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by gambler 1547 days ago
"A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie.

The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.

We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.

3 comments

Are you complaining that there is no way to "bypass censorship" on Facebook? Because it is pretty trivial to host your own site. The web has absolutely delivered on that promise; just see how the efforts to shut down The Pirate Bay have failed.
Yeah what you are running into is the difference between the web, which is already dead and rotting, versus the internet, which is quite resilient and is in the process of eating the web.
> bypassing censorship

Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.

It's still true, for the internet at least; the problem is that the other layers we've since built on top of the internet (large, centralized web services) do not share that virtue.