"because a good website is the only way to push back to Big Tech and it's practices"

I agree with this. But what really spins my beanie is the amount of power a website gives a single person, small business or non-profit. It's really amazing.

So true! I hear small businesses and freelancers complain about being kicked of Twitter, OnlyFans, Youtube, Facebook, etc.

One might not immediately make money with a website (although you sure can!), but the moment you are kicked of some platform, you have a safe haven to fall back on. A place where you can share the same textual or visual media with your visitors(/followers/friends/fans/connections). But instead of organizing a party and renting some space, you make it a house party, where you are the host.

The only moderators on your website are you, your webhosting provider, and the government (I call it GovMod).

Thanks for your reply!

My biggest concern is for the people relying on the big platforms you mentioned but not using them to build their own lists and lines of communication with their clients.

I recently heard a podcast by the comedian Kevin Hart. In the early 2000s, when he was an unknown and social media didn't exist, he would have a sign-up sheet at his shows, where people could enter their names and email addresses. This way, he'd maintain an email list for each city.

Each time he scheduled a return appearance in that city, he'd send out an email letting people know the date and time of the show and a link to buy tickets.

Today, people build their followings on social networks that barely let you even post links to your own site (Instagram). Had Twitter/IG/FB existed back then, people would have no way to maintain independent contact lists.

Now, I would probably never seen his email because it would be filtered out with or lost in the thousands of other promotions.

Spam is a huge problem.

Agree. The big platforms make it all way too comfortable for everybody.

And I get it completely. Over the course of years, Google and the likes probably have more phone numbers of my contacts than I have. Only three weeks ago I made a text file with every name and number in it, so I have a safe copy for myself.

This is the type of thing people mean when they bring up regulations for big tech companies.

You shouldn't have to worry about suddenly losing your list of contacts. Google should be required by law to provide your data to you in cases such as account termination.

> One might not immediately make money with a website (although you sure can!)

Not if you get banned from payment processors. Which is a thing that certainly happens

True. This might be less problematic for freelancers or small businesses in Europe though. Paying by regular bank transfer is easily possible between all member states (and even more countries!). All you need is - and everybody has - an IBAN bank account. Not even your administration has to be adapted for international business (as long as you don't grow that big). The only downside is waiting one meager business day for your money, so it's not really instant payment.

I don't know about the US, South America, Asia or Russia, but I guess people have good old bank accounts, have an internetbanking app installed on their smartphone, and sometimes have to pay money to a neighboring country? It might not be as easy as here, or just completely different, but I guess there are ways to skip payment processors, as the fee-stealing middle man that a lot of people take for granted.

> Oh, and RSS is not dead. Not at all (thanks WordPress, for putting a feed on every instance). RSS is the only workable way to make the web social again.

What we need, IMO, is more experimental protocols to enrich the web, which maverick developers can use to good effect, the same way we did originally with RSS. More browsers forking Chromium or Servo to add support for these new features. Hell, maybe even something that doesn't resemble the Web at all. David didn't beat Goliath and nor did Heracles beat the Hydra by using 'the same old weapon but better'. The only thing that wins is a paradigm shift.

> is more experimental protocols to enrich the web,

New protocols are DOA until we significantly nerf the incentives to "own" the user.

IOW it's not gonna happen until we outlaw anything that resembles spying on users. And maybe also ads generally.

> And maybe also ads generally.

This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Right now, a lot of people with adblockers are benefiting from a situation fausse where they free-ride on the ad-click revenue generated by others. I think in some people's minds this leads to an impossible expectation that they can continue to enjoy freely provided services, provided at considerable expense to the service provider, without paying anything or even having the inconvenience of having to see some ads.

I'm all for abolishing ads, but it needs a serious proposal, not just "what we have right now, but no ads". I'd also be all for an online payment mechanism embedded into browsers through a new protocol - something like https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ but designed with more of a view towards paywalls - but I'm under no illusion: most people's revealed preference is consistently for ads over paying anything, as many startups in that space have discovered.

> This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Why?

Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

Others would survive by charging (more) money.

