I thought this was a well-written piece. I would love to see a "return to the internet" movement in 2018.
The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn digital land." And I think this is the way forward. In 2005 or the pre-FB era being a "techie" was a personal distinction. I feel that now most people have become "techies" in varying degrees, either out of necessity or general interest. I mention this because I think I think there's so many more people now that are fully capable of operating their own site or blog than there were in the pre-FB era or the pre-smart phone era.
I think one of the greatest joys of "getting online" back in the day was the sense of adventure that the internet provided - strange, funny, obscure, intriguing, informative "websites" lurked everywhere. And stumbling on one of them and bookmarking them is/was a strange thrill. Contrast this to scrolling through a uniform looking "newsfeed" you have no control over. I think something like a "back to the internet" movement just might make it's own momentum.
I am not an engineer but also am not a huge social media fan -- I like more control over what i share and the format I use to share it. Instead of using linked in / FB pages / medium, I've been building personal websites for friends and my own businesses, first using Wordpress, but found that just making simple static sites is much easier for me and more flexible.
However, Ive had trouble with super basic deployment stuff and i haven't found many resources to help. Ive just been using Cpanel, manual ftp updates, shared hosting etc, but have found this setup is super limiting, and I didn't really know much about hosting options before setting hosting up
I just found netlify, which seems great: integration with github, easy ssl certs, free, but just changing the DNS to point to netlify has been confusing, and I haven't been able to fix it. I also setup a site for a friend who was using wix (so terrible...) and can't figure out how to get hosting switched.
I feel stupid for not being able to do this, and have been able to figure out how to do a lot of stuff that should be more complex (building web apps, data analysis with Python, etc) but I've struggled with basics of deployment
A good set of resources for people who aren't engineers but have some HTML / CSS and programming knowledge, but don't have any devops or professional engineering background would be really useful imo
I was very proud of my Geocities page back in the day! It was pretty exciting writing out the url on little scraps of paper at school and passing them out to my friends. An unreadable storm of horrendous style choices, including by not limited to very obnoxious flashing fonts and inconsistent use of WAY TOO MANY CAPITALS--this was MY site and it felt good. Back when I had FB I never had the same feeling from it.
Would you say that social media is alienating, in the sense that it has routinized man's acquisition of information and knowledge? That the internet should serve as a tool for our own purposes, and not vice versa?
The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy.
The only way to ensure that your content doesn't get reshared without your permission is to create a tightly locked-down walled garden. If you're really worried, you need some sort of DRM too. And if you're really really worried, you need global laws that ban software that breaks DRM.
You can't have private, distributed data. You have to pick.
>"The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant about: Privacy."
Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?
Content control, copyright and DRM are orthogonal to the issue of privacy.
Also I don't really understand the use of the phrase "the distributed internet" to distinguish from "silos" and "walled gardens." The internet is by design distributed. FB while being a walled-garden is still very much "on" the internet.
Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?
You can't publish your site/blog/domain/presence privately to your friends. That venue does not substitute for Facebook. When talk about replacing social media, we have to accept that most people don't want to share their baby photos etc with the world.
>Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?
A website that any old person can access means it's a website that any number of bots can crawl over and aggregate. Now you're basically back where we started with Facebook.
There's a big difference between content aggregation (done by all search engines) and behavioral profiling (done by advertising companies, including social media).
Sure, but that fact that the latter is supposedly not done on personal web pages doesn't mean it can't / won't be done on the data on, say, Mastodon instances.
A crawler has no way of knowing whether or not I visited a site. A crawler doesn't have access to cookie data or HTTP access logs. So no we are not "back where we started with Facebook."
Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites. It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time.
>"Even giant corporations don't want to build their own sites"
What giant corporations don't want to build their own sites?
>"It isn't that people can't, it's that they would rather pay for it with money or data instead of time."
There might be a sea change in this though. And I think with things like Squarespace et al you can create a slick looking site for yourself with both minimal time and cost.
