A New Age of the Web

The future of the free web requires that we rethink some of our assumptions about how we use the internet. We are firmly in the era of enshittification. The excitement for the endless possibilities of connection through the internet has been turned against us; replaced with an ideology that, on the one hand prioritizes profits, and, to maximize that, on the other hand, prioritizes Ease. Ease and Profit coincide to produce certain centralizations. As the saying goes "You could stop at five or six stores, or just one."

"You could stop at five or six stores, or just one!"

But, to continue the metaphor, your average experience at Wal-Mart is the exact reason that, if you're buying anything you actually care about, anything you expect to last you longer than a year, or anything in which you may want some input from a knowledgeable seller, you don't want to stop at just one.

Controlling the distribution of knowledge and discourse has been a long-held activity of governing parties. These days we've watched as the modern center stages of discourse have, much like the Mainstream News Networks of the last era, selected for bombastic stories centered around individuals who are made to play the role of figures - objects, for discursive narratives they have no control over - all while discrediting and sectioning off marginalized voices.

When Elon Musk acquired twitter, he did so with the backing of some of the most reactionary forces on the planet. Since then the targeted harassment of marginalized people skyrocketed.

Marginalized, targeted people need to start developing the knowledge and the tools for perpetuating our own networks, our own communities, in ways that aren't beholden to centralized, corporate control.

First things first...

YOU Should Make Your Own Website

The current state of the internet is unstable and unsustainable. We've all been funneled into increasingly central locations, grouped together into clusters by algorithms designed to keep us there and to sell us things. The era of static HTML blogs and early webhosters like geocities has transformed - from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter - into an era of subscription based, "advertiser-friendly", engagement-focused, algorithmically enhanced addictions.

At the core of this rot is the cost of hosting data and the cost of handling a large number of requests at a time. The more centralized a space is, and the more people expect everything posted to that space to last forever and to run relatively quickly, the more expensive it is for any one company to bear the cost of running the site. Distributing that cost, both monetarily and computationally, is one of the only ways to avoid the enshittification of your online experience. The internet was not made to be profitable, and the more we hand it off to corporations, the more they will invade our lives. Sharing the cost with each other is the only way to build a sustainable internet.

There is a growing wave against the state of online rot. Some proponents, like those behind IndieWeb.org, are trying to formulate moves against the rotting corporate web. I highly recommend looking at Nora Reed's "Manifesto" - a short and simple manifesto for starting one's own website. In that same vein are more and more and more videos getting popularized talking about their own frustrations with the modern web and the excitement they feel in the possibility of a robust "IndieWeb" developing.

Alongside that are those who promote running small-social sites that connect to other small-social sites. runyourown.social is a guide for this very thing! It's website that explains and promotes running your own small social network. It talks about why and how you might want to do that! Or, if you're not technologically inclined, perhaps it can help give you the steam to encourage the technologically inclined around you to provide the service that you want to see in the world.

On that note - here's our attempt to help you do so:

Mastodon and Other Federated Networks

One of the clearest paths we have in the direction of non-centralized, non-corporate control of discourse right now are federated networks like Mastodon. Mastodon is the biggest and most popular way to access the network of servers running the ActivityPub protocol - the network is oftentimes referred to as The Fediverse. Mastodon's power is in the fact that anyone can make a new instance and instantly become a part of the network. This means anyone, including you, can fully own your own part of the network. No other entity can remove your power over your part of the network. This is federation.

Some sites have gathered some of the data from Mastodon's network to show the clustering of instances, creating little neighborhoods of connection.

How to Get Started on Mastodon

A straightforward and simple guide to joining Mastodon.

How to make your own Mastodon server (without needing any Developer knowledge)

Additional Info for those who made their own Mastodon servers

Other Fediverse Services

The Fediverse is a whole lot more than Mastodon, and even bigger than "Twitter-esque" micro-blogging - lots of things connect to each other via the protocol, ActivityPub, that Mastodon uses. From Micro-Blogging Social Networks, to fullsized Blogsites and Written Publications (like Substack), to Event Management to Image and Audio and Video Sharing sites (like YouTube, Flickr and Instagram) to Link and News Aggregators (like Reddit) and even Live Streaming.

Other (non-Fediverse) Federated Networks

The other most popular federated social networks currently in use are Bluesky, Nostr, and Secure Scuttlebutt, with Bluesky as a clear front runner in popularity with 25 million accounts registered. If you're reading this blog at the time of its publication, you almost certainly already have a Bluesky account.

