Angus McIntyre
This essay from @pluralistic, describing how he applied Indieweb POSSE (Publish Own Site Syndicate Everywhere) principles to maintaining a web presence free of the Big Tech gatekeepers is worth a read, particularly when he talks about decisions he made & the reasons for them.
I'm a fan of POSSE. I have altogether too many websites of my own (see profile) & try hard to avoid dependencies on any 3rd-party platform for anything I publish that I care about.
But ...
Angus McIntyre
2/ It's easy for @pluralistic or me to say "Just put it all on your own site", because we are both hardcore nerds, and so running our own sites is, if never exactly frustration-free, at least largely within our area of technical competence.
I do believe that people who make their living creatively, or just want their thoughts to be heard, should have an "own site", whatever that means: some form of Internet presence where they can publish without the imprimatur of Zuckerberg or Musk.
But ...
Angus McIntyre
3/ Creating and running your own Internet "thing" (whether it's a website or anything else -- some place where people can find you and hear what you have to say that can't be shut down at a moment's notice if some faceless algorithm decides that you have Offended) takes expertise, time, and money.
Many people who have something worthwhile to say may lack one or more of those three.
Angus McIntyre
4/ I don't like the idea that we should only hear from the people who have the luxury of being able to run their own website.
Such people tend to be WEIRD.
Not weird, which I'm all in favor of, but WEIRD meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (psychologists coined the acronym to reflect the fact that their test subjects are often very unrepresentative of humanity as a whole, with obvious problems).
So the question becomes ...
Angus McIntyre
5/ How do you democratize the process of owning your own website/microblog/podcast/thingumajig?
How do you make it so that anyone who wants to can indulge in a little POSSE-style self-publishing without having to surmount the expertise/time/money barriers to entry?
Angus McIntyre
6/ It's worth acknowledging that FaceTwit and InstaBook and their ilk do represent a possible solution to this question. Big Tech handed everyone a microphone (so to speak) with no up-front downpayment required.
Angus McIntyre
7/ Of course Big Tech social media turns out to be a devil's bargain. The microphone is free, but they can turn the volume all the way down or even cut the cord altogether, whenever they want to, for any reason or none.
And then there are all the other things they get up to to ensure that your use of their free microphone is HIGHLY profitable to them.
Angus McIntyre
8/ You're probably familiar with the phrase "If you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product."
It might be more accurate to say "You're paying for it, but perhaps not in the most obvious way."
You pay for your social media with your privacy, your attention, and anything else you have that the corporations think they can turn into money.
And we ALL pay for it in other ways too, through the casual damage to society inflicted in the name of profit.
Angus McIntyre
9/ So maybe that's not the best possible solution to the question of how to democratize access.
And so one of the things that I think about is, how could we do it better? What solutions could we come up with to the challenge of giving everyone who wants it a place to do their own thing on the Interwebs, lowering the barriers to entry without requiring people to trade away something intangible but valuable as the price for their fifteen minutes of attention?
Angus McIntyre
10/ I think any "solution" is going to be a point on a continuum. There may not be one perfect one-size-fits-all answer that delivers maximum flexibility with minimum cost of adoption.
I'm interested in, say, @laura 's site.js (https://sitejs.org/) as an example of a project that aims to lower the barriers to site ownership.
I see that as a point on the continuum: Site.js lowers the bar THIS much, and in exchange you get THIS much flexibility, power, etc.
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