but wait there’s these spaces

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.”

  • irmoz@reddthat.com
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    9 months ago

    Still acting as if everyone’s complaing that “but no one will go to my website”

    Maybe you’ll realise soon that no one said that, and that the actual complaint is that setting up any kind of functional website is expensive.

    • TechLich@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It’s really not… A domain name is what… $5-10 per year? Web server software is free (nginx, apache, lighttptd, pick your poison). You could run a website on your phone. It doesn’t need much hardware or network requirements unless you start hitting thousands of users.

      A static IP helps but dynamic DNS is a thing. If you need more juice or you’re located somewhere that NATs IPs, a public web host is like $5-10 a month if you’re getting ripped off.

      It costs more to get a streaming service subscription.

      Hosting a popular webapp with tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users interacting with complex backend code and a database (see Lemmy) gets more expensive but it always was and it’s now cheaper than ever.

      Edit: I should point out that I’m pretty anti-corporate and I’m not defending the current state of social media or search results. I’m just also agreeing with the guy who pointed out that the web is still open and you can host a website on a potato.

      • jwiggler@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        I agree with you and the original guy – the web is still just a collection of interconnected computers, and it’s still open and mostly inexpensive anyone to host a website on. The trouble for the individual is the maintenance cost, especially if their site sees high traffic. But that brings us back to the idea that you’ll pretty much never see the same userbase as the large social media platforms.

        This isn’t to say that the power held by Google, Meta, Snapchat, or TikTok to direct information any which way they would like doesn’t need to be dismantled. It’s just that the web is still free, in the sense that it is just a road to another computer, and you can still prop up a house with an address on that road for relatively cheap.

    • jwiggler@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      But the person above said

      While technically true for some but not all places, in reality it’s just not a practical thing anymore as it has been displaced by motorized transportation and social media being where 99% of the people are, respectively.

      You’re allowed to try to make people notice a website with no social media presence in the same way as you’re allowed to run for congress as an independent with a budget of the necessary registration fees plus $5.

      Aren’t they pretty much saying the exact thing that you’re claiming nobody is saying? That in practice it’s still easy to create your own website, but nobody will use it because 99% of people are on social media platforms, instead

      I dunno maybe I’m missing something.