A simple web we own

Hacker News · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

A simple web we own By R. S. Doiel, 2026-02-21 Tenant and product or co-owner and participant? Today the Web and Internet is owned and controlled by large for profit corporations and a few governments1. Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification2. What if I do not wish to be tenant and product? What can I do to change the equation? Those two questions lead me to a bigger question. What happens when ownership and control of hardware and software shifts from the domain of corporations to a world where a significant percentage are owned by individual people and cooperatives? I think the answer is suggested by a corollary found in the history of labor movements. When a significant percentage of industries were unionized the unions exerted a strong influence across the political economy. I think ownership of the hardware and software can mirror that impact on the Web and Internet. I think when a significant number of individuals and cooperatives own the hardware and uses simpler software we can impact the Web and Internet in a positive way. That's my hypothesis. An observation and common some assumptions: Most content on the web is already created by individuals not Big Co Big Co persuaded people that only Big Co could provide easy Web publication Big Co convinced many there was no point in looking for alternatives The assumption that only Big Co can provide easy Web publication is just flat out wrong. These systems don't last for more than a decade before they decay. Each of Big Co origin story are similar. They started small. They get to scale by having investors who fund and push rapid expansion. Innovation slows so they buy up any potential rivals. Big Co then either shut them down or fold the rival system into their product lines. The last real innovation these companies introduced was decades ago. Lack of real innovation is one of the factors that drive the Big Co and Big Tech hype cycle. They proclaim a new shiny thing in order to maintain the circus that accumulates more money. Along the way Big Co insists on tax breaks and zero regulation as a prerequisite for innovation which isn't delivered. When they did innovate they didn't have the breaks they insist on now, hell they didn't have the investment or market lock they have now. They only need the hype cycle, not innovation, to keep the money rolling in. At the end of the day we wind up the product, we wind up being exploited and we get very little useful in return. Folks there is an alternative. In 1992 authoring for the Web did require significant technical knowledge. HTML itself was very challenging to teach people. It was challenging to teach computer enthusiasts! I was involved in helping out at classes that taught HTML back in the early 1990s. I speak from first hand experience. But a funny thing happened on the way to 2026. A tech writer (John Grubber and friends) came up with a simpler expression of hypertext called Markdown. You don't need to know HTML to create a web page or blog post today. You can write it or read it using Markdown. You can write it using the simple text editor that came with your operating system on the computer you own. You only need a program to flip Markdown into HTML. There are plenty of programs out there that do that. In the past many of our efforts to break free of Big Co have met with limited success. Usually the energy and effort has been spent re-creating the centralized systems as distributed systems. There was a sense we needed to offer the same experience as Big Co. While ideally individuals and groups could easily run these distributed version the reality is that it remains challenging. I'm really happy to see some of them have some degree of success3. It is an impressive effort. They have broken new ground and importantly they are playing an important role in the world today. I don't think they alone will get us to where we need to go. Even Cory Doctorow uses a system administrator to setup his system. Cory Doctorow is a smart technical guy. It should be easier to do (see https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-a). I think there is a simpler path. The Web itself is a decentralized system. What is needed is an easier way for individuals to create content for it. Markdown I believe is a significant piece of the solution. There are many software programs that can convert Markdown into an HTML page. Pandoc is a brilliant example of that. A website is more than a single Web page otherwise we'd be done. This is why content management systems were adopted on the Web. What you need is a way of getting to the HTML typing something easier to read and type. You need a simple way to manage the website structure for what you have written. Again there are programs that do this today. Unfortunately many are complex and come with their own steep learning curve. The most popular content system on the web today is WordPress. It was designed to run remotely on a server. It integrates with the social web systems like Mastodon. It is open source software and you could run it on a personal computer in a pinch. Unfortunately WordPress is complex to maintain. WordPress is really a bundle of software. It requires running Apache or NginX Web Server. It requires running a database like MySQL or MariaDB. It is built from a bunch of PHP, JavaScript, CSS and templates. WordPress out of the box does some really nice things. But it comes with overhead too. If you are a developer WordPress isn't a huge barrier. It's dandy. But running and maintaining it amounts to running and maintaining a whole bundle of interconnected software. That takes up computer resources like memory and computation time. That is problematic. It's challenging to set it up to use as simply as you use your text editor or word processor. Your stuck because it is designed to run on a remote server. If you only want to type up some Markdown to turn into a web page WordPress adds another whole other level of complexity to that big kettle of fish. Complex content management systems was what lead to a renaissance of popularity of using static website generators. Static websites are simple to generate, cheap and easy to host and can be surprisingly interactive. You can even hand craft a static website page by page using Markdown and Pandoc. It did that for years. What Pandoc doesn't do easily for you is provide the trimmings like RSS feeds and sitemaps. If doesn't help manage this site structure. Many people build websites with more elaborate systems like Jekyll and Hugo because, like WordPress, they provide more in the way of content management. There are literally hundreds of other static website generators out there. Unfortunately they don't complete solve the problem. The ones I've tried have been too complex or didn't run on the machines I wanted to do my writing on. I think this is because most were created by developers like me. We grew up on large large complex content management systems. So when we build our own they easily become large and complex too. That is a problem. As a writer you shouldn't need to put on a developer hat to produce a website. You shouldn't have to use Medium or Substack either. What is needed is different. What is needed is an easy way to go from Markdown documents to websites without extra knowledge. Ideally you'd only need to know Markdown to build a nice website. This lack of simplicity for writers has disappointed me. The Web is over thirty years old. It is reasonable to expect a simpler writing system for the web. One that can run on small computers. Ones that don't make you use a text input box for writing. Yet the systems out there are are stuck with complexity because they are solving the problem faced by professional Web developers decades ago. They are making old assumptions about requiring complexity. In a way developers like me keep building formula one race cars when what is needed is a single speed bicycle. How do we get to a simple web? I've been search for an answer. I don't think any invention of is needed. The answer in 2026 is already built-in to the Web. What is needed to change is the software holding that technology. The Web can interconnect us. The software needs to take Markdown and generate the rest of the website so we can take advantage of that. I think we need to break the assumptions of complexity of use and complexity of multi author or centralized models. The core software requirements include an easy way to express hypertext (Markdown), an easy way to generate the HTML. It needs to make content syndication and discovery automatic (create RSS files and sitemaps). The Web browser will see HTML, CSS, JavaScript, RSS, sitemap.xml but the author only needs to work with Markdown documents. I've written experimental software to prove this is possible. My hope with this post and pointing at my own software contribution will shed some light on how easy it could be. I hope it is an example that this can become collectively understood. What is needed? A simple web of our own has three core characteristics. A computing device owned and controlled by an individual or cooperative A network owned and controlled by an individual or cooperative Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content Examining the current state The Web and Internet we have today isn't required by the technologies that created it. Human choices and human organizations combined with past scarcity of knowledge and resources is what lead us to this point. That's good news moving forward. Between 1992 and 2026 resource scarcity has changed. Spreading knowledge through communication is the strength and purpose of the Web. They are solid foundations to build on if we choose. Changes in