That's why we have Peertube and your personal (not hosted by a corp) website. It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.
I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.
Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.
There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.
I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.
>I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed
That already exists. They're called onion sites. What we really need is something that performs about as well as the current Internet, but is stronger against deplatforming: decentralized DNS. It doesn't even need to give memorable names like DNS does, it just needs to be a second, stable addressing layer on top of IP so clients can always find the server.
Unfortunately three letter agencies are going after exit node operators and threatening them in pretty fucked up ways. I think there's also likely some issues with very wide spread use of government owned nodes to be able to deanonymize people
>Decentralization just puts people that run servers as middle men to further impose a censorship agenda with ActivityPub.
Name lookup is not like a social media feed. If a server is censoring, say, TPB, it's plainly obvious, because you'll go to the IP and not get the content you expected. Just move on to the next server on the list until you find one with the up-to-date information.
>Whatever it is it needs to be distributed like BitTorrent.
DNS is already a distributed system like BitTorrent. When you publish an IP update you do it to a single node, which then propagates through the network. The deplatforming problem of DNS is that name assignment is something only central authorities can grant and revoke.
It also makes it very difficult to censor. There is 1 YouTube and thousands of ActivityPub servers and relays that would happily carry all posts through the fediverse regardless if they seize one or two hosts. There are other options as well - that was a bit my point that Medium/X/Bluesky/YouTube - these are designed to harvest engagement in exchange for content. They’re not good for news and certainly not good as an archive.
In theory yes, but in practice, most of the traffic will gravitate to popular servers and the popular ones will be targeted by people that want to censor content and force the gatekeepers to silence content. The ones that don't play along wont matter because they are not that visible.
I don't think it's about UX at this point. It's more about critical mass. Unfortunately, YouTube is where the videos and audience are... yes, it's a Catch-22 situation.
Youtube is certainly useful for discovery and monetization but if the goal is to share a video that may be censored I would suggest everyone should upload to {n+2} locations at a minimum and link to both YT and the self hosted mirrors from a blog after linking to the blog from YT. It's easier than friends of YT would suggest.
In case of YouTube I wouldn’t be so sure. Yes, it’s the central hub for making your name but many YouTubers came up with their own platforms for exclusive content to have more control over their business once they got big. PeerTube is inline with that idea and because of that might be promoted by big creators soon.
Does having your personal website even matter when the agents of censorship can just request that search engines delist your urls? Or pay for tons of ads so that your site's ranking drops to the second or third page for whatever keywords it happens to match on. And if they still get sizeable traffic, they can just ask your hosting provider to cancel your account. No need to burn the books when you can just remove them.
And you think it will stop here? Nope, next AWS or whatever cloud where you host your clone will terminate your service, then you go and rent a bare-metal, same thing later, then you go and host it on your own hardware, the CDN will terminate it! Oh you managed to find a mediocre CDN? The ISP next!
As long as there's no regulation protecting your rights, whoever has the biggest share in xyz will be in charge.
We're in an attention economy. You don't post on Youtube for preservation, you post there to reach an audience so people know what's going on. If you're not the POTUS you don't have the luxury to use an alternative site and not be utterly ignored.
From my experience, it used to be quite normal for a lot of my non-technical peers to have a personal webpage on the internet with frontpage express, wordpress or geocities. Nowadays, even a lot of businesses don't have a website, but instead an Instagram or Facebook entry. YMMV
Idk, most people I know used services like wordpress.com (so not self hosted), livejournal (and its local alternatives) etc.
This if we are talking about second half of 00s. Before this? Most people barely have internet access at home. And things like BBS (for example) were for techies only with very few exceptions.
Maybe it was quite different in the US for example.
Yeah sure wordpress.com or geocities are not self hosted - but you had much more control over your content. People would just link to other blogs they like or comment on their guestbook / comment page. People would host php-forums. In each friends circle (school or hobby groups) there was always at least one kid who would be tech enough to host some php app on a shared hosting, and people would actually use it. But just self-hosting was not really my point, it was the degree of control that used to be common. I'd argue even myspace was much better than what we have today.
I don't think so, i was very young but my family didn't have Internet whatsoever until 2001 and didn't have broadband until 2005 (in the US). I certainly didn't know anyone self hosting anything (even my most tech savvy older relatives), but by 2005 we were all on Myspace.
I wonder if the future should simply be a cloud version of a personal computer. Rather than subscribing to a lot of SaaS where your data distributed across various platforms, you "purchase" a cloud computer (could be a tiny SOC + disk, or a VM), install software on it (licensed, not subscription based), and store all your data on it, as good old-fashioned files only you and your programs can access. Including your video library, part of which you can choose to expose to the outside world through a public IP. When your cloud PC needs more memory or CPU, you upgrade, just like you do your physical device.
And then the company goes under, or decides your variant of the service is not worth maintaining, or that there is potential for enshittification. All your data, gone. And it WILL happen.
If by service, you mean the cloud machine -- I mean a plain vanilla machine running an OS of your choice (e.g. Windows or Ubuntu). Switching to another service provider means taking your file backups + reinstalling your software on the new machine.
Developers already know how to do this with EC2s, Droplets, Linodes, Azure VMs etc. The process just needs to be more average-person-friendly.
And where then is your backup? In the same cloud? The one that just tried to rip your data sovereignity away from you?
The average person still uses the same password for EVERYTHING, despite say iOS and Android making it easy as pie to just go "generate passwords for me". Telling an average person to have a 3-2-1 backup AND run stuff in the cloud that they will 100% lose the password for is not a battle I see to be won in the near future.
