When the World Wide Web was in its infancy we were all very idealistic about how it would be used. Most of the early sites were universities and for a while academia ruled. Tim Berners-Lee of course was an academic and envisioned the web as an information management system. When I brought up the first web server at Southern Oregon University the earliest content was from professors posting their research papers.
A different Tim, though also originally from academia, had a different idea for the web. Timothy Leary said "the Web, with its network of alternative realities, was the LSD of the next century. Its ability to demolish boundaries and create new visions made it, for him, a utopian force." (source) . While not going as far as Dr. Leary, many of us saw the potential for the Web to foster communication in a way that nothing could before.
In those early days the web was a very open place. No one could foresee that it would soon be dominated by corporate giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. When I first brought up this website in the mid 1990s I was running it on a server in my basement. I had a fixed ip address from my local Internet Service Provider. There was no cloud yet so if you wanted a website you had to have a server plugged in to the internet.
The idea of the Open Web was very popular, with people like Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, continuing to argue for it to this day. The technologies to be able to share and aggregate information across a distributed Web advanced quickly and were used widely. RSS enabled you to build your own feed of content from all over the web. It didn't matter if it was from the New York Times or my basement server. Sites like Wordpress and Squarespace sprung up to make it not-that-hard for non technical people to create their own websites or blogs. Even Twitter was originally just a protocol that could be leveraged by many different kinds of apps for messaging.
Then came Facebook. Facebook changed everything by establishing critical mass. I really resisted Facebook for a long time but eventually I realized it was the only place I could see what was going on with my oldest granddaughter and niece, and eventually the rest of my family. So Facebook took over the world connecting old friends, schoolmates, and long lost lovers in a way that nothing could before. I belong to dozens of special interest groups on FB where I engage with people on everything from bicycle touring, and guitar repair, to old woodworking tools and programming languages. Facebook is a big part of my life.
Now we see Facebook's founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg showing us who he really is. Sure Facebook users have always complained about him, but if there had every been any doubt about his lust for control, and world dominance, that doubt has now been clearly erased. The dude really wants to be in the club with Trump, Musk, and Bezos. I'd really love to see a users rebellion where FB users take control of the platform, but I don't see how that could ever be possible. They got us by the data and the connections.
And so I start to think back to the Open Web and what I can do to help us get back to that vision. Bluesky seems like a step in the right direction. It's based on an open protocol and has the potential to become widely distributed. I could even bring up my own Bluesky server although I'm not sure why I would want to.
But I do want to own my own data. So yesterday and today I made a start. I have for many years hosted my blog on Blogger, which is part of Google. I have now imported all of my old blog posts into my own website here. You can use the filter on my blog page to see the posts that came from Blogger. I'll continue to share my blog post on FB and Bluesky, but I'm to start limiting how much content I post directly on those systems. My next step will be to see if it's even possible to retrieve my posts , pictures, and videos from Facebook and clone them on my own site. Stay tuned.
I don't see how it will ever be possible to topple the corporate giants that now rule the Web, but it is possible to help build an underground network and still stay connected to all of my friends and other like minded people. Should be fun.