The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.
The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
While I still inspire to launch a twitter 1.0 plain old less featured version, but the thought of moderation kills my motivation immediately. :(
There are still public computing facilities here, like sdfeu, envs.net etc, am not sure how they handle the moderation of spam and pirated content attack.
To be clear, I think the admins are mostly white knuckling the moderation problem.
My point: at least there's something worthwhile there on the more desirable network to require moderation, rather than it all being on Facebook.
Indeed. But unlike machines (and AI, in the future), humans don't scale well. managing a potential audience of 10000 user with a few hundred commenters focused in a few countrie is an order of magnitude different from the millions of users with thousands of commenters and a very well established malicious actors with no respect for community.
It's more work, for more people, for less appreciation. It's also harder than ever to pay for labor as a small community, unless you are very well off.
I could see why this might not scale as well to instances with thousands of users, or if a user is a frequent target of harassment (where opt-in federation might be the only solution), but for our lab, the existence of all the nazi or whatever instances has been resolved via a simple "Oh, these again. click, click, click There, the whole instance is banned." a few times a year. I have a suspicion that Dunbar's number or lower might be the optimal size for any federated social media instance, since knowing every user on my instance makes it a lot easier to tailor the little effort I have to put in.
[0] https://seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/
Is your email still valid as listed?
No, it's a function of economics. Division of labour still works. It is not more profitable to run your own cloud and pay for your own traffic when you're specialized in producing content. It makes financial sense to pay someone to do that for you. The middleman is cheaper, that's why they exist. The internet looks like it does for only one reason, in any system of increasing complexity there are increased returns to specialization and trade.
Didn't support scripts IIRC but with webassembly it doesn't have to be too difficult to support something like NextCloud I'd think.
> As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen.
> The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks.
Maybe Web 1.0 won't return as the "dominant culture," but I wonder if something like it could return as a subculture.
> Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
Maybe we just need an new MS Frontpage for the new millennium?
I’m shamelessly link to this thing I’m running[0] because I personally believe that subculture is already (still?) there and I’m doing what I can to help other people discover this fact.
Just recently I added a guestbook to my site and I’m having fun seeing other people doing the same.
Webrings are also doing a comeback. I have hope for a return of a more personal web, even as just a small subset of the whole web.
With so many static site generators, I wonder how hard it’d be. Not that it’s simple, just thinking that an opinionated structure, a gui, and gluing it all together.
That and financial incentives. Substacks seems to be the most successful "web 1" implemenation in the past decade, but that still monetizes the idea (anthetical to a web 1 era).
Of course, the defaults would have to be basically zero-management. But people would be able to choose how much control over their own data they want versus how convenient they want it to be. Right now, it's pretty much all or nothing.
well that's the issue. There is no "small community" these days like there would be in the Usenet days. At least not a genreal purpose one for blogging whatever is on your mind. My parents wouldn't really care much about the content so much as supporting me. My friends don't necessarily share all the same interests as me. So you want to seek out like strangers on the internet to bond with.
That's part of why we transitioned to early web 2.0 of utilizing a middleman to host content, and use that to attract a community. The internet grew and people could focus exclusively on what they were genuinely interested in, as opposed to subscribing to users directly.
There's also RSS feeds
Horrible, confusing UX. Very limited feature sets. Mediocre performance, at best.
if that's supposed to be the future, call me a luddite I guess.
Super easy to run your own server to host content from a desk/laptop and super easy to use a client to visit other servers. You could find servers using trackers (name severs that kept track of hotline servers) or keep the server private and only give out the server info to people you want.
I think that the right place to provide this is at ISP level, positioning as a beefier router with extras.
I worked for an ISP before and did multiple projects involving consumer hardware. You do not want to be tied to whatever garbage your ISP decides to buy in bulk and give to.
You want your stuff to be movable between ISPs, however, so your domain registrar should be separate.
ISPs are not great, true, but why not build a good one? For a change.
Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.
In particular, I’m wondering how much a self hoster can expect to have this sort of downtime because of breaking changes to the mail server application(s) vs. misc. server outages (e.g., breaking OS upgrade unrelated to the mail server) vs. having to fix “my mail was marked as spam” problems.
Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it would still likely leave a sour taste in your client’s mouth if their new vendor couldn’t even get their shit together to keep their email up and running smoothly.
Before the Russian/Ukraine war, I worked for a US company that did business operations on Russian cloud providers - one (very major one I don't want to name here publicly) had their main support in some sketchy all-russian telegram channel that I only could access via my personal device. You'd type your issue in english, get a bunch of russian responses, and then sometimes hours/days later your issue would mysteriously vanish.
"I don't know, dude is usually black out drunk I will go check on him"
5 min later
"Yeah he was passed out on the floor, I threw a bucket of water on him and rebooted the thing it should come back up shortly."
...and yet WhatsApp Business exists to do exactly that. In developing countries, some businesses use WhatsApp as the only written-communication channel (supplemented via voice calls). For over a billion people, their smartphone is the primary - oftentimes only - computing platform. Business communication over WhatsApp is not as awkward as you suppose it is, and all businesses, including large ones, have to meet their clients on whatever platform(s) they happen to be on.
You had a mid-sized to corporate business sending passports over WhatsApp? I highly doubt that.
This is not even coming from a “US-centric” view. This is coming from a “that will never pass any sort of compliance or hell corporate governance” sniff test.
To answer your question, no I've never corresponded with a client via WhatsApp
Installed a second server last year. That had 0 problems since day 1.
I feel like people overblow the whole email thing. Want you to pay for tuta et al when you can build your own and manage it.
I havent updated both servers in a year. Zero problems.
Again, people maybe confuse miab and other email servers maintenance with maintaining nextcloud which is a real pita
This was what eventually broke my self hosting plan.. too many emails sent and never received.
Maybe my buddy hasn't responded because he's got a lot going on at work at the moment. Or maybe my DKIM/DMARC records aren't playing well with his mail forwarder. Pretty difficult for me to tell - I'm not in the habit of phoning someone to tell them I sent them an e-mail.
Heck, the company I work for gave up trying to host our own email blasts to customers as we were fighting with different places around the world *constantly* (we had a dedicated position just for dealing with this shit, and they were becoming overwhelmed).
But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation.
Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason.
Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs.
Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability.
I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.
People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.
PE is good business for the raiders, bad business for the raided.
And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was criminal, or at least should be, they were not a good business and hadn’t been in a very long time.
A good business is rarely worth more parted out than whole. It’s most often good business for the “raided” too because they are failing and the alternative is bankruptcy. A company that survives after laying off 25% of its staff still employs more people than one that dies entirely.
This is why they prefer companies with high revenue and low profits. That’s nearly always the sign of a business that has been mismanaged and can be fixed.
I have come to the conclusion that people in tech are as largely ignorant of finance as people in finance are of tech.
Well I'm you can certainly speak for yourself, but that doesn't mean the rest of us are, so maybe keep your opinions to yourself. I was responding to the premise that people hate on PE because of negativity bias - there is a negativity bias toward Private Equity, and it is entirely on the fault of the industry for their mendacity and lack of empathy. The fact is, there are more than enough examples of this bad behavior (recently, Chuck E Cheese and Toys'R'Us come to mind). There are also plenty of examples of PE "improving management" by crushing labor, degradation of product quality and screwing customers, so that is is the reputation for the entire industry.
I'm not even specifically criticizing the industry - they have a role to play in the economy. What I am saying is don't go crying about the public perception - if they want the big money, they get to own that reputation and be the bad guy. No one likes a parasite.
PE is a giant thing. There is a lot of it. The ones who don’t run companies out of business have no control over the ones who do. You’re using “they” to refer to thousands of people as if they’re a monolith.
And I don’t disagree that the bias you mention is accurate, I was pointing out that it’s because the people who think that way simply don’t understand finance. And judging by the comments here every time it comes up, the bias you mention is very popular.
Keeping opinions to ourselves would make these comments sections pretty sparse. Why is mine not ok but yours is? I was largely agreeing with you and expounding anyway.
> You’re using “they” to refer to thousands of people as if they’re a monolith.
