The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say.
The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water.
Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere. It would have been something new, something revolutionary.
He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic. When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been."
Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not. What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem.
It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies. If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates.
Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom.
Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn.
P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.
How so?
It's getting to feel like some weird kind of AI McCarthyism where everything is suspected of being manufactured.
Since I have no idea whether something is LLM-generated or not, I've instead decided to argue things on their merits alone.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
Barf.
Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that.
I suppose it takes time.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population.
This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?"
Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean.
You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users.
Sites like HN will be the outlier.
Technological gravity, boss.
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.
And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now [0].
OP is right.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
This one. The open web is freely accessible to anyone on the internet.
> So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
Yes. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not open.
A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups.
A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed.
A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization.
The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors.
Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