Some would be replaced by protocols (several social networks would be among those replaced). Clients & hosting may be paid, or not. It'd work out fine.

Most of the rest isn't valuable.

> Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

> It'd work out fine.

You have no idea whether it would work out fine. Neither do I. I'm intensely sceptical of anyone who issues hand-waving proclamations about how a dramatic change would affect an almost indescribably complex system.

You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

> Most of the rest isn't valuable.

Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

> It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS). Or probably a dozen other ways. It's far from insurmountable, there's just no motivation to fix that now (because there's no demand for it). That's the story for most of the services that could be replaced by [two or three existing protocols] + [some not-exactly-rocket-science UX effort]. The commercial side of it is solved by... hosting videos. Yourself, or paying a service to do it for you (these services already exist, despite YouTube's dominance, all the way from simple video-hosting to full white-label video streaming services).

> Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer. A perfect replacement for them is a book of Sudoku puzzles. People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good. And that's after dismissing the ~75% of the Web that's spammy garbage of negative value (because it drowns out better material covering the same thing).

> You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

Beats accepting the wishes and preferences that created the bad situation that exists now, right? Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer? Has zip to do with a lack of rationality on my part, though it's easier to dismiss ideas if one first paints them as irrational.

We can have useful, widely-used open protocols or we can have spying (ads may or may not also be on the table, but take away the spying and there goes much of the advantage of the huge tech companies, anyway). The two very clearly cannot co-exist. I'd prefer the former.

> I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

This isn't necessarily wrong. I personally use Gigablast, which is excellent and entirely independent (unlike many 'alternative' search engines it isn't backed by Google or, more often, Bing).

However, pace the problem of other minds, I am not the only person in the world, and many people enjoy and rely on Google. I think this conversation is continually falling into the trap of muddling up what you personally prefer vs what would most satisfy the majority of people, and thus achieve adoption.

It's not a good solution if most people consider it worse for their needs, irrespective of your own personal preferences, or your feelings about what other people should like.

> The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS).

Come on. This is as near as possible to an objectively worse solution. Again, I think you're struggling to see beyond your own preferences and abilities, to how most people in the world interact with technology.

> It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer.

I refer back to my previous sentence. [Also, both Snake and old Nokias are exactly as available today as they ever were, and I see no sign whatsoever of this happening, despite the clear advantages in price, battery, uptime, etc.]

> People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good.

I refer back to my penultimate sentence.

> Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer?

I refer back to my antepenultimate sentence. The answer is: because you are one person in a world of seven billion, and your solution is not going to go anywhere if the mass of people don't like it.

---

Look, in summary, this is not a useful conversation if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences. I don't care if you think most people should spend their time knitting or listening to Brahms. I'm trying to come up with a solution that satisfies people, and, therefore, can actually compete.

You seem to be assuming I don't consume a bunch of content that could be replaced with Snake Game or Solitaire at ~0 loss of enjoyment, because it's incredibly low-value entertainment, so am somehow looking down on others. What do you think this is? That I'm doing right now? The value, in every sense, of nearly all online activities can be found next to "marginal" in the dictionary.

[EDIT]

> if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences

Definitely a complete characterization of my views on this, and of these posts. You've looked carefully, considered thoughtfully, and discovered the entire thing. Very good.

You make a very good point about adblockers having that negative second-order effect where they continue to let people have the expectation of getting things that are intrinsically expensive (storage, bandwidth, sysadmins) for free - I didn't think about that before.

As for alternative funding models - why not microtransactions? Attaching an explicit price tag onto website access (subscription model) or individual media/document objects (standard "pay for what you use" model) would have some other beneficial effects, such as reducing extraneous media consumption (mindlessly scrolling for hours suddenly starts costing you money, better to buy a book and get value out of it) - most advertisements are a mental cancer that we should try to get rid of anyway.

Thanks for the kind reply, I appreciate it. I do think that's the kind of mindset that adblockers are inculcating in people - they don't quite realise the extent of all the costs that are borne by everyone else. Perhaps especially so because the sort of person who uses an adblocker is probably the sort of person who can't imagine himself clicking an ad, and so underestimates the amount of revenue made from ads. And thus also likely underestimates all the costs which that revenue pays for. (And then you end up in a predicament like the very-self-aware fellow in the other subthread, insisting that Google and YouTube and Facebook could be run by non-profits, and 'it would all work out fine'.)

