Ownership

With all the recent news about a plutocrat billionnaire buying a whole social network and running it into the ground, I have naturally begun thinking a bit harder about who owns what in terms of data.

I have long been a fan of open source projects, and so I had already joined a Mastodon instance since 2019. It is in my view better than commercial alternatives because it feels like a throwback to a pre web 2.0 internet: people had their kooky little servers chugging along the big corporate ones, and rules where a bit different depending on where you went.

You browsed more as a guest, less as a customer.

It seems that this line of thinking also led me to ditching lazy corporate hosting (github, netlify, whatever) and hosting my (now static) website on my own server. It was pretty fun setting it up, and to think this kind of migration would have been an infinite headache with Wordpress… When did we start thinking that databases were a good idea for personal websites?

Anyways, I guess this rant is a big “the before times were better nyah” but you know what, yeah, fuck the corporatization of websites.