The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

> Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--preventing our voices from being heard by too widely

I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison.

"Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television networks were the only actual public media (we could include zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical properties.

Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific kinds of content the way that TV stations do).

The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.

I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this comparison, but more significantly, it is also misdirecting. It leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly different media and legal frameworks.

A four-fold increase in Gemini usage doesn't tell me much. Even a 100x increase wouldn't be surprising or meaningful for something that started at zero usage just 13 months ago. We're talking about a total of 2000 capsules, which is cool, but just not enough of a signal to make predictions off of. I already knew there were at least 2000 highly technical people in the world willing to experiment with a new protocol: if Gemini crosses over to moderately technical, moderately motivated people, that will be more interesting.

"Back in the early 1990's, the spirit of the Internet was the pursuit of knowledge, exploration, innovation, fun, and community."

Yes! I couldn't have put it better. Great article.

I'm sympathetic. My first personal website (after a couple of, ahem, not personal ones) was about the film "The English Patient", and yes, I know that smile.

However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology required with the actual end goal.

Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated websites focused on some particular interest of their own. Very few of them have any interest in Apache, Amigas, FreeBSD, servers, operating systems, bandwidth, IPv6 or any of the technology that would underpin them doing this.

Hence ... Squarespace ;)

We (computer technologists in general, and web folk in specific) failed to make running servers a trivial matter, and as a result in 2022, the honest truth is that running your own website no longer has much to do with any of the skills we might have smiled about back in the day. At least not for 99% of the people who don't already do it but might somehow have an interest in the idea.

Who is your ISP?