As for alternative funding models - which is definitely a much more interesting conversation - I actually considered starting a company in exactly that space. I have some experience in fintech ("very credentialised" according to my former Anglo-German lead investor, haha) and so I thought I could pull it off. I couldn't, and it didn't get past the MVP stage ... luckily. The trouble is that people aren't willing to pay even the $0.01 to access an article. There's something deep in people's brains which is averse to spending money, no matter how small the amount.

I believe - and this is more second-hand evidence from other founders rather than first-hand - that the approaches which typically see the most success are those where people 'top up' a certain amount and then spend it gradually. That doesn't set off the same psychological alarm that directly spending money does. However, that kind of approach would be much harder to implement - especially as something like a browser protocol - because it would require holding probably-vast sums of money in escrow[0], which is an extremely burdensome legal and regulatory position to be in.

Personally I think Brave - much as it's a stupid company started by a stupid clever man - might be onto the right big idea here (despite getting a million little things wrong, and alienating virtually all of its users and most of its non-users too). The core idea of buying attention tokens which are paid out to websites to which you pay attention is a brilliant one. However, it needs a lot more refining, since the crude version of that model is not particularly well-equipped to deal with the difference between e.g. a movie-streaming site, on the one hand, and a shorthand news site, or even a site like Twitter, on the other hand. I may well watch a movie for 180 minutes but get less value from it than I do a tweet. So attention != value, or at least the concept of 'attention' needs refining to be more than simply 'time I spend on a website', but there's a promising kernel there, I think.

[0] Compare it to Starbucks's gift card program. Starbucks is one of the largest commercial debtors in the world just by virtue of the vast number of Starbucks gift cards in people's drawers. These things add up quickly and bigly.

If you're not already aware of it, Gemini is an interesting project that aims to do exactly that. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Interesting, thanks for the pointer! I was aware of Gopher, but not Gemini. It seems to address what would be one of my main concerns about any proposed alternative, which is - for the beginning at least - interoperability with the web.

I'm sure people have other bold ideas. I personally think there's a lot of room for something which builds on the 'progressive web app' paradigm: i.e. a web for websites which are more like apps, downloaded once and then exchanging data ad hoc with a backend server, with potentially much richer and more performant experiences. WebAssembly (WASM + WASI) would be a great foundation for something like that. But that's just one among countless compossible paths.

In a bygone era, everything was built of forms, tables and bullet lists. It would be interesting to experiment with a browser that drops JS support in favor of a more robust list of native components.

Alternatively, the modern browser has basically evolved into a virtual machine anyway. You seem to be suggesting that we could do exciting things with a more intentional version of that idea, and I don't disagree.

I've often thought about this. People nowadays build their websites predominantly on React component kits which resemble more sophisticated HTML elements. If HTML were extended to include that more sophisticated functionality -- and come on, it's been 20 years and people are certainly sufficiently aligned on this approach to now include it in the spec -- then I wonder whether JavaScript would be necessary, or at least as necessary as it is now.

I think either direction would be interesting. Or both. The browser was an experiment in the first place, but people seem to have stopped experimenting and are just doing the equivalent of what building on an IBM mainframe would have been in those days. It's disappointing. (It's not unlike people who quote Martin Luther King today, not appreciating that the essence of his radicalism was the direction of travel towards justice, not the political compromises themselves which are now firmly established.)

I hope at least that the renewed interest in systems programming that's come with the Rust fandom might spur some actually innovative developments to replace the antiquated model we're all stuck using. But sadly the tech community seems to be split into two communities, one of which has no interest in innovating, and the other of which seems to be set on innovations so absurdly impractical (¡world wide web on the blockchain!) that they could never take off.

I agree with your sentiment, but RSS and the likes are not 'the same old weapon but better'. It was never 'weaponized' in the first place. It never really came to fruition for the masses. To me, RSS is like two sticks and a string, and it needs some people who can see that they can make a bow and arrow out of it (to stay in the realm of 'weapons').

