They ruined Linux!

It’s really not… A domain name is what… $5-10 per year? Web server software is free (nginx, apache, lighttptd, pick your poison). You could run a website on your phone. It doesn’t need much hardware or network requirements unless you start hitting thousands of users.

A static IP helps but dynamic DNS is a thing. If you need more juice or you’re located somewhere that NATs IPs, a public web host is like $5-10 a month if you’re getting ripped off.

It costs more to get a streaming service subscription.

Hosting a popular webapp with tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users interacting with complex backend code and a database (see Lemmy) gets more expensive but it always was and it’s now cheaper than ever.

Edit: I should point out that I’m pretty anti-corporate and I’m not defending the current state of social media or search results. I’m just also agreeing with the guy who pointed out that the web is still open and you can host a website on a potato.

I feel like that’s not a fair comparison. You can’t ride a horse on a freeway but you absolutely can host a website that anyone in the world can access instantly.

Back when the web was “open” and “free” and not dominated by social media, the 99% of people, the millions and billions of users, weren’t using it. It’s not like your Geocities page in 1999 had a billion visitors (despite what your “one billionth visitor” blink tags proclaimed). Even after it got added to that popular web ring for like-minded netizens.

I feel like people have forgotten what the old web was really like and that most communities only had a handful of active people. You can still do that and in fact there are thousands of such small independent websites and communities in forums and platforms like this. Hell, a bunch of the old forums and IRC channels etc. from back then are still running and some actually have more users than ever just because of more overall internet adoption.

It’s a bit sad that Google SEO favours large platforms and garbage medium blogs over smaller personal websites but search was mostly shit back then too (metacrawler ftw).

“aborigines” is not a great word to use these days. It’s generally seen as pretty offensive to Indigenous Australians as it’s a bit dehumanising and comes from colinisers who treated people like animals.

Better to go with “First Nations people”, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” or “Indigenous Australians.”

But yes, they’ve been treated (and in many cases continue to be treated) pretty horribly.