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Comment on To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model

The premise of a web business model is that websites must make a profit - either directly or indirectly.

That’s utter bullshit. Some of us are old enough to remember when the web (or for that matter, the pre-web internet) was there for sharing of information, social interaction, and community. Schools, the government, and nonprofits provided hosting for free.

Later on, ISPs started to add hosting as part of their internet service - along with usenet access and an email address. The cost to them was negligible, especially vs. the benefits of being able to say “switch to us and create your own website!”

Nowadays you can run a site from your home PC in a VM, punch a hole through your firewall, and pay a modicum for DDNS to a custom domain for under a hundred bucks a year. If you’re a bigger site with more traffic, maybe you spin it up on AWS and pay ten or twenty bucks a month.

The very idea that “The Web” is a homogeneous, for-profit entity is a profound and fundamental mistake that is made by every money-obsessed organization around - not just the financial rags like Forbes and The Economist, but essentially corporations as well. Take a look at the support site for your favourite product and try to convince yourself that they didn’t just put the minimum required effort in to send customers into the arms of their competitors.

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Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I never heard of an ISP offering a free website to host, the free mail address I do remember sadly.

A lot of what is wrong with the web is the result of governments lacking the ability to stop companies from growing too much. It doesn’t help either that the best country for startups is as corrupt as fuck and has been for decades, including from before the start of the internet.

We all should chose to use parts of the web we want to use, like Lemmy and actual non-profit organisations like Ecosia, Proton and what not.

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Zexks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Nobody ever offered free web hosting. They put ads on your shit or you paid for it. You became the product. You’re talking about shit that very few these days even know how to do. And no those costs weren’t negligible which is why geo cities and all those other “free” pages disappeared. Same with all the couple dozen different chat programs that sprung up. Free shit works partially at small scale but can’t handle any kind of serious activity. People can barely navigate Salesforce there’s no way they’re setting up their own hooks or poking holes in their routers or setting up external dns.

Don’t pull that age bullshit on me. Im nearly 50. I was there in the muds, in the bbs, on icq, watched Napster sutdown. Been configuring this shit since 3.1 and wordperfect in dos.

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