I don't like talking about tech and business in a sense of 'weapons', 'winning', 'smashing the competition', etc. Talking about it in this sense makes it a struggle, because one will look at tech from the pov of a stockholder, capitalist, or just a narcissist. The wording is very important, and the moment you make that wording your own, you can't see it in a different light anymore.

To be honest, it's only since recently that I myself take RSS seriously. Before, I developed a sh1tload of websites without even really knowing what RSS is capable of. Ignorant me.

Thanks for your reply!

Interesting point! What would you say the full realisation of RSS would look like?

Also, the weapons metaphor was mostly just responding in the frame of the original language about 'pushing back on big tech', 'shattered by big tech', etc. And I do agree with that framing: I think there is a tussle over the direction of the internet – tussle, battle, tug of war, whatever you want to call it – and I'm not sure it helps to avoid the martial metaphor out of distaste when you are in a battle.

RSS is pub/sub, right? Doesn't social media like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter - where you post stuff and other people post stuff - resemble that? Replace 'your' account, profile or page with your own website.

With the right website software it's easy to have an RSS feed nowadays, so the only thing that's missing is website software that also works like an RSS reader. In the most basic sense you only have to read XML with your program.

So now there's your own feed and other people's feed, mixed up in a nice and honest timeline (however you program that). To me this sounds a lot like the first principles behind social media, but without the obscure algorithms to fvck your timeline and without the intruding ads (I have nothing against ads per se).

P.S. Sorry for ranting about the weapons metaphor. I triggered on it and felt the need to tell what I think about language.

Edit: I forgot to say that RSS feeds have been there all the time for a lot of websites based on Wordpress. That has big value, because it means there's no need for technical adoption. These are all websites with feeds up and running right now. I've been hating on Wordpress for other reasons, but this was a good move for the open web from them.

https://micro.blog for example does exactly this, sort of RSS based Twitter (i.e the idea is that your feed contains mostly shorter posts, but that’s not a hard restriction) . Give it the RSS of your website (they can also host one for you), "follow" other people (=subscribe to their rss feed) and boom there is your "social media"

Nice! I really like their idea, and very friendly UI. I get a social vibe from it.

Your explanation is exactly what I was thinking of as the ideal social media, but I don't see that explained on their website. No mention of RSS. As long as the feeds from my software can work with their feeds (and the other way around) I'm good.

Have you heard of Scuttlebutt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt)? The entire protocol revolves around 'pulling' other people's feeds - unlike most all modern social media, it's a pull-based rather than push-based model. It sounds quite similar to what you're looking for, at least based on the way you describe it in this particular comment.

Yeah, I've seen it come across here on HN. For my intended web application I already chose RSS as the way to go, especially because there exist so many feeds and because I'm familiar with XML.

If you have a blog and/or RSS feed somewhere online, let me know. I'll add it to my 'to follow' list.

> the only thing that's missing is website software that also works like an RSS reader. In the most basic sense you only have to read XML with your program

This is a fascinating idea. I often think that Twitter's success, unlike Facebook's or Google's, is fundamentally as a protocol - and one which shouldn't have been centralised under the control of one company. And incidentally it seems Jack Dorsey thinks the same way, since he's suggested the possibility of having one core protocol for tweets, on top of which people could build their own frontends, and users could choose from a marketplace of both (a) frontends and (b) algorithms for filtering and ordering what they see.

I do agree with you: what's missing from RSS is not the existence of the protocol, nor even necessarily the 'supply side' of websites providing it (like you say, largely courtesy of Wordpress), but the 'demand side' which really needs a well-designed interface to consume that kind of content. I absolutely agree with you that this feels like a huge area of potential.

And thinking on a more second-order level: I wonder if one thing that's preventing these innovations is a suitable, easy 'base' for people to build this software on. For example, take `create-react-app` for the web. Countless things have been made because people know that they have that simple base to start with. For building a web browser alternative, there's no equivalent for most people: they don't know where to start. If we had a simply bundled toolkit such that people only had to write some business logic, I wonder how much more would be done.