I, personally, don’t see why it’s necessary to coddle those who are unable to remember a time before garbage “social media” sites, by adopting the term “social internet.”
It’s just The Internet.
None of these sites or apps have done anything new, with the technology we have. It’s the same shit that existed in 1999, but scaled up to more bandwidth, faster client-side hardware, and warehouses full of servers.
Facebook really isn’t an improvement on AOL. Snapchat is just a means of forcing people to delete the lewd emails you’d like to send. Twitter is SMS text messaging, plus a mailing list web UI.
Since maybe 2004, people got sold on the idea of turning their address book into a home page, exposing their contact list as content. But it wasn’t anything new or incredible, it was just user behavior that changed.
Only now, when everyone is desperate for a political scapegoat, are we claiming that it was used to rig elections. But the only difference between the time before “social media” up until now, is that when we just had 900 page paper phone books, the phone book never drew lines to graph connections between phone numbers.
We have smart phones now, and smart phones have been the real game changer. In 1999, an ad campaign would have conflated these devices as supercomputers banned by export treaties, pointing to Game Boys getting used as missile guidance computers or military grade cryptographic hardware. But again, it’s just scaled up network bandwidth and more computing power packed into smaller packages. The real game changing aspect of smart phones is the cameras, hot microphones and uniquely identifiable, trackable radio tags we’ve been brainwashed into carrying.
Insisting on calling it a “social internet” simply treats people like children.
Platform monopolies are not The Internet. The Internet does not require a prefix or qualifier. It’s not the “social” internet.
"Better" mousetraps built - when what we need is more community for growing and learning and more interconnectedness, through increasingly better organization and governance.
Welcome to how the internet used to be. It's amazing that people's memories are so short on this subject, if you have enough smart people pushing corporate experience X or Y then everyone assumes that's the only option.
The first step is rejecting the aggressive attempts at corporations to ensure you live in their "garden" as much as possible. It's bizarre that people are doing gymnastics about how if you just restrict yourself to this certain 3% of the food in that garden everything will be ok.
How about setting out on your own instead? How about starting from: "I don't need youtube, I don't need amazon, I don't need google analytics" and figuring it out?
Pretty much all websites I make are like this. It's text, it uses minimal HTML formatting and a tiny bit of javascript if absolutely necessary (HTML has no #include directive).
Have you looked at static page generators? Wonder if that provides the simplicity you're looking for along with optional customization. One example: https://gohugo.io
Got distracted by problems with Markdown (an8d Asciidoc).
Get distracted every time I want to write.
After I got my html "template" up and running I just copy that and write whatever I want to write.
Conclusion: for me, when writing, finding the correct tools prevented me from just writing.
(I have however spend some time on my developer tooling and feel I get a good return on investment there. Currently (for 5+ years) Netbeans and Maven, and later also VSCode + Yarn.)
I've spent more time than I dare to admit trying to rebuild my person web site which I ran successfully from 2000-2012. Which coding framework should I use, CSS, database, hosting platform, the list goes on. I should have just spent the time writing it all in plain vanilla html (which I've now started doing).
Ironically if I'd start posting my content on a social network where I had no control over how it looked/functioned I would have spent my time actually putting together something useful.
Server side includes. It does everything required and doesn't bloat and doesn't change. I've been using them since the geocities era with hand-written static html content. Easy to mix and match.
> For those who don’t crave recognition, it induces a digital life that’s more localized to closer friends and family — a state that’s more congruent with our fundamental human instincts.
It's a noble goal.
To achieve it, the author suggests that people buy a domain name, spend $4 a month on web hosting, and manually install Wordpress. The author leaves out ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.
Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.
Subtract from that the ability to write polemics on any of these topics:
* geopolitics wrt Ukraine
* diversity in tech/gaming
* China's policy on Tibet
* probably others that I'm missing.
Because if rile up anyone with even slight hacking skills (or anyone who could pay such a person) your $5 a month website is toast.
And we're apparently replacing the attention economy with "directly checking your site," RSS, and email newsletters.
