this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Such bullshit.
"AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money."
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
The premise of a web business model is that websites must make a profit - either directly or indirectly.
That's utter bullshit. Some of us are old enough to remember when the web (or for that matter, the pre-web internet) was there for sharing of information, social interaction, and community. Schools, the government, and nonprofits provided hosting for free.
Later on, ISPs started to add hosting as part of their internet service - along with usenet access and an email address. The cost to them was negligible, especially vs. the benefits of being able to say "switch to us and create your own website!"
Nowadays you can run a site from your home PC in a VM, punch a hole through your firewall, and pay a modicum for DDNS to a custom domain for under a hundred bucks a year. If you're a bigger site with more traffic, maybe you spin it up on AWS and pay ten or twenty bucks a month.
The very idea that "The Web" is a homogeneous, for-profit entity is a profound and fundamental mistake that is made by every money-obsessed organization around - not just the financial rags like Forbes and The Economist, but essentially corporations as well. Take a look at the support site for your favourite product and try to convince yourself that they didn't just put the minimum required effort in to send customers into the arms of their competitors.
I never heard of an ISP offering a free website to host, the free mail address I do remember sadly.
A lot of what is wrong with the web is the result of governments lacking the ability to stop companies from growing too much. It doesn't help either that the best country for startups is as corrupt as fuck and has been for decades, including from before the start of the internet.
We all should chose to use parts of the web we want to use, like Lemmy and actual non-profit organisations like Ecosia, Proton and what not.