Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
If that was less scary maybe more people would do it!
The place where the web is still great is where you have to be invested to be a real participant. Everyone can yell about politics in a text box on twiter/FB/reddit/HN or post photos to IG/Dataing site Or videos to twitch/YouTube.
If you can host something, even for a small number of people your one of the rare few. If your "into" something where there is a focused community then your back into one of those 1% pools where people vibe and participate.
To make an analogy of it: The web is now a tourist town. Everyone is interested in making money off the visitors with the flashy lights and signs luring them into the over priced tourist traps. The locals, the natives, the REAL .01% know where the cheap places with great food and local flavor are.
Evidently, if you combine content access platform with a hosting platform and make running the latter a requirement for the former, it works out.
If, theoretically, there would be a way to resolve domain name to a specific phone, I can see self-hosting site apps getting popular.
Nowdays there are a few solutions (phone hosts a site, shows QR-code with its current IP and a port, and you can actually open the site in browser), but it is mostly for "right there right now" solutions. Site will go down the moment this phone changes the tower.
The best example of mobile hosting I have found, comes from AmnesiaVPN team. You have to rent a server, but then you just feed server IP and password to an app, and from there the app controls the server.
I imagine a future where big VPS companies started to make apps that made buying domain name, renting a servere, hosting and backuping a basic website/forum easy. It's an unlikely future, but a fun one