If we're going to entertain technical-user fantasies like this make-the-internet-great-again piece does, can't we as technologist at least imagine a less boring future?
* it should cost $0 to publish
* the more popular/polemical one's writing, the faster it it should be to retrieve the document. You know, technology that has existed for close to two decades now
* it should be as easy to use the software of our fantasies as it is to use the awful social media networks we're decrying. Drudgery shouldn't be a badge of ethics.
* it should also probably be able to deliver publicly-funded scientific journal articles at $0 cost to the user.
Actually that last one is key. If someone thinks they've got a Facebook-killer, don't describe the technical underpinnings to me. Just give me a search bar to find publicly-funded scientific journal articles on your system. If I can discover them and read them and they haven't disappeared after a month, I'll then consider using your system to express myself.
> To achieve it, the author suggests that people buy a domain name, spend $4 a month on web hosting, and manually install Wordpress. The author leaves out ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.
> Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.
For most of us it would be more efficient to just use html.
Then you don't have to maintain Wordpress at all.
Or, if updating links etc gets tedious: use static html generators.
Hmm I suppose static site generators actually are more secure and stable too right?
If it's just a static server, then it won't require the maintenance of core, plugin updates that WordPress and other CMS's need, just the web server updates.
One can also use WordPress.com and an owner domain. Hosting, installation and security is covered and you still get to own your content. And I haven’t heard of any pro-Tibetan blogs banned from WordPress.com
> "...the development of open social protocols that support the network effect usefulness of large social networks without a centralized company in charge."
Not sure what exact shape the author imagines this might take, but I've had this idea (dream) in the back of my mind for a long time.. We need a standardized protocol that is open (I.E. not controlled by or dependent on 1 or 2 companies), private and secure by default, and dead simple to setup. For a while a few years ago I was really excited about the Bittorrent Bleep concept. The fact that it's been discontinued demonstrates just how important it is for these protocols to be open source and have multiple implementations!
Imagine a protocol that was P2P, supported chat/messages/voice/video, group messaging, integrated microblogging, ability to follow your friends and rank their posts with your own algorithm! Imagine if it was modular. You could choose from a half dozen post ranking algorithm plugins, or write your own, or sign up for extra-value services from companies that were competing for your business (maybe providing curated post lists or cloud storage of your posts/PMs).
I realize that absolutely none of this is innovative on it's own. We've been able to send encrypted messages/host blogs/script our own algorithms forever. But it's highly fragmented and requires a certain technical acumen that many people just don't have. My grandparent's aren't going to host and configure their own blog. Not going to happen. But, while it lasted, Bittorrent Bleep was entirely doable for them.
I think we need to think of social protocols less as a technical solution and more as what I'd describe in my day job as a 'business process'. Sure, part of this will be tech-enabled and parts will be fully automated, but I feel that what is really lacking is an internet etiquette that can be abstracted over different channels or platforms.
Consider Facebook. With the friend request it invented a new social protocol. It was based on an underlying technical need (this platform will allow you to message, interact with and view the content of this target user) but became a social contract (I assert that I know and am willing to interact with this person on a level where they can see my daily updates and information that I have chosen to share). This was incredibly rigid and binary, but essentially shaped the social media landscape and affected the way that users, especially early users considered their friendships and acquaintances.
Also its a bit out of vogue now, but there was a massive 'thing' of the facebook relationship status being some kind of social registry.
If anyone has read the 'Kingkiller' chronicle books by Patrick Rothfuss, I would imagine a 'social protocol' to be something like the 'rings' system from the city of Severin. Simple ruleset, but allows complex social emergent behaviour and could be abstracted over different mediums or communications channels.
Sure, but I'd argue the Facebook friend request is different to, say, the MSN friend request. One felt like adding someone to an address book, the other felt like officially adding someone to your circle of friends.
Probably subjective, but therein lies the insight into why Facebook is so culturally significant.
Well, I don't see how it's very much different from, say, LiveJournal friend request (except that it doesn't have to be mutually accepted) or a similar feature of MySpace (I think they had it too) or even last.fm.
