The "Cheap" Web

I mean, that's because Facebook Pages are cheap. Businesses don't want to spend money on anything they don't have to, and people aren't much different. The argument for learning to write even basic HTML only to upload it even to something like Amazon S3 (free) and direct a web address to it (not free) or spend money on hosting to not have to learn how to deposit files into an S3 bucket is a LOT of time to spend to accomplish this task. Instead, you can outsource all of that time, effort, and labor to Facebook who already built a website. And yeah, it sucks ass and it's full of undesirable people, but it's free and it accomplishes the same goal.

Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until tomorrow.

This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web, mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination) and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep a website, because I value my independence and have no interest in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway) and will just stick to the easy option.

Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a social media site that functions as a public utility instead of a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.

I don't really get this point... HTML is not _that_ complicated. I mean is:

this

this

this

really "more complex" than something like:

# this

## this

### this

You still need to know that '#' means header / title, and that more of them leads to a lower header level... and this is just for the most basic concept of web pages: headers. Okay, even if it's not markdown, no matter what system you cook up, the syntactic complexity to support the huge number of elements that exist in HTML has to live _somewhere_ right? (Yes, you can argue maybe not ALL of the 100+ HTML tags aren't needed, but probably most of them are!)

While there is something to be said for mega purists who don't even like JavaScript, we're supposed to not even like HTML anymore either? I think at some point you have to accept that building things for the web involves some minimum level of complexity...

The font (because of the drop shadows I guess) looks jarring in dark mode.

Matrix Homeservers like Synapse can run on anything now, and there is conduit which should be lighter too.

I didn't express myself as "the web designer" nor I implied that I wished to share experiences with you. What I meant is that I can share experiences to my friends via the browser, which act as a kind of a simple prototyping platform.

I want the power to create experiences for some people I know, in a niche setting, without intentionally inviting anyone else.