As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.
Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way, but it's sooo much easier for the average non-tech person to not self-host an email server versus using something like gmail. It's the same reason I do not own a lift for my car.. sure technically I can install a lift at my house for my car but then I have to maintain it's hydrolics and I'd only use the lift once or twice a year ... who has time for that? Especially if my thing is fixing piano's and not cars. Let the car people handle cars, let the piano people handle piano's... I think we are in the same situation with tech.
You are _technically_ correct, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier".
These days you are pretty much required to use those same 10 sites if you want to interact with anyone, do business, or find useful information.
Those 10 sites have effectively captured the Internet.
The gp is saying the millions choosing the "easier" action is what causes the network effects.
E.g. another example that applies to tech-savvy programmers: most developers have the knowledge (or can Google a tutorial) to host their own personal git server but most choose not to. The collective millions choosing not to bother with self-hosting leads to emergence of something like Github.
Signing up for a free account on Github is easier than:
- hosting a personal repo at home on a laptop or Raspberry Pi
- buying a $10/month shared VPS server to host it
So even before Github had network effects (say less than 1000 user accounts), it was still easier to create an account on an unproven Github platform than self-host. Those early adopters leads to future strong network effects.
But that also leads to unwanted side effect of Github deleting repositories from DMCA takedowns, etc (aka "censorship").
90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go
Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, trying out every known vulnerability under the sun. etc. etc.
I can grab a cheap vps within minutes from DigitalOcean or OVH, with a public IP included. Both offer images with pre-configured software, and there are ample guides for setting up just about anything. Certbot/Let's Encrypt will literally setup add the generated TLS cert to your nginx config if you ask it to.
I had a friend who was there at the start of IP-over-cable, and they were particularly excited about the promise that they would be offering symmetric upload/download performance. By the time it became a consumer product, that too had this major asymmetry baked in.
I did it a while ago and it seems to work fine to this day: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you... (disclaimer: forwarding ALL ports is usually overkill, unless you're lazy like me)
Alternatively, just ask your ISP for a static IP address, even though that could be more expensive.
Let's shut up and let the other side speak? It's usually the opposite in my experience =-P, haha. Sorry, couldn't resist, I know you probably meant to write the opposite.
Sure, you can say, even yell, whatever you want. I don’t have to listen to you though.
On a larger scale, “I” becomes “we” and “you” becomes “them.” The side that feels they are being censored don’t like the consequences of what they’re saying.
It was naive to think that just because technology progresses, society progresses too. The 20+ year Iraq and Afghanistan wars really made me realize that advanced technology meant nothing if we were going to regress morally.