🔗 The web is not dying – Manu:
The current AI chaos is prompting people to write all sorts of posts and articles about the imminent death of the web. The current debacle surrounding the TikTok ban (forced sale?) in the US is making journalists believe that the internet as a global town square where people can interact is over if governments start banning these huge platforms.
I don’t believe the web is dying. Not for one second. Maybe this specific version of the web is dying, that might be true. Let’s imagine we ban TikTok. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Threads. And all the other huge platforms. There would still be one global town square left. It’s called the web. The web itself IS the global town square.
Sure, it’s a lot harder to reach a million people if you have to start from your own little corner of the web. But you know what? Tough shit. Some things in life are hard. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe being able to instantly become viral is not a good thing overall. Maybe we do want some friction in the system.
This argument is appealing to me and I want to believe it.
However, there are a few problems. The first problem is that the vast majority of folks on the web are not going to set up their own website, or figure out how to get cross-posting working, or take the time to build and maintain a list of feeds in the RSS reader. We can talk all we want about making this stuff simpler but it just inherently more complicated to stitch together a bunch of disaggregated systems and platforms and understand why and how data is (or is not) flowing back and forth between them.
And it’s not because people are stupid. I mean, multiple times per week I see people on Micro.blog—an indieweb platform built by and populated mostly with users who are in the weeds of tech and indie web publishing—complaining because cross-posting isn’t working, or this post isn’t showing up there, or some other technical snag that has gummed up the gears.
Out in the broader world, my experience has been that people don’t really want to know how any of this works. They’re not here for the ideology of The Open Web or for the fun of debugging APIs and cron jobs; they want to read the news or see the memes or watch an unboxing video for some product they like. And that’s fine! The web for most folks is a means to end—it’s like the difference between being a mechanic and being someone who just wants their car to get them to their job and the grocery store.
There is a more fundamental problem with all of this, though.
Even if we were to wave a magic wand and make TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all the rest of the big commecial platforms disappear, all of this indie stuff people are buidling in the margins runs on commercial infrastructure. It’s all hosted somewhere, it’s all routed through privately owned networks, and it all gets to our homes and offices over wires controlled by telecoms.
We have spent the better part of the last thirty years convincing everyone that all of this stuff not only exists somewhere in “the cloud” (never mind that the term orginated as the depiction of “stuff some other company owns” on network infrastructure diagrams) but is also free. If you want to build something independent, where do you host it? How do you deliver it? It’s all in some datacenter somewhere, integrated with a bunch of services hosted in other datacenters, and the same companies we’re trying to get away from own most of the underlying gear.
Regardless of who owns it, all of this stuff costs money and it needs to be paid for. The hosting costs money, the bandwidth costs money, and keeping it all running costs money.
I don’t know what the answer is here. How do we undo 20+ years of companies selling people on the idea that technology doesn’t cost any money and magically runs on an ethereal plane? How do we ensure that everyone—not just those of us who can afford to pay for apps, pay for hosting, pay for broadband—has access to the basic technology utilities? How do we treat this stuff as the public utility it is without giving government control over it?