Increasing lot sizes of our digital homes

Somewhere between the mid-90s and now, pretty much everyone alive somehow became a homeowner on the internet, a place they return to out of habit most days, if not everyday. The people who built those first homes had a name for themselves: Netizens . And the standards that came with the title were, by today's measure, wildly idealistic.

What is a Netizen? CMC Magazine, 1996

We definitely know that this is not the case for a majority of today's internet users, to the point where users who meet all those criteria are saints walking among us. However, given how pivotal the internet has become in this age, it is more than fair to broaden the scope of the term for users discarded by the old definition, such as lurkers, doomscrollers, or even trolls. No matter the benefit or detriment contributed by these users, we still cohabit the internet, and spend up to about a quarter of our days on it .

Similarly to how the definition of internet inhabitants has expanded, the size and shape of our homes online have also changed significantly over the years. In the age of the dedicated netizens who painstakingly curated their forums, mailing lists, and bulletin boards, digital homes on the internet were limited to a small number of people; the rest were still getting acquainted with the concept of the personal computer. Those who had the means and motive to go to places on the internet congregated around common interests, like pubs or cafes where they could meet like-minded people across the world that they simply couldn't in their irl surroundings.

Then in the mid '90s came one of the first large communal spaces without such high barriers to entry, in the shape of GeoCities. Users were allocated plots of land in the form of HTML pages that they could choose to place in different neighbourhoods of different cities, and suddenly you had a buzzing colony of eclectic content, shaped by users all around the world. It was one of the first times the internet witnessed a congregation of so many internet users in such close proximity to each other – sharing zip codes, if not always sensibilities, with people they'd never have crossed paths with otherwise.

From the Geocities Gallery .

But that came to a stop because of the first iteration of a pattern we'd become all too familiar with, because in January 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities outright for $3.57 billion , and immediately started acting like the president of a nation they hadn't built. They quietly rewrote the Terms of Service to claim broad, perpetual rights to reuse anything users had posted. What followed was one of the first large-scale internet revolts, with users quitting or defacing their pages en masse until Yahoo ultimately acquiesced to their demands to drop the ToS change.

It didn't matter for too long anyhow, because after years of dealing with an acquisition they realised they never wanted, and that they couldn't fit into their product suite, Yahoo announced in April 2009 that GeoCities would shut down. By the end of October the servers were switched off for good, taking an estimated 38 million pages with them. An estimated 7 terabytes of unique, user-generated history – the digital equivalent of millions of personal diaries, photo albums, and manifestos – was wiped out in an instant. While a small fraction was saved by rogue archivists (and exist to this day as a museum absolutely worth visiting ), the vast majority was lost forever. It was a cultural extinction event. Understanding this loss is crucial because it's a stark reminder that our digital heritage is incredibly fragile, often held captive by corporate decisions. The photos, blogs, and profiles you create today exist on servers that can be shut down tomorrow, and the "city" you live in could become a ghost town overnight.

Facebook, which arrived a few years into GeoCities' decline under Yahoo, had a very different goal than creating a space for people to congregate. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to build the World's Largest Social Network, and he wanted to make sure everyone working on it was aware that this was the goal. Naturally, this had a big impact on the shape of digital home that Facebook dwellers had. Millions of users around the world, such as preteen me, were drawn in by the simple premise of creating a profile where I could express myself as creatively as I wanted – within the confines of expression they created – and then being able to see how my friends (and crushes) were doing the same. But that's not enough to make the World's Largest Social Network, because while creative expression is great for getting users on board, Facebook was built to be a place you could never leave. And thus was born the Database Panopticon Condominium.

The Database Panopticon Condominium. Note that this image was generated with the help of AI from a badly drawn sketch of mine.

In order to make sure users stay, the platform had to observe every little thing about their behaviour – what made them close the app, what kept them from closing it, what keeps them engaged so they don't even think about closing it – and manipulate them into staying as long as they could. And then, they realised the mechanism for observing people is immensely valuable, to the point where they could make a billion dollar industry of leasing that infrastructure to whoever pays them, for whatever they wanted to do with their voyeuristic observations .

Thus users are forced to adapt to the world of contemporary Instagram, Tiktok, X, and the rest; you couldn't be expected to leave what has now become your home and your community around you, despite the ever shrinking walls of your domicile due to advertisements, ragebait, and anything to keep you hooked, while the surveillance apparatus to monitor you gets ever so sophisticated in parallel.

Thankfully, the bastion of the scorned early internet, along with younger idealists, have developed the next iteration of internet housing, where cities are free from control, and home sizes can be whatever we want them to be – we are in the fresh new age of Open Social. The difference mainly comes from the fully reimagined network topology.

Closed social platforms control the infrastructure for every single user, whereas open social protocols allow users to host their own infrastructure, but still access content on the broader network. Note that this is a very simplified diagram.

