I've never really had much to say for myself. Maybe not the best start to a series of blog posts on the Web, but let's just treat this as a preface to everything that follows. You see, that's the great thing about the Web. It can be both highly social and completely anti-social, at the same time. Which means I'm completely free to contradict myself, and reserve the right to do so.
I was raised in a time when the World Wide Web - as we really called it back then - was replete with user-driven content; it's worth noting, too, that we didn't call stuff content back then, either. It was all just information, and importantly it was created by people, not corporations; people sharing information, all over the world - the Information Superhighway.
Companies were quite slow to adopt the Web as a medium for doing business, and though there were plenty of companies who had some form of presence on the Web, they existed largely in the form of basic, informational websites, often publishing brief information and contact details, and not much more - and by basic I am not referring to the aesthetics of the websites, just the nature of the information they presented.
The great thing about the user-driven nature of things was the sheer diversity of things you could find - and, crucially, you really did need to find things. That's why HyperText was so important. It was the engine oil of the Web. It's how people transitioned from site to site, finding all kinds of weird and wonderful things along the way.
If you want a modern-day facsimilie of this, try Wiby.
The point I'm meandering towards is that what you find on the Web these days is goverened by an algorithm, controlled by an all-powerful entity which biases search results away from user-driven sites, and towards commercial areas of the Web. This creates the illusion that the Web of old is no more, and to some extent this is true, but I believe a LOT of user-driven content is still out there; it has just become much harder to access.
There is a growing, but somewhat informal movement towards a more user-driven Web, where people are once again attempting to collate and/or index sites made by individuals, and this comes under the loose umbrella of smolNet/smolWeb. A quick Google search for these terms will reveal a number of commentaries, explaining things much more comprehensively that I can.
One of the potential solutions to correcting against the excesses of the modern, Corporate Web is to abandon HTTP(S) altogether. Before HTTP there was Gopher, after all, and there is still an active Gopher ecosystem in place today. Gopher, though, acts more like a file repository. It also hasn't been updated to support encrypted connections through TLS, which means everything sent and received over Gopher is plaintext. This may or may not be OK, and indeed maybe warrants a further philosophical discussion.
A newer protocol, Gemini, was created to provide a sort of Web-lite experience, but with TLS included. The Gemini Protocol is specifically designed to be significantly limited in its markup functionality (no inline links or formatting, for example) in the hopes that it will never be plagued by the same feature creep of HTTP. If you want to explore Gemini for yourself, you'll need a browser that supports the protocol. The recommended method is Lagrange, but there are a large number of Gemini browsers out there, and it really just comes down to personal preference.
As website maintainers, we have the power to choose not to fall into the creeping excesses that have befallen the Web. We can choose not to migrate to other niché enclaves, and instead persevere with the Web. We can create organic presences here, full of rich and unique information - a network of user-driven sites that, in time, may wrest back control of the Web. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of skepticism about that. The proverbial Genie is out of the bottle, and now that the Web has become a powerful corporate tool for revenue generation, it seems unlikely that there can be any realistic prospect of changing the trend.
This is why other protocols may be the answer. The 'Fresh Start' approach. A new network of sites, built by people, for people. This website has a presence on Gemini, though my writing there is different to what I put out there, mainly because I don't think simply mirroring Web content to Gemini is a great use of the platform. Gemini is its own thing, and should be treated as such. It's not a drop-in replacement for a broken Web, but a separate entity designed to co-exist.
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