Hacker News Reader

The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game.

Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.

I sense some cognitive dissonance between your two paragraphs. In the first you argue for a focus on consumerism and marketing, in the second you criticize Firefox for competing by appealing to styles and trends.

Do you feel that this dissonance should change how we readers interpret this argument in some way, or is this meant solely as a typo-fix kind of comment? It’s unusual to see a new HN user offering proofreading comments, so I’m hesitant to accept that interpretation without checking first.

Not sure what the meaning behind your comment, but I found /u/downWidOutaFite's reply to be thought provoking.

Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism.

I also don't know why the account age has anything to do with this -- they're not pointing out a typo, they're pointing out a logical contradiction.

I see. Thank you for taking the time to speak in more depth about it.

I do not see these two as being in opposite to each other, or more specifically i do not see the second contradicting the first.

Firefox's owners can be corrupted and focused on the wrong things (i'm not saying they are, btw - actually i do not exactly agree with the idea of Firefox having "owners" in the first place, at least not the same way as Microsoft owns Windows) and have the wrong priorities. If you consider that Firefox needs to do things right, you may want to prioritize making Firefox "good" (whatever that means, e.g. making it the fastest and/or most secure browser and/or giving the most control to the user, etc) and then (in terms of priority) try to promote and create a marketing campaign that focuses on those aspects of Firefox. It isn't like marketing is all about style. And even if it focused on the style, one might disagree that the proper way to go about it is to copy Chrome.

There are many ways to interpret these two paragraphs as not being contradicting.

I completely agree about the owners being corrupted. Under the semblance of "open source", the owners are only increasing their take-home salaries while firing away all the lower -level staff.

> They do them because they're easy

If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.

The Nazis didn't promise pain, they promised a better world and told people they'd have to be prepared to go through pain and suffering to reach that goal. They also claimed the war was forced on them, that they had no choice. The speech was basically asking the people if they were going to bend the knee or stand up and fight to the last man. It was the Nazi version of the Braveheart speech, whatever we may think of that.

Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.

Not sure I understand what you mean. It's a motivational speech like many others. Goebbels was a brilliant public speaker, no doubt. But he wasn't a social wizard who cast an evil spell on the German population, the way people who like to mysticize Nazism often portray him as. Such speakers still exist today, the same old populism still works great. The dangerous part about fascism is exactly that it wasn't a one off terrible mishap, it's a regular occurrence. The Nazis most certainly made all kinds of positive promises, they were the whole reason they got elected. They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc... Just look at their campaigns and posters.

> They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc.

You're missing one component, which is that the Nazis took all of these (more or less) legitimate grievances and redirected them into the figure of the Jew. You're right in that this wasn't a result of some supernatural ability of Hitler and Goebbels, and that's the whole point. There doesn't need to be. I'm sure individual Nazis had similar thoughts as you do (this is just another motivational speech, these are decent campaign promises, etc). The precondition to repeating Nazi ideology is already present in normal psychology.

You're just rephrasing what I wrote now, so I guess we agree. Will you admit your original point was misinformed then? We can look at actual Nazi election posters if you like, they never told the people it's going to be suffering and hell, obviously. They made tons of grand promises and that's how they got to power. Denying this fact is dangerous, if we don't understand how totalitarian regimes come about, history is bound to repeat itself.

What? No. I specifically referred to the Total War speech, not to election posters. You seem fixated on making your own point unrelated to what I was saying.

I don't think Firefox is even better than Chromium overall. There's a lot of good stuff in Chromium that just doesn't exist in Firefox like a great tab groups implementation and PWA support.

Some of the Firefox-only things I like are it suggesting Reader more more often, and the Page Info view. They're the kind of small conveniences Chrome is missing.

[EDIT] Oh, and being able to use bookmarks to sync custom searches across devices was AMAZING. Of course, that had to die. [/EDIT]

And of course zero knowledge sync and uBlock on mobile are huge, which Chrome itself has a less excellent record on. But some of the Chromium forks like Brave and Vivaldi not only offer those, but also good tab groups.

The big thing with Firefox is that its enthusiast userbase is moronically hostile to Firefox gaining financial independence of some kind. They bought Pocket and integrated it and people were just about ready to lynch the Firefox/Mozilla team. A lot of them are more motivated by the kind of purity that makes people install gNewSense and complain about companies doing business than any desire to have an actually useful tool with independent revenue streams.

