1/ Someone asked, "How can basic HTML pages be social media -- and create something resembling the public square?" So here's a thread 🧵
If you were not around to witness the early web, let me explain what it was like.
During the 90s, most websites just used HTML. CSS and JavaScript existed in the latter part of the decade, but they were entirely optional.
The appeal of the web wasn't "rich media". Again, that came later.
What made the web exciting is what also made it social: hyperlinking
2/ The web has become so popular, people forget that an Internet exists apart from the web.
Prior to the web, people were able to host basic .txt files fine on various BBS boards.
What made the web so completely dominant is that none of those other services could hyperlink.
This is so important that the protocol itself is: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
What is hypertext? Text that allows for referencing. Mostly these are hyperlinks.
So why reference? Because referencing is social.
3/ Let's now consider what makes hyperlinking explicitly social.
Virtually every website has a hyperlink. Most of the time, these hyperlinks reference other pages on the site.
But they can do something else: reference pages on OTHER sites.
This is important because visitors to your website don't need to be siloed to your website. They can now become aware of a much wider world of creativity.
Hence why the web was called the World Wide Web.
4/ Now what made the web especially attractive to people was that the sky was the limit in terms of creativity.
Not only could you format text, you could change backgrounds, embed pictures and animations, create tables -- the sky was the limit.
This was the appeal of sites like GeoCities where people could just show off their full creative freedom.
To this day, I feel the early web was more creative and expressive than its current iteration.
5/ If you want to know what this older version of the web looked like, and how it was explicitly social, I recommend browsing through Neocities.
Sites like these were why people literally just surfed the web as a hobby -- because there was so much social creativity going on that it could entertain you for days, weeks, months -- even years.
Now why do I mention that the web was designed to be social?
Because it's not so apparent now.
Nowadays, a static webpage implies no interaction.
But this was not true of the early web. Rather, the interaction was through static webpages themselves.
People communicated with each other via hyperlinks.
7/ What people forget is that the destruction of Meta and Twitter *doesn't* mean the destruction of the public square.
No, the *web* itself is the public square.
Anyone can set up a simple, basic website.
In fact, it's easier than ever to do this, and it costs very little money.
All you need is hardware.
And guess what? Almost all hardware made within the last 20 years is capable of being a webserver.
A basic website actually is the most accessible of social media tools.
8/ Now I'm not the biggest booster of the web. In fact, I've long since said that the Internet needs to decentralize away from it.
Nevertheless, the web is a tool -- an important tool -- and we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that basic HTML (with hyperlinking) can do a whole lot of things that can address inequality on the Internet.
If you're an activist and you worry about censorship from Meta and Facebook, building your own website and self-hosting it is an incredible tool.
9/ The biggest problem with the Internet nowadays is increasing centralization.
What do I mean by this?
That there's an alarming decrease in sites that people visit on the Internet.
There's a trend to do everything on one site -- or to even bypass the Internet entirely and do it on one app.
In fact, there's a VC-driven race right now to build an "everything app". That's the end goal.
Should we let that happen? No!
This is why we should continue to build websites -- and visit them!
10/ That said, we should never look at the web as the only tool for re-building the public square.
The Internet is bigger than the web.
To work for a more equitable, fair Internet, we need to build for:
1. The Web
2. Email
3. Chat (IRC, XMPP, The Matrix, etc.)
4. Social Media
5. File sharing
We can't let our foot off the gas pedal because certain powers-that-be are trying to do their damnedest to make us forget that the Internet was designed to be decentralized.
Let's give them hell!
/END
It would be reasonable to start making apps that explicitly dropped the "Mothership" model and acted peer-to-peer. An unfortunate side effect of doing so: Without a mothership, monetizing is a nightmare from hell. You would also have to give up authentication, which can be controlled by capitalist surveillance, or by The State either directly or indirectly by laws and lawsuits. The only way to avoid those is "don't have a locus for doing that."
It would be really cool to see someone create a project like that, but I'm not expecting it until it's too late to bother.
@Romaq Not everything needs to be monetized.
