When I was a teenager in the 1990s the internet felt like a secret that not enough people knew about yet. I was a curious kid, interested in how things worked, and I was completely enamored by it. I found Linux -- specifically Slackware -- and suddenly I had a working installation on used hardware from Goodwill. Eventually I got a mail server running for my friends so we could have our own email addresses on our own domain. Before that we shared a single ISP address with our parents. Having something that was ours felt genuinely powerful. We owned a small piece of the internet. Nobody could take it away from us or change the terms on us.
That experience is a big part of why I still care about the open internet. I still run my own servers. I still want to build on open protocols. But I also recognize that I am not a typical user. Not everyone has the time, the curiosity, or the inclination to go down that path. Most people just want things to work. That is completely reasonable, and it is exactly the dynamic that closed platforms exploit.
So the question I keep coming back to is: how does the average person work towards maintaining an open internet? I do not have a complete answer. But I think it starts with understanding what is at stake.
The open internet has always survived on a simple condition: it has to be useful enough that ordinary people choose to use it. When it stops being the most convenient option, people leave. They've done it before, and they're doing it again now.
In the early 1990s, most Americans online weren't on the internet at all -- they were on AOL. A closed, curated system with its own content, its own email, its own chat. It was easy and it worked. What killed it wasn't a better closed system -- it was the open web becoming genuinely useful. Companies started publishing their own websites. News, shopping, and communication moved onto the open internet and AOL became a middleman nobody needed.
For a while, the open web thrived. People published blogs. They followed each other through RSS feeds -- a simple open standard that let you subscribe to any site and read everything in one place, without going to each site individually and without any platform in the middle deciding what you saw. Aaron Swartz, who co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec at age 13, believed deeply that open standards like this were the foundation of a free internet. He spent much of his short life fighting for that idea. The culture he represented -- of building open things that anyone could use and nobody could own -- produced the best version of the web we have ever had. I miss it. I wish we were still there.
Then the smartphone arrived. The web didn't disappear, but the habits changed. Apps offered tighter experiences: faster, cleaner, with push notifications and native feel. The data behind them -- often just JSON talking to an API -- was the same information that a website could have delivered. But the app became the interface, and the interface became the product. Twitter progressively throttled its web experience to push people into the app. RSS readers were shut down -- Google killed Google Reader in 2013 and took a huge portion of the blog-reading public with it. The open URL became a second-class citizen.
This matters because apps are not the open internet. You cannot link deeply into most of them. You cannot index them. You cannot archive them. When a company shuts down or changes its terms, the content disappears. There is no Wayback Machine for an app's timeline. The information exists, but it is not yours to access.
For people who are not going to run their own servers, there are still meaningful choices. Some require no technical skill at all:
But I am genuinely uncertain whether a list of habits is enough. The drift toward closed systems is not driven by malice -- it is driven by convenience, and convenience is hard to argue against. I want to understand how people who did not grow up tinkering with Linux can still have a real stake in keeping the web open. I do not think I have figured that out yet.
There are reasons to be hopeful. Mastodon and the broader fediverse are the most promising development I have seen in years. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub, is an open standard -- anyone can run a server, and servers talk to each other. No single company owns it. No terms of service can disappear your audience overnight. It is the RSS model applied to social networking, and it actually works. It is not perfect and it is not easy, but it exists and people use it.
What I really want to see -- and what I think would matter more than any individual user habit -- is companies coming back to the open web. Not just maintaining a presence on closed platforms, but building real websites again. A website is something you own. It has a URL. It can be linked to, indexed, archived, and read without an account. When a business publishes something on a closed platform, they are renting an audience from a landlord who can change the terms at any time. When they publish it on their own site, they are building something that belongs to them and to the web.
The open internet will persist as long as it remains the most useful place to be. That is not guaranteed. It is a thing people have to keep choosing -- and we need to make it easy enough for everyone to choose, not just the people who were already curious enough to go looking.