Retreat to Move Forward
This really looks like it starts out of nowhere unless you read this first.
The end result of the tech industry’s stagnation is that software has ceased being a useful tool and has instead become an increasingly mediocre service to funnel revenue to enrich investors and executives, while offering diminishing returns to the users.
I’ve watched all of this unfold over the last 40 years, from the rise of genuine “started in a garage” companies who became industry titans, to the explosive growth of the web and the massive creativity of everyday people that followed, to the emergence and entrenchment of social media and its walled gardens brought about by the smartphone, to the current Enshittification Era.
There was a time when free protocols reigned and people built software and communities that took advantage of what others had made and given to the world for free. Email facilitated by SMTP, network routing and data transmission using TCP/IP, Newsgroups made possible by NNTP. All of these protocols fueled the free flow of expression, discussion, and information exchange. We could flame each other to our heart’s content, create funny pictures with totally legit copies of Photoshop, and make short videos mocking everything from the past few decades of pop culture.
The price of entry was getting an internet connection and finding software to take advantage of it, most of which was free or relatively inexpensive shareware created by a single person or a small group of people. And completely legitimate commercial software that was in no way bought in Sim Lim Square on a compilation CD with other cracked software, or warez shared in a newsgroup by someone involved with the scene.
There were Bulletin Board Systems using Citadel, web bulletin boards facilitated by PHP, blogs built on Perl, and chatting via IRC and other freely available or open source software. The offerings were varied and many.
The move to Web 2.0 and its walled gardens wiped away much of that era of the internet, and the emergence of the smartphone with its app system as a primary interface pretty much killed it off. Of course, many communities still persist in diminished form, shuffling along in a half-dead state, but the vibrancy and dynamism of that era is long gone. I would imagine the users of those communities are steadily shrinking groups of die-hards who enjoy talking to each other, but offer hostility or indifference to any new blood that engages with them.
They’re like the Legion Halls of the internet at this point.
I keep feeling a need to break away from the current model and do something different, or at least gain an illusory sense of control over my online presence. At the very least, I’d like to experience some form of the internet that I enjoyed before the iPhone was released. At the same time, you can’t really go back and in many ways you wouldn’t really want to. I used to code websites by hand using Notepad, but that’s not something I really want to spend my time doing at this point in my life.
The challenge is to determine what my goal is, what compromises I’m willing to make, and resist nostalgia’s siren song while also feeding the need to fiddle around with something that I own and operate. I also don’t care if I make any money off this or how many people view or engage with it, so hey, we already have some good old fashioned internetting going on here.
I just want to express myself in a manner that benefits me and isn’t being monetized so some asshole can build a bunker in Hawaii.
The one thing I’ve decided to do is move back to having my own website. I bought a domain, rented some server space, and spun-up WordPress. I’ve installed plugins that take advantage of the ActivityPub protocol that allow me to host my own content here and syndicate it on open networks like Mastodon and PixelFed (and to a lesser extent, BlueSky). A person could even reply or like a syndicated post on another site and it would appear here as well.
It reminds me a lot of FidoNet and while it may remain a niche tool for people and communities, it’s pretty cool to try it out and see where it goes. I’m fine with occupying the niche. The move to social media and using my real name to connect with people I already knew always seemed kinda weird to me.
For me, the internet had always been an escape from the small-minded, working-class world I lived in and a conduit to encounter truly interesting people and provocative ideas from all over the world. Weirdos, oddballs, and outcasts have always been my comrades and we all found each other in this crazy and confounding realm. I don’t know if there’s any way to recapture all of that, but it’s still worth trying.
If nothing else, I’ll learn something new and at my age that’s saying a lot. I’ve got the guy from Law and Order slinging term life insurance and Tom Selleck trying to sell me a reverse mortgage, so learning new protocols and some scripting languages seems pretty fucking appealing at the moment.
It’s one small step to reclaiming some part of this internet for myself using old and familiar tools, but also exploring new ways of connecting with others that doesn’t involve proprietary protocols or closed software with continually increasing subscription fees to enrich the C-suite and shareholders at the expense of everything else.
Sure, I’ll still use TikTok, Threads, YouTube and other closed systems. Ideological purity was never my thing and besides, there’s a lot of interesting people to see, and it doesn’t hurt to put things out there that the right people may find and enjoy. But everything I make and distribute on those platforms will exist on this site and my personal server, owned by me and available to be distributed wherever I see fit.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. I think those of us who’ve grown dissatisfied with the current state of things are trying the best we can with what we’ve got and hoping that maybe we’ll stumble into something novel and truly interesting. It beats facebook at any rate.
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♻️ Dr Pen