FREE AND OPEN

The original spirit of the web is dead.

In march of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, envisioned a democratic space for freely sharing knowledge, information and research. The resulting protocols and standards evolved into the “World Wide Web” we know today.

During the early years of the web this spirit thrived: Users built their own websites, openly sharing passions, information, and more. And even throughout the 90s and 00s, this spirit persisted. From hand-rolled HTML pages to vibrant WordPress blogs, a netizens’ pride was their personal website.

BORN OF LOGIC, RAISED BY SCIENCE

The web was designed for scientists and academics.

HTML and CSS, while not complex, require some technical understanding. Setting up a Web server a daunting task to the layperson. Networking might as well be black magic to most.

And so, as the web grew and attracted more non-technical people, services evolved to simplify these tasks. Web hosting services like GeoCities and Angelfire made networking and hosting more accessible. Later, WordPress and other content management systems hid much of the code. Finally, platforms and social media emerged. Their simple “You post, we host” model grew them a massive userbase.

WALLED GARDEN RISING HIGH

Death by megacorporation

The ease of having someone else host, serve, and feed you content has made these platforms the primary method of engagement with the Web. It has gotten to a point that most users frequent 4 sites at most, if they even leave their apps.

This degradation has led to a slow but steady downwards trend in quality, human-centric websites. Content these days is made to farm attention, capture eyeballs for just long enough to blitz the next ad onto your retina, trying to make you a better consumer, at the cost of truthfulness and quality.

To serve these ads more effectively and perfectly exploit each and every users subconcious weaknesses, platforms collect any and all user data to serve ever more hyper-targeted advertisements. This is a creeping invasion of user privacy, inserting themselves in as many areas of your life as possible to siphon off any information that could help build a more accurate user profile.

Furthermore, they retain the freedom to delete, suppress and ban content that is deemed harmful to their advertising revenue, robbing you of potentially valuable perspectives. They claim to ban this “harmful content” to protect their users, but a public company such as Google or Facebook is mandated to pursue shareholder value. If they ban “harmful content”, they ban it because it endangers their image, their relationships with financial backers, or the publics view of their leadership.

This dependence on megacorporations gives them the power to dictate how your ideas reach the world. The once-free exchange of ideas gets filtered through the lens of shareholder value.

OWN YOUR WEB PRESENCE

Not allowing the internet to slowly morph into a corporate playground and reviving the original spirit of the internet can help you gain:

  • Freedom from censorship: No longer be at the mercy of platform algorithms and policies that can suppress content at will.
  • Data sovereignty: Control who has access to your personal information and protect your privacy from unwanted eyes.
  • Content ownership: Own your content outright, without fear of it being removed or altered by a third party.
  • Technical and creative autonomy: Freely design and manage the functionality of your website and create something to your exact wants.
  • A more resilient web: Contribute to a decentralized and diverse internet ecosystem, reducing centralization on a few dominant megacorporations.

THE DO IT YOURSELF ETHOS

So if you’re technically minded, overly curious, a tinkerer, or just very ideologically motivated, consider taking a stroll through the following pages if their approach to hosting yourself speaks to you:

The IndieWeb

The IndieWeb is a community project of independent personal websites based on the shared principles of owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site, and owning your content.

HUGO Static Site Generator

HUGO is a open-source static site generator. If you’re using an existing theme, this is a very quick and efficient way of creating your own blog or website, and what I am using for this site.

LandChad

LandChad is a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords by showing them how to setup websites, email servers, chat servers and everything in between. It contains documentation on setting up self-hosted services of many kinds.

NeoCities

While I don’t recommend depending on a platform, NeoCities, offers free hosting and is a great start into designing your website without diving into the deep end with self-hosting right off. They have many very interesting custom websites to use as inspiration in building your own.

Use them as a stepping stone to build a website and gather knowledge.

Hosting

Running your own Webserver from home is not always possible, so if you need to rent a small server somewhere, I have personally had great experiences with Hetzner and Linode.

Closing thoughts

I hope that I could motivate you to take part and build your own corner of the internet today. We could use more weird personal websites these days. If you do decide to build one, send me a mail so I can admire it. Happy hacking!