I think your last point is a key point in this. Such a protocol wouldn’t just need to match what’s already available by centralized services. Like Email or HTTP before it, it’d need to be innovative in and of itself.
If Snapchat were an open Facebook implementation, it would not have taken off.
It likely would need some compelling user-focused feature/gimmick + rock solid UI in order to get a foothold in the market.
However, the real innovation would be in managing the cryptographic keys in a way that is both secure (within parameters) and dead simple for end users.
This is the part where someone starts shouting "blockchain!" Not sure if that's the solution, but with enough smart minds thinking about it I'm sure a there's a way.
You need to build trust with early adopters which is through clear explanation . You need good branding too, as part of tapping into user behaviour psychology - things need to be easy and flow well, needs to be immediately understandable and intuitive to some degree, without being so shallow as to being hype or potential propaganda. Blockchain may be the answer or part of the answer, I personally hope incentivized blockchains won't be successful for their unnecessary downside/unreasonable value extraction/subtle reallocation.
> My grandparent's aren't going to host and configure their own blog.
My grandparents didn't set up their own Facebook account either. We (mainly my mom, I think) did it for them. You could help your grandparents set up a blog, then show them how to post to it (think something like WordPress or Ghost, not a static site using Markdown and Git). After all, they had to learn the Facebook interface too.
I had some extra server space after a side project a few years ago and offered to set up Wordpress blogs for my mom and a few friends. Most of them were basically never used. My mom kept up near weekly posts for a year and a half or so, but it's been several years since her last post. I bet I could delete them all right now and it would be next Thanksgiving before they noticed.
I second the author that we need to host our own website and data, however finding an audience is really hard in post-Facebook world. Just ask any blogger who saw the golden years of blogging (2008-2012). The Internet might be the same but the social media sites have changed the nature of the game. I feel our attention spans have decreased and the fallout of the Facebook privacy fiasco will definitely make it hard to consume new stuff.
I'm not sure if decentralised solutions like Mastodon/Scuttlebutt/Diaspora etc will succeed, as I feel this is a human problem, not a technical one.
> I second the author that we need to host our own website and data, however finding an audience is really hard in post-Facebook world.
I think many of us wants even further back than the golden years of blogging: we want back to before "blogger" was a profession, back to when we put things on Internet to share and get feedback.
IMO "Finding an audience" is something you need if you are going to milk advertisers.
I have been maintaining a nextcloud instance for some time (migrated from owncloud).
It initially was for my personal usage, but over time I created accounts for relatives, friends, university and work colleagues (free Dropbox !!).
I’d have never thought it’s so customizable:
in the store there is an app for xmpp chat with a fb-like ui (very popular amongst my younger friends) and the social aspect can be managed by Circles [https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles], control over visibility and permissions is included.
Of course, it does not scale to millions of users, but that’s the point. The approach is a middle ground between “delete social media” and “own your own domain”.
The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility.
Its easy to start a blog (wordpress/blogger/tumblr etc.. ), its harder to get people to go to it and periodically check it out. RSS aggregators/ google reader was a good way to do this, but they've fallen out of favor. There is a ghost town of abandoned blogs on the internet presumably because they didn't get the reads/ interaction.
Its almost like you need to announce your new blogpost on twitter/ fb..
But I think there are solutions.
I saw this open source groupware on hn a while back and am starting to get in installed for an art non-profit. There are probably others, but I'm going install and see how it goes:
I agree with this sentiment. Yet, it seems instinctive to suggest that the internet wasn't made to be exploited by those wishing to monetize it. I just think we've let the presence of large tech companies pervert this concept.
Absent such groups, it would seem to be desirable to let individuals monetize work which makes them happy. In such a web, it would be more akin to a street marketplace, as opposed to, say, a curated set of goods.
"The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility."
So the matter we must take up is that of equal opportunity for those wishing to increase their readership, (whether for influence or monetary reasons)?
