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Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

My charitable read of the comment here might be: the only culturally acknowledged web presence today is that of the Platform -- and when the platforms are so monopoly-adjacent, the skills necessary to build a planet scale platform really are pretty cutting-edge and rarefied [1]. But there's nothing about making a website of your own that requires that -- so ordinary people ought to feel like they can attempt it on their own without a Platform in control.

[1]. inb4 "but if we'd all just stuck to monospaced plain text without executable scripts, none of that would have been necessary!"

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It’s probably easier to set up a ‘planet scale’ website now than it was to set up a website in the 90’s. Setting up a VM like lightsail and hooking up a CDN is pretty straightforward. Setting up a serverless site is even easier.

That's sort of part of it. On the one hand, I'm absolutely for anyone with the urge to go out and build a web site, just like I'm the same way about someone wanting to write. If all they find out is that they don't actually like doing it, then hey, they're still ahead.

On the other hand, I'm tired of the goofy fetishizing of the early, rather exclusive and limited web wrapped up in a copy-and-paste rant about social media and how this is some bold alternative to teh corporations. The talking about people who just have websites as if they've rejected modern society and gone off to live in communes in the wilderness...it's just deeply weird, and it's probably best killed by more people considering making a website a perfectly normal and doable thing.

Then, of course, we'll probably have much of the same enthusiasts bemoaning all the "terrible" websites by the wrong sorts of people.

Did you lose your sense of fun in the war?

Some people need to learn that their fetish is not the definition of fun.

So... I tend to think that social media deserves to be ranted about and that teh corporations are, in fact, Actually Bad, so I'm pretty forgiving of those parts. (And, in fact, I like that it gets duplicated in people's own little ranty ways -- it creates a nice document trail of the folk understanding of these issues) However,

> fetishizing of the early, rather exclusive and limited web

and

> the same enthusiasts bemoaning all the "terrible" websites by the wrong sorts of people

I will cede are quite real -- things like https://250kb.club/ hostile to images, everyone being convinced that even progressive use of vanilla JavaScript -- indisputably part of the idiom of the web -- is an evil... hell, we can count all of the "how dare you Wordpress" scorn...

the aestheticization of the technical foundations of people's expression seems like a great hobby for techies (explicitly, in [Gemini]) but a bad thing to have influencing actual ordinary people trying to use computers to do stuff.

[Gemini]: As a core principle! "A client comfortable for daily use which implements every single protocol feature should be a feasible weekend programming project for a single developer."

I tend to think that social media deserves to be ranted about

Maybe. While I dislike a lot of social media, I'm tired of the rants because they are the definition of echo chamber. When I see such a rant that actually acknowledges why blogs and social media were useful and more attractive than building websites to most users, I'll have time for it. Until then, I think the complainers are not much less out-of-touch than the Gemini scene. (But at least the Gemini people are doing it deliberately.)

The worst thing about the rants, though, is that they come from people who act like they have just discovered that Chrome takes them to places other than Facebook. Like they think that these are unexplored new lands for them to claim in the name of a hipster-esque pose.

There's no web "revival"; the web never went away, it never stopped growing, it never even slowed down.

There's no "indie web"; there's just the web.

>(..)but a bad thing to have influencing actual ordinary people trying to use computers to do stuff.

I don't think any of this has any chance of influencing ordinary people, I see this as a niche reactionary phenomenon entirely within the tech sphere, literally no one else cares.

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