> The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy.

Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays.

So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals.

I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.

The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at the same time. How can a tech company improve their product without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people responsible for that?

Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.

So whats the better, more ethical alternative? Certainly not Chrome

Servo

Edge

I was really rooting for Edge back before they switched to Chromium. Now it's just worse Chrome. I do use it as my default PDF viewer though as I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs. (there's Master PDF but it's a bit overkill when I just want some multicolored highlighters.)

Security-wise, it's far better Chrome.

Privacy score really depends on your views on MS/Google/Mozilla. Firefox is taaaaalkative.

> I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs ...snip... some multicolored highlighters

xournalpp, okular.

Vivaldi.

That's still Chromium. I care more about avoiding a browser monoculture than I care about dick-measuring the corporate ethics of the three remaining companies which actually maintain actual browser engines.

People might hate Safari but with Firefox slowly retreating into obscurity, Safari looks to be the final vanguard against a total Chromium monoculture. Yet many on HN absolutely abhor Safari because it doesn't currently support some bleeding edge feature which end users probably don't care about.

Which platforms is Safari available for?

Platform availability isn't the operative metric when concerned about browser monoculture. The only metric of concern is browser market share. Safari represents approximately 20 percent of browsers.

Safari is holding mobile apps back. I prefer a monoculture to Chrome+Safari.

Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use chrome.

I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things).

I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed.

If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over.

Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.

Everything old is new again.

Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in).

Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.

> I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed.

I saw a physical poster or sign the other day which didn't even go that far. It had ("f" logo)/name. I had the same reaction.

It's not a matter of it being faster for me. It's a matter of it being more stable. I used Firefox for years, but when my extensions started breaking with FF updates I switched. I tried again recently, but now it's the extensions.

Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from Google.

Also remember that at the same time Google did everything they could to make sure Firefox market share would be as low as possible.

See https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 and the billions spent in Chrome marketing, bundling with other software, and the free ads on Google properties.

so what?

ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.

Probably for legal reasons. Firefox exists so chrome is not a monopoly and stricter government action is not taken.

Google doesn’t give money to control Firefox, they just need it to exist.

yea, that's what I meant :P

That doesn’t mean anything. It’s a tired attack that gets repeated over and over, but has nothing to do with the values and goals Mozilla/ Firefox represent.

I think if I learned Greenpeace was single-handedly funded by Exxon, my reaction wouldn't be to say 'that doesnt mean anything'

So what do you think it means then?

Not OP, but my understanding is that the browsers 'compete' much less than the public thinks they do. The developers attend conferences together, they co-fund initiatives like the MDN, they ultimately collaborate on a common spec. Google wins as long as people are encouraged to spend more of their time online. Firefox needs market share to sell homepage defaults. Apple wins as long as desktop and mobile capabilities converge so that they can sell iPhones but remains hard to monetize so they can sell apps. No one wins if antitrust regulation gets involved.

I think this a logic fallacy. It’s a false/ incomplete comparison.

Mozilla is not an advertising company. They have no incentive to track users or invade privacy. Their whole ethos as a company is pro-privacy obviously.

Yes, they take take money from Google to make them the default search engine on a fresh Firefox install. They are a big company with lots of employees (less as of recently) that need to be paid, and they don’t really have any products that generate large amount of income.

Seems like a small price to pay if you ask me. I’ve never heard anyone who throws out the ‘Mozilla takes Google money’ criticism back it up with why that somehow compromises Firefox as a browser.

> they take take money from Google to make them the default search engine on a fresh Firefox install.

Heh, no.

They take money from Google to get paid and also help Google avoid antitrust suits.

Pragmatically speaking, you're right. Something needs to keep the lights on. Further, even if they did not set Google as the default search engine, surely many users would configure Firefox as such.

The browser isn't compromised, but their principles are. When you compromise your principles or apply them very selectively, you lose credibility and authenticity.

A fitting example of this is their Facebook container. They have poured a lot of resources into minimizing the potential harm Facebook can do to its users. They totally can, as they have no dependency on Facebook at all. Yet no similar effort is made to isolate Google services.

Again, we know why. Most users are unlikely to care, but it demonstrates that principles are for sale. If we were to focus on privacy only, both Brave and Apple take a far more principled approach in protecting privacy consistently. So where does this leave Mozilla on this matter?