This is the same thing the cops whine about. The PE industry has a ton of money - if 90% of them are good actors, they could easily organize and lobby for rules to stop the bad actors. That they don't tells me that the incumbents like the rules where they get to do whatever they want.
> I was pointing out that it’s because the people who think that way simply don’t understand finance
I think you are wrong. They understand the impacts that financiers have had on themselves, their families and their communities. There is a reason private equity (and its' older equivalents) have been loathed by common people for over a hundred years in this country :)
It's a strong indicator of a second-class mind and surface level thinking when they say "you compared X and Y!?!?". Comparisons don't mean anything. "Abraham Lincoln and Hitler were both men" is logically equivalent to what I said, and just as true. I didn't equate the societal effects of the two, I was merely pointing out that people who don't understand groups tend to lump them all together and suffer from observational bias. Human irrationality repeats itself in clear, obvious ways. Sometimes it leads to something terrible (centuries of opression), sometimes it leads to something innocuous (people saying something stupid in a comment thread) but it's the exact same mechanism. Think deeper before saying things that dumb, you're hard to take seriously.
People absolutely do not understand the impacts financiers have had on themselves. They do not understand economics, at all. This is a country (and, in most cases, it's the same everywhere, just swap the title) where most people think the President is a major factor in things like inflation, gas prices, etc. They have no more idea why the economic things they observe happen than they do why they universe exists, and so in the exact same way they jump to the conclusion they understand. Skydaddy made us, rich guys ruined everything for their gain. (There you go, I just compared poor economics knowledge to religion, have fun.)
If a lot of people think something, it is not because it is correct. (Sometimes it is correct by happenstance.) It is because they are exposed to a lot of propaganda to that effect and they don't know enough to have a more nuanced explanation.
I've always been very skeptical of the sale/spinoff of various divisions of automakers in the 80s/90s. To me it always felt like they were looking for a short term profit vs the general 'steady pace' of government contracts and the like, I also can't help to feel amazed nobody even showed a good second option for the next gen mail carrier... but again, I feel like it's because everyone sold the farm already.
I think Tesla is a good illustration. They make a lot of parts other auto makers outsource, and they also have a whole lot of quality control issues. I am sure I suffer from observational bias here, as my GF has a model Y and I notice all the parts that fail that never would on any other car (like vent fans, door handles, etc.) but the upside exists in some engineering document or p&l I don’t see.
LBO is just one type of PE, and even among LBO, there are lots of stories about firms fixing a business. For every K-Mart there’s a Dollar General.
And even with the K-Mart type stories, those businesses were 100% failing without intervention anyway. They might have done so in a way that was better for shareholders, and that’s an egregious example. But they’re not generally parting out thriving companies and leaving banks holding a bunch of bad debt. Banks are smart and good companies are almost always better off whole, just as a running car is almost always worth more than the parts.
PE's, meawhile, don't really have that control. They are shooting all the hell up and we don't know if they are self destructively OD'ing or are curing cancer. Most high profile results are sadly the former. There's simply less financial incentives these days to invest in "saving" a company if you don't emotionally invest in it.
It is not, however, the business model, as many here seem to think, because the people on the other end aren’t THAT stupid. There isn’t that much dumb money.
The business model is buy a company that’s in serious need of improvement, fix it, then sell it/take it public. That’s why they prefer companies with high revenue and losses.
Or sometimes, if they think an industry is just poised for strong growth, they just buy and hold. I suspect that’s what’s going on with all the veterinary office purchases we discussed recently.
I really don’t know where Squarespace falls. They’re allegedly keeping management in place which would make me guess they just think it’s poised for strong growth but I really just don’t know.
And even with a negative outlook and debts (i.e. liquidation), extracting value without making bigger issues is not at all simple.
If this is a thing that they all do all the time and the creditors always lose, how do the creditors not learn?
Or is it possible that that’s just a story based on events that happened a few times and were extrapolated to be believed to be the norm?
I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network.
We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/
As soon as it is owned mostly by investors, everything becomes about shareholder value.
If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...
Web3 was never part of the Internet in the public consciousness. Nothing that requires logging in with a crypto wallet ever was.
Wait, shit--
What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now:
1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent.
2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet.
3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids.
Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism.
My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites.
Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives.
If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.