Nope, the previously mentioned shared hosting providers still offer it. > HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design) Old-school HTML pretty much works the same, and is actually quite fine on both desktop and mobile screens. -- Frankly, I don't think the problem is that making your own site has gotten any harder, it's that there was no FB/IG back then. Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.

hedora 8y ago
> Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place. I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos. Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.
- FussyZeus 8y ago
  Well Facebook was built on the failures of MySpace which in turn was built on the failures of Friendster, and so on. People who wanted their own space were always making their own space, and the rest would go to whichever social network was the most relevant at the time.
  - mtberatwork 8y ago
    Facebook wasn't built on MySpace's failures, they were both operating at the same time. People moved to Facebook because it was more intimate and less commercialized while MySpace turned into a dodgy spam heap.
    - FussyZeus 8y ago
      And that was the failure; one Facebook learned from and has applied, with varying intensity.

hedora 8y ago

> Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place. I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos. Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.

FussyZeus 8y ago
Well Facebook was built on the failures of MySpace which in turn was built on the failures of Friendster, and so on. People who wanted their own space were always making their own space, and the rest would go to whichever social network was the most relevant at the time.
- mtberatwork 8y ago
  Facebook wasn't built on MySpace's failures, they were both operating at the same time. People moved to Facebook because it was more intimate and less commercialized while MySpace turned into a dodgy spam heap.
  - FussyZeus 8y ago
    And that was the failure; one Facebook learned from and has applied, with varying intensity.