The alternative is more strange.

In Europe not too long ago my partner and I called in to an undergroundish bar of the kind we used to frequent when we were younger for a beer on the way back from dinner.

It's the sort of place where people write on the walls, and I couldn't help but notice how many instagram tags there were.

Properly articulating why I felt like it was a shame that the one thing a lot of these young adults wanted to share was a link to their little ad-gated corner of a big tech company's garden would probably need more space than I've got here.

There's even an "opt in to tracking or pay" ultimatum on Instagram there.

It's nice to have a space to talk to your friends, and be the one setting the rules about what kind of behavior isn't okay in this space, instead of that space being owned by a corporation whose rules are largely designed to maximize their profits.

Before the modern social media era there were billions of PHPBB sites that were largely differentiated only by the crowds who used them, and the choices the moderators made. It's really nice to have that back with some federation added in.

That's literally what the web was born to be, or at least the dream in the 90s. Not for profit, enabling learning and communication (and commerce, but not of human data). It was about expression, experimentation, freedom.

You thinking individuals hosting their own site is weird, is weird to me.

Why? Isn’t that essentially what self hosted wordpress is? Aren’t people running the same OSes everywhere? You don’t have to visit them all and they all don’t need to be unique if they’re different sites.

The push for people to all be on the same platform and a single code base run by a marketing company is the strange thing.

Everyone wants to be an owner.