Brave is basically the result of the firing of Brendan Eich, for his private donation to a cause rejecting gay marriage. You can think of that what you want, but there is zero evidence of him ever projecting this private belief in the workplace in any way harmful to anybody at all.

But I get it, it looks bad for a progressive organization like Mozilla. A PR disaster.

Their progressive image indeed largely seems PR. For example, they've had a series of large layoff rounds, whilst at the same time drastically increasing executive compensation. You have to wonder where this compensation is based on, as leadership is running Mozilla into the ground. Market share keeps bleeding and there's zero alternative successful revenue streams.

That's classic neoliberalism. Firing workers whilst enriching yourself. At the same time, they are involved in "equity" projects to address the issue of some people unable to afford internet access.

This is all very confusing. Principles are sold out, contradicted, and only seem to apply to others. That's why to me, Mozilla's "values" have little value.

A Firefox user does not need to care about any of this, but here comes the problem: Mozilla is downscaling on Firefox engineering whilst increasing their more activist/political projects.

How is that strategy not a disaster? They're great at engineering yet terrible at activism.

You make good points, I don’t necessarily disagree. But at a certain point I just don’t have the time or energy to analyze and stress over every detail of every company’s business practices.

When it comes down to it and I’m presented with the choice of opening Chrome or Firefox, I’m taking Firefox every time and it’s not close.

I'm with you. None of the above affects my choice for using Firefox.

It does affect my choice of offering any help, such as a donation. They won't get a cent out of me, given the above.

It's indeed a Mozilla problem, not a user problem. Yet the user base is shrinking, so I'd be curious to know how this will end. I suppose Google will keep Mozilla in a zombie state for a while just to avoid regulation pressure.

> but there is zero evidence of him ever projecting this private belief in the workplace in any way harmful to anybody at all

Materially supporting a public, political campaign intended to remove my civil rights is NOT private behavior and IS harmful to me. I agree with the rest of your post.

I understand where you're coming from, and agree it's a morally questionable stance. Not only that, also a foolish one, as the legalization of gay marriage seems an inevitability, like a domino-effect.

I too am puzzled by how denying somebody this right that in no way negatively affects him, is something to put your weight behind.

That said, it is private behavior. He didn't use company funds, express the belief publicly or acted in any negative way towards the LGBT community in the workplace, this is confirmed by Mozilla leadership, so not my take on it.

People are free to have any private belief or donate to any campaign privately, as in, this is well within the law.

It can mean many things, depending on their actions.

If they were just taking Exxon's money to do good things and Exxon thought it was a great PR move but still completely failed at building a good image that would be a massive win for Greenpeace in my view.

This tells you how dire the situation is at this moment. If you would view the open web as an ecosystem, we might be on the verge of a total collapse of it.

Maybe we should create and broadcast documentaries about it, think BBC Earth style, and watch ourselves and the governments ignore the lessons of it.

So if I was a dominating business, and you're an opensource more ethical solution, all I need to do is make a generous donation to you and publicize that I did, then people like you will say what you just said in every public comparative discussion to try to lower the value of my competitor for me. Investment well spent I say.

Don't you just love and hate game theory?

Just remember that HN loves to criticize every external revenue source they have. Pocket, Mozilla VPN, etc. "why don't they just focus on the browser".

People would criticize Pocket less if it lived up to Mozilla's principles of privacy and open source. Or if Mozilla hadn't tried to conceal it was about revenue.

Exactly.

Come back when your "team" is not taking hundreds of millions to put out a consistently less-secure browser based on an engine nobody backs.

If anyone wants the free internet, fork Chromium and at least don't start a mile behind when security is what's at stake — like Microsoft did.

> Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox

For the longest time this was actually the other way around. Firefox decoupled rendering from scrolling, which made it a far better option in many cases (there are some disadvantages, but FF just was further from the technical side).

Chrome cannot render nice pictures. It neglects quality for speed. I think it still does. Isn't visible in every image and you can disable this with tuned CSS tricks, but the issue remains.

But of course you are correct that all this is completely secondary...

Any serious developer that doesn't at least appreciate freedom and open source is an idiot in my opinion. Please excuse my strong language.

the future is a walled garden stepping on a face, forever.

Thanks for a good spank. HN needs one once in a while.

>> Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia.

You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...

