The corporate web may be dying/reinventing itself. Everyone talks about FOSS and having a user driven experience.
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? A “dark web” but not for illicit schemes but for free and open hosted content?
You go to https://website for your comporate fix and to foss:// for none “open source” content. (Stuff like fediverse, self hosted websites etc.)
You’d have to have a governing body, something like the Free Software Foundation that ensures everyone hosting on the foss-web follows the open source guidelines and goes after violators.
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
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.
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.
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?
