When @home first started figuring out how to IP-over-cable in the mid-90s, one of its early employees was incredibly excited that the promise was to offer symmetric up/down bandwidth, with the implicit goal that people could run servers at home.
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I see no reason why we could not bend it back that way. I have some friends that run a mid sized ISP that somehow managed to stay independent, they run fiber to the home and have a large enough customer base that it might be interesting to see if they're open to removing any blocks on symmetrical links for qualified users.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
I've been fighting my ISP for years trying to get an upload speed that is not over TWENTY FIVE TIMES slower than my download speed. It took an FCC complaint for them to even get back to me.
The whole discussion reminds me of talks at the dinner table with my father. He was born in 1939 studied what is "IT" nowadays in Vienna, Austria, and Chicago, Illinois. He was working as the head of IT at the University in Innsbruck when the first e-mail ever was sent at the CERN.
The idea of a free and decentralised Internet to connect Universities and scientists on the whole planet was the ideal that started his workoholism.
First networks were up, when suddenly the marked was flooded with products from the US based on a network fitting the needs of the US military.
My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say.
The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water.
Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere.
It would have been something new, something revolutionary.
He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic.
When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been."
Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not.
What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem.
It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies.
If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates.
Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom.
Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn.
P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.
I do find it quite ironic that this piece reeks of LLM-writing while also simultaneously decrying the death of everything that is in antithesis to things like that. Is there a single shred of originality or shame left in the SV-adjacent writing sphere?
Likely because it used common writing techniques, which people have now convinced themselves are a surefire way to identify AI content, because the AI, having been trained on writing that uses common writing techniques, also uses those techniques.
Best to treat it with some emotional distance. It's not like the optimization process feels it.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
There is an ever-dwindling minority of people who think "fuck boosting engagement" is a valid strategy in this era. Online, engagement is everything. We have all, through social media and feed algorithms, been reduced to acting out the most insipid style of court-jester antics to try and garner attention; the SNR is just too high for good content to thrive.
"We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram…."
Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that.
Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
To be honest, I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Open web" is supposed to mean?
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
> what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
The reason why no one cares is because most well-adjusted adults have never interacted with the web or its many tendrils as much as the patrons of this website (and others like it) have.
I don't understand the point of the distinction. We say the open web is dying because a vocal minority does do all they can to preserve it and reject the influences of the worse platforms. But the rest of the world doesn't care and so the open web is dying. Its proponents aren't killing it; it's dying despite their best attempts to keep it alive.
The article starts with a picturesque "Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat", I woyld wish there be an LLM to generate that, are there any?
I won’t be taking responsibility for the scrapers that are molesting the free and open web and destroying its economic viability. Somebody else is doing that.
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
Why use the present continuous tense? We can safely use the past tense as llms definitely killed it. The web of course isn’t going to vanish but there is no motivation for anyone to create a new site now.
76 comments
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say.
The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water.
Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere. It would have been something new, something revolutionary.
He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic. When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been."
Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not. What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem.
It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies. If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates.
Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom.
Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn.
P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.
How so?
It's getting to feel like some weird kind of AI McCarthyism where everything is suspected of being manufactured.
Since I have no idea whether something is LLM-generated or not, I've instead decided to argue things on their merits alone.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
Barf.
Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that.
I suppose it takes time.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
> We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual.
Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population.
This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?"
Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean.
You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users.
Sites like HN will be the outlier.
Technological gravity, boss.
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
> what have we done to foster the open / small web today?
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562214
> We embedded the follow buttons, added the share widgets, installed the trackers, and told our friends, readers, coworkers, and communities that the right place to find us was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, or whichever silo was ascendant that year.
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.