That's my interpretation. In this sense, are Google and many other "given" sites on the web a barrier to having a conversation about such measures, because of their power?
I think good visibility to quality content is the problem. Maybe why many of us are here on HN to get interesting content not on our social platform.
Google would seem to want this a more open web. I suspect they're starting to fear everyone using Facebook for everything, thus investing in Wordpress. Though they haven't been big supporters of their own blogging platform.
A lot of the social media Giants like you to keep your content on their own site, basically the longer your on Facebook/twitter the more ads they can show you. Google drops ads all over the web (except Facebook and twitter) so they don't care where you go.
This is a penetrating analysis and I completely agree with its values.
In practise, however, it is a very quixotic pursuit to try to pull the social world away from SV companies with network effect lock-in. The only way to succeed just may lie revolve in anti-social marketing behaviour.
I agree with you; the sentiment here is right, but it's unrealistic to try and change the mindset of so many people.
In my experience, 'the masses' are bright enough that they will drop a service when it's no longer useful to them, or when something better comes along. After all, they adopted FB in the first place, right?
If you're opposed to the services, the best you can do is abstain from them and share your reasons why with anyone who cares to ask, but don't bother preaching. It might be as effective to be a loud exception: as an example, how could a public agency organize a public forum via FB if all citizens aren't using FB? By standing out from these services, inclusive groups will have to accomodate their members who are outside of them. That's all we can ask for.
People are giving their attention, personal information, and money via these social services, but maybe they can afford to spend it there. Otherwise they would stop, no?
1. We started with the idea that actually social tools would let you get in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission: Empowering People.
2. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software themselves. The flipside of letting people actually get together on their own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them. Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their own time. (See https://qbix.com/communities). Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: Uniting Communities
3. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook, that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.
But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments. We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit, vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform). We don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)
It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the email is greg and the domain is qbix.com
See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:
Nice work. Which tool did you use to create the video?
One of the examples says that when overlaying a Google map widget on the dentist's site, that the dentist does not have access to location data. Elsewhere, the video mentions iframes. If the dentist's web site runs HTTPS, how are you injecting iframes? Or is the primary "site" being served locally, with the dentist's web site displayed in an iframe?
If all of the user's identity data is stored on their phone, how do they backup that data or move it between devices?
2. The dentist's site HTML/JS actually chooses to include the iframe pointing to the user's identity server, our platform does the rest.
3. The user's data is stored encrypted in other areas, as well. They themselves can decrypt the data and grant keys to access it as they see fit. Our platform handles the rest.
My personal take is that over all, `application specific` social platforms (SP) are working just fine like Github (SP for coding) and Yelp (SP for local listings). There's a general goal that people go to get the resources they desire.
However, Facebook as come to be a `SP for media`, which is why its generally known as social media. There's just no general purpose on FB other than to share media articles nowadays.
I went a few years without Google Analytics, and I was proud of the fact that my weblog had no tracking software. I kept thinking I would write a script to track the audience myself. But I was busy and never got around to it. So in the autumn I decided, okay, I'll use Google Analytics for a few months, till I can write my own code.
I'd written my own system for tracking my weblog, back in the era of 2005-2009, before I used WordPress (back when I only used my own code for websites).
Looking at the Google Analytics results nowadays is heartbreaking for someone like me, who remembers the independent blogosphere of 12 years ago. Because it is gone. Utterly gone.
Back then my traffic tended to come from dozens of independent bloggers who noticed when I occasionally said something smart. The blogosphere was a world of individual voices. There were big group blogs, such as Crooked Timber, but even those consisted of individuals and it was easy to figure out who had admired something I wrote. It was a world where you had some sense of who was reading you, and what they thought about you, and they could see when you read them in return.
That world died in the era 2006-2010 as Twitter and Facebook gained influence.
Nowadays, Google Analytics shows I get traffic from sites that aggregate audiences. Overwhelmingly, that's Facebook and Twitter. The traffic is very sporadic, full of big spikes of anonymous readers. A few times a year I'll write something that gets on the front page of Hacker News, and then I'll get from Hacker News anywhere from 4,000 to 40,000 visits over two or three days. Which is great, but also sporadic.
