The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
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Free hosting, for everyone, without ads.
Ut-oh.
(But seriously, while it wasn't free, having an account with an ISP used to come with 10 MB of personal webspace without ads or anything. That's something you never really see these days.)
Woof. I forgot that used to be a thing. I’m pretty sure I had a phonebook those days.
Yeah you can host your own blog on the fediverse. I've started similar attempts, in fact, such as !aniki_blog@feddit.org . I intend to expand it, but it takes time getting used to this type of personal web space.
Alternately, what'd be really neat would be an easy way to mostly completely do a webpage setup for someone using the free hosting options that do exist.
Like, a tool that makes handling deploying something to Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or whomever else offers basically free web hosting that isn't nerdy to the point that you need a 6,000 word document to explain the steps you'd have to take to get a webpage from a HTML editor to being actually hosted.
Or, IDK, maybe going back for ye old domain.com/~username/ web hosting could be an interesting project to take on, since I'm sure handling file uploads like that should be trivial (lots and loooots of ways to do that.). Just have to not end up going Straight To Jail offering hosting for people, I suppose.
Not really needed with dynamic DNS able to point back to a web server on your own network.
There's a lot to be said for "http://yourISP.com/~username" being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.
There's a little to be said for it, sure.
I use nearlyfreespeech.net for personal hosting. They charge me about 10 cents a day.
Many ISPs still give an email address.
These days with how tied to your identity email is, using an ISP provided email is like self-imposed vendor lock-in though. A friend who uses an ISP provided email just switched ISPs and it caused havoc - bank logins, power company logins, etc
The ISP I'm with allows you to keep the email address indefinitely. But I'm sure there are many ISPs who don't do that.
That seems unusually mature and consumer-oriented for an ISP
It's such a reasonable a policy I'm finding it hard to believe, unless there's a clause that they get a kidney, or are allowed to show up and break your ankles, or are taking ownership of your first born child or something.