Terence Eden
Wondering what the world would look like if we implemented "Universal Basic Website".
Entitle everyone to their own domain, a few GB of space, the ability to run simple apps / blogs / etc.
What does the world look like if people aren't beholden to Flickr / Facebook / Google Photos to share their family albums?
Aral Balkan
@Edent It’s called the Small Web.
Been working on building it for the last however many years.
Erik Jonker
@Edent ...great idea which has been discussed before, you can imagine that a government provides every citizen with a digital presence, just like they provide them with a digital identity. It never happend until now however.
Aral Balkan
@ErikJonker @Edent Here’s an article about our pilot project in Ghent seven years ago (!!!) now. Unfortunately, a conservative local government took power and cancelled our funding.
https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/gent-wil-burgers-eigen-stukje-internet-geven~b92ec1b4/
Aral Balkan
@ErikJonker @Edent My goal with the Small Web (Kitten, Domain, and Place) is to launch as a paid service so we can pay the mortgage and then, hopefully as people use it and maybe even as other orgs host Domain instances, to go to the EU, etc., and say “it works – now support this with our taxes.”
We’ll see how it goes. The fact that we have had €zero EU funding to date doesn’t exactly fill me with hope.
CoffeeGeek
@Edent You're describing geocities. It's been done. We'd all need to be addicted to RSS readers for it to be viable.
Come to think of it, maybe that's the REAL reason Google killed Reader.
Aral Balkan
@coffeegeek @Edent Geocities was a centralised corporate affair. You no more owned your own place on geocities than you do on Facebook.
The Small Web is about having everyone own and control their own place on the web. A place where they can be public if they like or private if wish (actually private).
It hasn’t been done.
Peter Bindels
@Edent What if you were to run that on a tiny device that's connected to your internet connection, with a global bounce server / address for people without incoming connections? Make the devices link directly to each other, make your own hardware link to your home server.
VPN to your home from anywhere, use IM / phone / cloud storage that's at your home. No giant companies needed at all.
Peter Bindels
@Edent Let me know if I should write up the detailed design somewhere.
Aral Balkan
@dascandy42 @Edent https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
Peter Bindels
@aral @Edent Interesting, close to what I have in mind.
Missing:
- Replacement for the tether your phone has to Google/Apple
- Replacement for what people rely on from major tech companies: whatsapp (IM, calls), email, calendar, address book etc. Can't drop whatsapp when there's no usable replacement.
And up to a point, missing an alternative mobile phone OS. But I can understand limiting scope.
Aral Balkan
@dascandy42 @Edent Funny you should say that, a decade ago now I initially started out thinking a phone was the way to go. Very quickly realised that there was no way to make that happen with the sort of budget we’d have. It’s been a long process of refining what’s possible with no resources to speak of. But it’s getting there :)
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