Technology

The corporate web may be dying/reinventing itself. Everyone talks about FOSS and having a user driven experience.

You say that, but I would politely suggest that your use of 'everyone' is narrow to your personal experience, at a guess with a focus on those who are either IT professionals or enthusiastic amateurs.

90+ of the world don't care in the least. They want the functionality to access and share information and connect with either their friends or a wider audience. They want reliable and simple functionality. Those people don't really care if they're playing in a corporate walled garden.

FOSS projects with user ownership are a brilliant part of the modern tech landscape but don't be deluded into thinking they're a vast global paradigm shift

FOSS does not exclude corporate interests. Most contributions to the Linux kernel for instance come from corporations, including Microsoft.

Edit: Also see Facebook entering the Fediverse soon. Their frontend JavaScript library is also open sourced by them. Their backend PHP version as well.

I wouldn’t want the FSF with its own little politics having any kind of power over information distribution.

Just look at the problems they’re causing with their GNU/Linux moniker nobody except Debian is using. With power handed to them, they’d probably kick everyone off who leaves out the GNU/-part, even though it’s debatable whether it’s really appropriate these days.

I mean we're almost there with some of these protocols... It doesn't even need a policing body, as long as the small parties are willing to kick out the corpos by not collaborating or federating. But as the recent debate about Meta has shown, that's not the case.

But one thing we don’t have is a true FOSS web, a protocol like HTTP that only allows FOSS websites to be hosted and bars any corporate interest from hosting for profit.

Would something like that be possible?

Possible? Maybe. Meaningful? Not in my opinion.

One principle of free software is that everyone can use it. Also for commercial things. Or for example to control missiles that kill people.

In addition, many companies contribute to the development. Without them, Linux, for example, would not be as developed as it currently is. Whether you like it or not, we need companies. Excluding them would therefore be a mistake.

The only true bottle neck to hosting your own web content is access to the internet itself. And that's a really complicated can of worms to work around and basically be your own ISP. What good would an entirely new protocol be?

Hmm corporate != anti foss. FOSS is all about giving some things for free, and thats it. Maybe youre thinking about Copyleft Movements where they purposefully make softwares thats derived from theirs to also be copyleft (like a virus).

About the protocol, there already is something called Freenet, but its dying/dead. It doesnt have a governing body to do that though, because their main mission is to keep everything thats posted there to stay as long as possible.

"dark web" is what mass media calls what is not in the "clearnet". there are already protocols in place like tor, i2p, gemini, gopher etc.

this is the exact same thing i've been wondering for a while now.

we used to have dynamic ip's. we could update our a little longer tld's to our everchanging dynamic ip's and that was that. i could even host a mail server this way. i had a script that updated my mx and a records and i was good to go.

now most isp's give you shared dynamic ip's that you have no way of exposing your local machine to your tld.

i now have my local server serve my nextcloud instance over tor. it's a little slower but i don't need a governing body to setup my tld, which was my end goal.

there exists a script called fedproxy but i haven't had time to investigate. it would be cool if it worked.