Nostr is the second largest of the two with around 1 million registered users and is largely popular with bitcoin communities and comes with heavy bitcoin integration. For this reason I can't recommend it.

Secure Scuttlebutt is on the small end of the spectrum with and estimated 33,000 people on the network with a functionality centered around unreliable internet access. It's the oldest of these networks at 10 years old, and it doesn't provide what most people are looking for in a "Twitter-Like."

For a dive into the differences between Mastodon and Bluesky, check this

Comparing Bluesky and Mastodon

The week after the election Bluesky quickly surpassed Mastodon’s user count. Jumping to 1 million accounts made every day for over a week until settling somewhere around 25 million accounts. Entire communities flocked from the husk that used to be Twitter. Previously, Mastodon was the biggest competitor to Twitter in

Nomad Archiveswander

Encrypted Messaging - Matrix, Signal, Briar, Telegram

Encrypted Messaging is one of the most important tools of the modern era and is receiving ever-wider adoption. Along with no-log VPNs, they have become some of the most powerful tools of resistance against surveillance by over-reaching, authoritarian governments and they've been used to good effect in numerous protest movements. They function by running your posts through software that transforms your regularly-readable-text into "ciphertext" that must be decrypted by the person who receives your message. This is usually done through "keys" which are generated per-user. This means that in some contexts for some Encrypted services, there is still a possibility that the Owner of the encrypted service might have access to both the encryption keys and the decryption keys - meaning they retain the power to read your messages, and might be able to hand those messages over to government agencies who request them.

This is to say: All End-To-End Encryption (E2EE) software is not made equivalently. Facebook has recently incorporated its own E2EE services for its messenger, but, as said, when looking at an End-To-End Encrypted Messaging Platform, there are some important things to keep in mind. While Facebook's encrypted messaging may very well encrypt your messages from onlookers, it does not mean that Facebook is unable to read your messages.

Because of this, as of time of publishing this, the E2EE messaging services i recommend are

Matrix - A decentralized approach to E2EE. Anyone can self-host their own Matrix server and integrate with the wider Matrix network, meaning your encrypted messages would be owned by you. The Matrix network also bridges into many other services including IRC, Discord, etc.
Signal - Signal is a tried and true classic, used across the world. If someone has an E2EE service already, it's almost certainly Signal or Telegram.
Telegram - Telegram outmatches Signal in its adoption rate worldwide, with a proposed 900 million users on its service.
Briar - Briar is for the highest threat models. Where Signal or Telegram users central servers, Briar instead is entirely Peer-to-Peer, and is designed to be delay-tolerant.

Meshnets, Tor and VPNs

VPNs

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be tools which work to privatize and anonymize your internet traffic data. Not all VPNs do this though. Free VPNs oftentimes don't encrypt your internet usage and they keep logs of your internet traffic to sell to others, or will be forced to give to governments that request it. A good VPN, one that works to privatize and anonymize your data, will almost always be paid for, and will encrypt your requests and won't keep your logs, so even if a government did request their data, they wouldn't be able to give useful information over. VPNs function by establishing a connection with your computer before your computer sends any requests to the World Wide Web. Requests to the World Wide Web are encrypted, before being sent to the VPN, decrypted, and passed from their servers, hiding the fact that it came from you. To the websites you're visiting, it only appears as if your VPN is asking to see their content, not that you are.

Tor

Tor is a way to anonymize internet traffic by establishing a route between a series of computers which are working as relays, passing data along between them, all without the machines themselves knowing exactly where the requests came from, or where they're going.

Part of the Tor Project is Tails - Tails is a lightweight and portable operating system meant to run directly from a USB stick. It's designed to be completely clean every time you use it, and is designed to never touch your hard drives - this means it doesn't keep logs of anything you do, leaving your computer activity a secret.

Wireless Meshnets

The most powerful part of mesh networks is their lack of reliance on centralized paths for routing requests between computers, and instead utilizes the computing power of everyone on the network. There are Wired Meshnets, utilizing ethernet connections and Wireless Meshnets, utilizing radios to pass messages sent by computers or phone apps.

Meshtastic is a well-documented example of a Wireless Meshnet, with guides on how to join the network, but requires one have (or be willing to learn) some familiarity with setting up certain computing and radio gear.