In closed social networks, the infrastructure is fully owned and consolidated by a corporation with their infrastructure being provided to users. They provide free access but rule with despotic impunity over the subjects that create on and engage with their platform. Users can only access content that they or others created through the corporate infrastructure, and the degree of their access is controlled by the corporation. On the other hand, open social networks allow anyone to host infrastructure, and the content that users see is stitched together from all these different hosts. Moreover, users have a very high granularity over deciding what content they want to see or avoid. The specifics of how this is done differ between various open social protocols, with the largest ones being Atproto , ActivityPub , and nostr (for a deeper technical exploration of open vs closed social, Dan Abramov's Open Social is a definitive guide, which despite being more focused on atproto provides an excellent explanation of how they're different).

So now we have these fresh green pastures, and the real estate of our dreams – great, time to move in? Well, almost. The biggest problem with these new homes is that the neighbourhoods aren't quite as interesting as the panopticon condos just yet. Moreover, there's a lot of DIY you need to do to get set up, which most users can't be bothered to do. And reasonably so, because after a tired day at work, suffering through a bunch of ads and ragebait on Tiktok is far less mentally taxing than figuring out what Mastodon server you should join or what feeds you should pin on BlueSky. Whatever you think of them, the corporate overlords perfected the art of making the content you see interesting enough for you specifically. At this stage we're a bunch of lab rats that gained freedom from the experimental conditions that closed social media trapped us in. We need to rewild the internet , i.e. get back to making all kinds of weird, cool content without being in constant experimental conditions, and in such a way that we don't ever fall back into monopolised control .

@blaine.bsky.social (who originally developed Twitter) uses Werner Herzog to explain what rewilding the internet entails. The whole thing is worth watching, but about 4 minutes after the timestamp I've chosen (until 14:35) is contextually relevant here (bonus material is @kissane.myatproto.social 's amazing talk about Kelp) .

In practice, showing up to this budding rewilding internet currently feels less like moving into a house and more like being handed a tent and a compass in an empty field, but it's impressed upon you many times that you own the field and that it's really cool that you do. And then the newly rewilded netizen runs into a wall of jargon that used to be somebody else's problem: PDS, relay, AppView, labeler...

In a cruel irony these are the very components that make open social such a source of user freedom. The corporate overlords hid these details really well in their platforms, making sure you didn't need to know or care at all about how any of the stuff you're using works. In fact, asking such questions is how users realise that they are not quite getting the better end of the bargain so it's best to make it so that they never have to think about it.

This is where I think there is a chance for a more sustainable structure of community that's superimposed on and off the internet to emerge. Where those with the knowledge, time, and infrastructure can handle dealing with the jargon, and netizens without that privilege can have a seamless path that provides them all the freedom of open social, but also gives them enough information to find the community that they feel most at home. This is the age of the Open Social Ecovillage.

Sieben Linden Ecovillage

This concept is more established in the Fediverse, where you have server administrators who define the intent and rules of the community (e.g. Mathstodon ), and users can make it their home if their values or needs align. More congruent with the Open Social Ecovillage model is Roundabout by the amazing team at A New Public, which caters to geographic neighbourhoods and provides users with access to all kinds of social services straight from your neighbours without having to wait for hours at your local government office (although I yearn for the day when these conjoin, so that these digital Ecovillages are directly tied to government services).

I say we can combine these and go even further. Users pay multiple different subscriptions for various online services that they rely on day-to-day, such as storage (e.g. OneDrive, iCloud), media (Netflix, Prime, Spotify), documents (Word, Notion), AI (Claude, ChatGPT), and so much more. Apart from having access to some of these through work, most of these are only available through personal subscriptions, which are just more Panopticon services that spy on you and squeeze you for more money over time .

But the perspective that Self-hosting Is Selfish by @bmann.ca has been living rent-free in my head since I encountered it recently. It made me start sharing my Nextcloud instance with my family (after upgrading my home insurance to satiate my elevated anxiety). After all, why can't your Open Social Ecovillage admins also add the plumbing that makes the community fully self-sustaining for all digital needs? And when you want to engage with the broader internet, you take the highway and hit BlueSky City to catch up with the latest discourse. But when you're done, you have a home for you with the people you care about, and the commute is always short.

This may not scale up to all of the internet's users, but maybe that's the point – before, only big tech could afford the infrastructure costs for big scale but open social enables agglomerating a bunch of small scale hosts into the internet scale. Every community has at least a few geeks that could set up infrastructure that either they host directly or on third-party infrastructure. And by treading the path of setting this up over and over again, we already have some very simple ways of getting started for admins (e.g. Cloudron ). Users can pool in some money to offset infrastructure costs, like we're already doing with custom IPTV providers instead of Roku, for example.

Maybe the next iteration of Netizen is something closer to the ideal of the original, where we make sure we all have a home in the intentional internet community we want to be a part of, and participate in keeping them the way we want them to be.

Attributions

Database, Facebook, Instagram, Tweet icons created by Magnific - Flaticon
Server icons created by Roundicons - Flaticon
Telephone call icons created by Those Icons - Flaticon