alt Hacker NewsA website to destroy all websites
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To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
first off: this is a beautiful article! but, it got me thinking about how many times i found an interest that would then become a core part of my identity by having a really cool piece of media relating to said interest essentially force-fed to me by algorithmic feeds. i got into rhythm games by seeing a livestream of osu! pop up on twitch, got into archival fashion by seeing a really incredible outfit on reddit, got into experimental pop by having clarence clarity's "no now" come across my spotify feed.
as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago.
though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.
The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
These are some ways I’ve been using the web in a way that keeps me free.
- Run my own site (not much there yet)
- Use RSS Feeds instead of Reddit
- If a YouTube creator you like has a newsletter, SIGN UP!
- If a short form content creator makes long form content, watch that instead
- Post on forums, instead of their subreddit/Discord (lots of Linux distros have all three)
- Invest in my cozy web communities[1]
Speaking of the last one there, newsletters, RSS feeds and forums are the best way to be in control of the hose of content.
Will these ever be as “big” as the monolithic platforms? No. That’s okay.
Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
These are collective action problems. The number of people who would have to maintain personal websites full time in order to replace Reddit is boggling and unachievable. These articles all reduce down to "I don't love ads". Call your congressperson.
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
I'll counter propose a website to destroy all websites:
That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images:
Ad driven centralization bad. Go make independent websites using open standards. I just saved you 5 mins.
This spends a lot of time on mood setting and analogy and doesn’t address: network effects, discovery economics, hosting and maintenance costs, security, spam and abuse mitigation, user incentives.
It’s aspirational rather than operational.
At the risk of sounding trite; things that haven't hit the mainstream yet are good, until they hit the mainstream. Once there's money to be made (and the giants have finally started to slowly move in your direction) it's done for.
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
The open web needs to be preserved. And bespoke web pages are great. However it isn’t 1998 anymore. The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit. Unless you are putting up static HTML the learning curve to have a website that runs will continue to run immediately slopes to the point where it is not worth it. Despite OP saying they aren’t invoking nostalgia, they are.
IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
I've read most of this page and am surprised that nobody has (either positively or negatively) mentioned fandom.com, a wiki-farm founded over 20 years ago by one of Wikipedia's founders and another Wikipedia enthusiast. Formerly "Wikicities" then "Wikia", now "Fandom". Hosts about a third of a million communities. Supported by ads at top and side of pages, but logged-in users see very little advertising. Very secure, rarely exploited by malicious bots or other hackers. Numerically dominated by game, TV, and film sites, but many non-entertainment communities as well. The biggest English-languages sites are listed at https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Hub:Big_wikis but numerous other languages are included.
The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result.
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:
1. Start small
2. Reduce friction to publishing
3. Don't worry about design
4. Use the IndieWeb
5. Join us in sharing what you've made
Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again.
A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
This is one of the most difficult articles my eyes could read. The font is so small and my eyes jumped all over the place. The web I want: One that's easy to read.
I'm inspired to write more in 2026 and publish more of the things I just make for myself.
Wait, this was a nice article. why are people complaining?
This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
Webmentions in particular are a totally unserious hobbiest technology that will never reach anything like mass adoption. That the author was willing to offer this as any kind of solution really colored my view of the rest of piece.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.
While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.
Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.
This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.
So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.
No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.
Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.
The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
First 80%: "le web is le better" (sure, ok, it's a statement that u can make)
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
Not sure if its by design/intent, the font is too small to skim through it
> it wasn’t always like this.
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
I hear clamoring to go back to "the old web" frequently, I never really understood the perspective. The old web still exists. I use it every day. I'm a member of a number of tiny community websites with old web charm, and there are certainly millions more out there, for any random niche or interest. In fact, I almost consider Hacker News to be in that category (though it might be a tad too large these days; you can't really get to know everyone's name).
> But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead?
> Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
The only issue I have is that there are only 6 parts to this. I've installed the homepage on my telephone just to be sure.
Writer assumes reader is as cranky as writer. Reader loses interest.
>> The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.
Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video.
The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
>JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though).
I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.
Delusion. The only thing that will make dead Internet come back alive is another technological leap forward. Big Tech has total control.
Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory!
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989... But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society...
It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary
And, finally, my thesis:
The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons.
I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
[1] https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-044...
I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.