[jdworrells]

I see this come up time and time again in technical circles and I just do not understand the issue. My first exposure to the Internet was in 1993, when it was dominated by usenet and hobby websites. It was a happy place, full of independent thoughts, discussion, and cooperation. As time went on, people started to establish businesses and make profit on the Internet. That was the turning point.

Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish "web rings" with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own.

Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly.

Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost. When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.

[Mediterraneo10]

People who hobby blog and don't expect to make money, nevertheless want to have some audience. They might be creating content for the benefit of a community.

However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.)

So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no visits at all, this is discouraging.

[hessiejones]

I remember this in the early day of blogging -- we were always leveraging community to drive organic reach. I was told by a FB person once that we need to stop chasing organic reach -- it ain't happening. The monetization to the forced FB feed meant everyone had to pay. For bloggers this is how they make money. It's become a staple for the industry.

[wccrawford]

The "web rings" that he references existed because discovery has always been horrible on the web. If you want to go back to the old web, you basically have to take the bad with the good.

[cr0sh]

My ISP (cox) blocks ports 80 and 25, and probably others. Also, in the TOS it explicitly states that running servers is prohibited, and could result in termination of services.

The first is mainly done - from what I understand - to combat spam and other nefarious things; to keep people from running malicious web sites, and/or hosting spamming mail servers or whatnot.

But the second is more of an "implied threat"; for the most part, they don't really care if you run a server off some other port, use some kind of DNS discovery service, etc - provided it has low usage, and isn't doing anything against their other terms in the TOS.

So basically, hobby sites or similar stuff are allowed to run; part of the reason of this is because there is (or was) a lot of software (games mainly - if I understand right - but other platforms too) that were essentially servers, and became popular with people. Plus you had things like home VOIP, media servers, etc - that people used and liked. So they kinda let some things "fly under the radar" of their TOS.

But they never removed the language from the document.

...and so, that Sword of Damocles is left hanging over our head as a threat: "Don't get too popular...it'd be a pity if something happened to your system".

[anderspitman]

There seems to be plenty of healthy competition in the VPS space. I agree being able to host from home would be nice as an option, but in reality upload bandwidth usually isn't good enough for anything I'd want to host anyhow.

[rchaud]

Agreed. The indie web exists, but discovery is a problem since FAANG utterly dominates the consumer web landscape and makes it hard to find sites that aren't just badly disguised content marketing pieces.

At the end of the day, you can do all the decentralized node stuff you want to, but as soon as someone builds a sizable community independent of FAANG (I like G-MAFIA too), it will start to do whatever it can to protect that moat and with it, their monetization options. And then we're right back to square one.