this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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It is still possible to run your own server and set up your own website. Nobody is stopping anybody from doing that. That's literally what all the Fediverse admins are doing. We just all got lazy and decided to congregate around pre built platforms.
MySpace had the best of both worlds. A robust social media platform with tons of customization options, including even altering the css and html of your personal page.
Edit: also, this article is like, 12 years old.
It's not just laziness. The economies of scale can potentially be worth huge cost savings, and higher reliability, in addition to a significantly less burdensome workload to maintain. Especially for smaller sites.
I mean even when I was running my own homelab for years, the FOSS software I relied on was in many ways "pre-built platforms." From the Linux kernel to a distro package manager (and all the maintained packages), I was always standing on the shoulder of giants anyway.
You can, but it’s not how the web is used anymore. If you want to get reach, you’re better off using any of the established platforms. Search engines won’t help you getting any visitors to your website.
From the user's perspective it's not about "reach"; it's about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there'll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there'll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.
The world wide web is more than social media.
And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.
Factually true, but it sure doesn't feel like it most days.
It is, but it's a lot harder to find privately hosted things thanks to advertising ruining all the major search engines.