The Web is dead.

We lost. The Big Web won. The web is dead.

The web was never a magical place

Since its inception there have been countless efforts from big companies to make the World Wide Web theirs, to dominate the space by making everyone go through their service. This was never about the mere feeling of dominion, it was always about money. But at least in the early days you couldn't escape the premise and promise of what the web was for: written atop the (still unofficial) WWW logo designed by Robert Cailliau:

"Let's share what we know"

Yahoo couldn't help that the web was all around the place, and they had the idea to make everyone go through their service of indexing and categorizing countless websites, so people could find them. Google, in the beginning, was nothing more than a search engine, once more proving itself on the basis that it connects the web by making it easier to look through. Geocities, although a centralized service, couldn't escape the fact that people wanted to make their own page in their own flavour. Many of those services were attempting to create web portals, a sort of starting block or homepage for every time you would open a browser. Among them were Yahoo! in later years, iGoogle, etc. Those would attempt to encompass a large part of your internet needs by integrating things like news alerts, weather, and customized interfaces all in one page. But even they could not ignore the fact that what you really wanted was out there, after the search, and not inside their service.

You connect the people by connecting their individual web experiences. You connect their individual web experiences by making everyone's individual publicly available space accessible to those who are looking for it. The web was never a magical place. But it always had pockets of resistance under the pressure of giant companies. Those pockets of resistance offer to this day the initial premise: sharing knowledge. And under this pressure, some pockets popped, some faded, and some permanently shaped the web that we see today. But most of those pockets might just get crystallized and only be seen as curious fossils, i.e. dead pages. We lost.

We lost. The Big Web won.

But the Big Web won. The individual, independent web is only rolling down a steeper and steeper hill towards oblivion from the general public. Aside from technical users or those looking for very specialized information, few today brave the winds of the barren land outside the fortified walls of internet landlords.

The convenience of everything-apps has made us lazy, addicted, and especially terrified at the prospect of looking for something for a prolonged period. For the love of god, there are off-the-grid influencers maintaining Instagram accounts! Content finds us, and not the other way around. I'm bored, so I will look at reels, and if something interesting happens to pop up in those reels that I might want to know more about, I'll head on to the link in bio at most. If anyone wonders, yes, the I in that sentence is me, too.

Technocritical views are now mainly shared on social media platforms. Anarchists refuse to go to a supermarket but create a TikTok account. Feminist mobilization accounts that we know and love are forced to post eastheticizing pictures of women to boost their place in the algorithm. You can't leave Facebook because that's the only place your mom has an account on. We dodge and avoid ads, curate the feeds of content we see daily to weed out the shitty sponsored or promoted content, and use automatic app timers that lock us out after 3 hours of activity. We are fighting the web while staying in it.

This part might come as a whiny poor-little-me rant, but as far as I know, my friends don't bother checking this blog. And I don't blame them. It's outside of an app, it's all text, and you have to remember to visit it every once in a while. There's no follow button. Well there is one, it's called an RSS Feed and all it takes is installing one app for all the sites you want to stay updated on but that's not the point. It's a simple website that's so simple you could print it out and read it on paper without much trouble. It's not entertaining to stay here, because for the most part I link to things outside my website.

People don't check blogs because all the blogs are on Instagram or Threads now. Few here and there in France do the equivalent of a blog on Snapchat. Blogs outside of the Meta-space are pushed down by the algorithm, because god forbid you would ever click on a link and stop feeding Instafuckinggram your personal data.

The Web is dead.

Users of the web now largely can't imagine having to go out of their social app to find things. Try suggesting a website to your terminally-Instagramming friend. They'll forget it in seconds. It's not their fault. Meta fucked with their brain and made it difficult. But Big Tech won. Any new advances of the web today, any new content and information created has to be accessible by social media apps. Anything outside of this has slim chances of being even picked up on the way. Even I resorted to posting links to my new articles on there.

It is now easier to imagine the end of the web than the rebirth of its independence.

• Okay I stole that from here

People started logging off because the bubble they spent their online lives in imploded with bloat, or what some call "sludge" or even "brainrot". Gen Z are increasingly critical of social media and have started quitting it or taking monk-mode pauses.

It's not a reach to imagine most of them perceive the internet through those siloed and closed-off platforms. Apologies if I'm wrong about this. There is nothing wrong with deciding to take offline time altogether, both from media silos and the broader web. I encourage that. But chances are, if you're growing tired, bored, or hurting from big web platforms and you decide you'll ditch the entire web, your idea of the Web is strongly limited to big platforms, social media, and a few other big sites. Even if you know other things exist, you don't think of them.

They won. They won because they managed to make the web be perceived permanently as a nuisance, when it can be and often is a very good tool to share what we know.

If you find this article a little too pessimistic, might even say doomer-ish, and unfair to the large amount of efforts to preserve the open web, that's because it was written by a human with feelings, precisely those feelings around the time it was published. That human is not without mistakes and won't automatically create a for and against list. I spend a lot of my time talking about the good parts of the Web, so take a look at my lists of cool links or my other posts. Take care of yourselves.