This is ridiculous and hyperbolic on a few points, namely that Chrome's position is way worse than Microsoft's. Even if we ignore the fact that Chromium is open-source, that Chrome is heavily extensible, that Google has demonstrably shown commitment to developing the web in an open manner (eg WebRTC) - ignoring these and other facts, when Microsoft was 'in charge' of the Web (via IE's power) they locked IE down, killed their competition, and literally single-handedly stalled the progress of the Web.

The fact that you say IE at it's peak was worse than Chrome shows incredible ignorance on the matter.

Your anecdote about your friends reminds me of this odd joke from school

There's a senior citizen driving on the highway. His wife calls him on his cell phone and in a worried voice says, Herman, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there is a madman driving the wrong way on Route 280! Herman says, I know, but there isn't just one, there are hundreds!

> If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could.

Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.

For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.

Mozilla vs Google/Alphabet (values shared by...).

> Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN

CERN did not invent hypertext, just made a popular version on top of TCP.

Hypertext already existed at Xerox PARC and had multiple implementations since then across UNIX and 16 bit home computers.

> All my friends use Chrome

I’m guessing 99% of the users of this site use Chrome…Dev Tools. The real question is what people use for personal browsing after hours. I wish Mozilla would just import Chrome’s Dev Tools because they’re just undeniably better than anything else on the market.

I have been a long time user of Firefox, but as a web developer I use Chromium occasionally to test a web application I develop. I would like to know, what kind of feature that Chrome/Chromium dev tools offer that Firefox doesn't?

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values

It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy.

They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault).

Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.

1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of the people

2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?

It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not.

Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.

Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects.

Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape.

If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base.

Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.

     Why should I care about the politics of the 
     software company I use

One obvious reason would be if the company in question is directly supporting various causes that you like or dislike.

You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money.

Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.

There's no reason to dig up every opinion on Earth just so you can maintain neutrality between all of them.

Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around.

[1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively culturally conservative; super-liberal SF gay people wouldn't want nuclear families after all, they'd want to live in communes or something.

Eich would tell you he supported civil unions.

Too bad he contributed to a campaign that wasn't for them then.

And of course, CA did introduce something like "marriage with a different name" afterwards, but it didn't seem like the Prop 8 defenders liked that either, and the courts still found it unconstitutional.

California domestic partnerships included hospital visitation rights from 1999.[1] And most marriage rights from 2005.[2] They weren't fully equal. And separate but equal is nonsense anyway. But they came before Proposition 8.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...

> He's literally still around.

Low-quality.

I think Eich's view on gay marriage was stupid, irrational and selfish. But I support his right to have that view. Why? Because not supporting his right to hold that view isn't going to change it. If I want any hope of changing his mind, history has shown that silencing and cancelling the views you don't like is ultimately unproductive.

Sadly, people like Eich have been forced to become so defensive on this topic that there's no real hope of reaching them intellectually. This is how humans work: when we feel forced to defend something, most of us will defend it far beyond the point that it's rational.

The broader gay marriage movement is, in my view, a canonical demonstration about how effective positivity can be. Truly inspiring. Some more contemporaneous social movements could learn a thing or two from the cultural normalisation of homosexuality. Rather than learning from success, what I see it a whole lot of hateful negativity on Twitter... and little else.

I doubt any of this is true. If that was the reason, why not demonstrate for the right to visit?

It is often a negative stereotype that gay people want to live in communes.

> Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled

No, he was cancelled by Mozilla for something that has nothing to do with his work. The company lost a lot of goodwill because of that. Liberals too btw. If you preach tolerance and pull stuff like this, your statements won't have much weight further on.

I’m tribeless, just an American in the age old traditional sense, willing to walk away from any tribe, my only issue is worker's rights, and I also think it was a bad look on Mozilla's part.

Feel free to agree or disagree with Mozilla, obviously.

However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of pretending there's some objective universal standard of "neutrality."

Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or "right."

What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough to it.

How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.

Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their unrepairable e-waste.

I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.

Yes, I like YouTube, but it was great even before Google bought it. Now it does come with privacy concerns. Luckily, there are other similar offerings.

Those things where invented with public money yes. But Moore's law wouldn't have been a thing without profit incentive.

It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm.

What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.

It hasn't gotten any more difficult to host your own website - the reason nobody does it is they don't want to. It's hard to keep up with spambots and things like that, but it's not like Facebook is running the spambots.