What I miss is the ability to follow those who are reading me, and more so, their awareness, in response, that I am reading them in return. The dynamic of "You read me so I read you and you see that I read you" is alive and well on specific sites, such as Twitter, but I miss it being part of the general Internet experience. I do realize I can use something like https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge to treat social media as a series of RSS feeds, and I am planning on doing that, but that still misses the element of them seeing that I am reading them.
I've been thinking about some way to try to balance people's preference for walled-gardens with this kind of open back and forth conversation. I might work on this more seriously later in the year.
If anyone is interested in a bit of history, way back in 2006 I wrote what was widely considered the most definitive summary of the fighting that had taken place among those interested in developing RSS. All of this was made irrelevant by the rise of Twitter, but in 2006, this still seemed like a very important topic for the Web industry:
"RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"
One of the perks of social media is precisely the shift in cat herding burden from the user to the platform. I present the following as supporting evidence:
>NOTE: THIS SITE IS A PARTICIPANT IN THE AMAZON SERVICES LLC ASSOCIATES PROGRAM, AN AFFILIATE ADVERTISING PROGRAM DESIGNED TO PROVIDE A MEANS FOR SITES TO EARN ADVERTISING FEES BY ADVERTISING AND LINKING TO AMAZON.COM.
I do not revel in the glorious autonomy of, say, permanent academics whose self-help blogger reflexes have become so internalized that it's no longer clear whether they recognize that a post is opportunist piggybacking on trending slacktivist topics. If I can't tell from the general tenor of your blog whether you can tell that you're baldly shilling your books, your self-perception in the matter has ceased to hold relevance.
My first thought upon seeing affiliate marketing links on a self-serious blog is usually something more along the lines of: why does this creature believe they should be paid to have tastes in others' works?
For the most part, I'm not going to visit at all. But when I do, I am going — 100% of the time — to strip tracking parameters, affiliate codes, and all the other bullshit off any link prior to visiting.
Knowing that a platform's design serves to background any given individual user's capitalism of-the-soul in the service of a more homogeneous, impersonal assault from the proprietors is an extremely valuable thing. De-emphasizing personal schemes allows platform-centric economies of scale to double as behavioral peacekeeping. If I only have to circumnavigate a user's terrible ideology, vainglorious twitter feuds, etc. to accrue value from the subset of their posts I find worthwhile, I'm doing better, curatorially-speaking, than if I had to concern myself with that user's schemes to monetize their mere existence in my vicinity.
Constraints on affordances limit a small proportion of content-creating elites. You know you're one of those when your whining about the platform becomes action in leaving the platform, self-publishing in parallel, or otherwise upregulating personal agency.
For everyone else, though, those same constraints make the world go round.
The average internet user has no business whatsoever running their own services, per every single survey of digital skills ever conducted. And a CS prof writing otherwise is either (a) grossly incompetent in his stated area of expertise or (b) allowing himself to shoehorn flights of fancy into his writing in the service of pushing schlock.
A profile you lose because you didn't pay $4 last month, or didn't get security updates for, or […] is simply not a plausible centerpiece of alternative social media under any demographically-literate view of the world.
Homestead the noosphere all you want. Tenements will still need building too.
The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn digital land." And I think this is the way forward. In 2005 or the pre-FB era being a "techie" was a personal distinction. I feel that now most people have become "techies" in varying degrees, either out of necessity or general interest. I mention this because I think I think there's so many more people now that are fully capable of operating their own site or blog than there were in the pre-FB era or the pre-smart phone era.
I think one of the greatest joys of "getting online" back in the day was the sense of adventure that the internet provided - strange, funny, obscure, intriguing, informative "websites" lurked everywhere. And stumbling on one of them and bookmarking them is/was a strange thrill. Contrast this to scrolling through a uniform looking "newsfeed" you have no control over. I think something like a "back to the internet" movement just might make it's own momentum.