> P.S. Sorry for ranting about the weapons metaphor. I triggered on it and felt the need to tell what I think about language.

No prob at all! Susan Sontag wrote a really interesting essay 'AIDS And Its Metaphors' in the same vein, specifically about the use of war metaphors about AIDS and cancer: "fighting", "losing the battle", &c. (It's the culmination of a series of essays on the same topic, but this is the most thought-provoking of them, IMO.) You might enjoy it. I particularly liked:

> The metaphor implements the way particularly dreaded diseases are envisaged as an alien 'other', as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the demonisation of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Wikipedia has a great summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_and_Its_Metaphors#Militar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_and_Its_Metaphors

> I don't like talking about tech and business in a sense of 'weapons', 'winning', 'smashing the competition', etc. Talking about it in this sense makes it a struggle, because one will look at tech from the pov of a stockholder, capitalist, or just a narcissist. The wording is very important, and the moment you make that wording your own, you can't see it in a different light anymore.

I like this paragraph a lot, in my perception this is why most of cryptocurrency initiatives and recently hijacked and massacred `web3` concept are fruitless so far - too much focus on how to get rich quickly

Thanks! Getting rid of notions like 'winning' and 'competition' in areas where it's not necessary was a mind changer for me. Even personal stuff like friendship becomes a competition this way (and I see it everywhere around me). Nowadays, I prefer to think about it as 'challenges' instead of competitions.

It is against the TOS of the largest ISP in my country to even host a server of any sort. Colocation isn't that fun.

There are tens of thousands of hosting providers around the world. You don't have to pick AWS, GCP, or Azure.

That's a shame in itself, I see self hosting as the holy grail of the internet. There are a lot of good webhosts though. Worked in the 90's, and still works today.

I find lots of love for RSS by "innovators" and "experts" of HN community. Despite of it, the thing (RSS) is only going low and I don’t see anything other than RSS readers/mergers invented?

I think RSS is still in heavy use by podcasts.

Stay tuned. ;)

> Of course you can choose to put your website on AWS and svck on the bolls of Jeff a little. But you don't have to! And that's what all kinds of young devs just miss.

Where are you hosting your websites?

Not OP, but Linode. Used to be on their $10 a month VPS, downgraded when they added the $5 a month one. I think they have some fancy Kube stuff now but I just have a makefile that rsyncs a directory to my VPS and nginx picks it up. Honestly even the $5 VPS is more power than I need for static files, but it's nice to have the option to throw up a flask app or run some web-scraping scripts overnight or something.

Admittedly it's behind Cloudflare because DDOS skiddies, but I think the CF lock-in isn't much if you're not using workers or anything proprietary to them. Admittedly it does suck for people with really privacy-customized browsers or using Tor, but idk a better solution unfortunately.

But personal-website-tier static file hosting is free these days!

It's called webhosting at a hosting provider. ;) It works for me like this since the 90's. Here in Europe there are literally hundreds or thousands of webhosts. Some pricier, some faster, some cheaper.

I host some websites at Antagonist in The Netherlands. But I'm strongly considering moving, although they are by far the fastest and most reliable party I've seen.

Why? Because they - just like a lot of other European webhosts the last years - are now part of some vague sh1tshow called Group.one or something. I don't know what this organisation is up to, but I don't trust it for a second. I guess they are trying to become some European version of AWS or something. Data grabbers, probably.

Every sincere webhost that became part of their 'network' (they sell it like this, but it's just a merger/acquisition) uses stupid wording in their press releases, customers are not kept up to date about these important changes (only after the fact, of course) and they all of a sudden are now offering 'cloud storage' like it's Dropbox.

This was a bigger reply then I intended. But thanks for yours!

Smaller web hosts tend to use AWS on the backend. Sometimes they use Azure or OVH, but they rarely have their own datacentre.

Can't speak for OP, but mine are on vultr. There's a whole industry of web hosting, virtual private servers, or colocation facilities to choose from.

Contobo, Digital Ocean just to name two.

Scaleway

here here. keep fighting the good fight