I've been hearing a lot lately about how "the UK is killing the internet!" and "privacy is dead!" and so on and so forth. What's disappointing and somewhat confuses me about these exclamations is that, while I still very much disagree with these new policies, a majority of people have begun to see the internet as just a few sites, so if one gets worse or goes down, they think of it as a giant portion of the internet has been wiped out. I've begun labeling this type of traffic belonging to the blissfully ignorant as the intranet.

The intranet, not to be confused with 1980s office networks, is a tiny slice of anywhere from three to ten web pages from the entirety of the internet a person visits most often when not working. These often boil down to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, maybe Pinterest, and rarely anything beyond. Knowing this, if someone said to me "the UK is killing the intranet", I would 100% have to agree, but the fact of the matter is that the internet is not being attacked here.

Now, obviously, the internet as a whole is not completely out of the woods, but it never really has been since its inception, just the area of concern has shifted. I would even argue that the internet isn't more at risk now than it ever historically has been. This is where we still need to act, however, as the intranet is still going downhill.

What should be done?

With all these new attacks on the intranet, I forsee a revival of the classic internet, or what we now call the indieweb.

The indieweb is a part of the internet that is personally owned, self-hosted, and interoperable by design. It is the collection of individual sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, federated social networks, and small communities that live on domains people control themselves and can talk to one another without asking permission from a single corporate platform.

I think we will soon start seeing a revival of this type of internet as people start becoming more privacy and mental-health concious, as we are beginning to see with social media, but also as big platforms continue to push harder against their users for the sake of more revenue.

This Sounds Interesting, How do I Start?

I'm so glad you asked! This is where the post becomes less philosophical and more practical. If you came for the philosophy, I invite you to stay, but no offense taken if you decide it's not for you.

Reading

If you're just interested in finding sites to consume, perhaps to get off YouTube or Reddit, then I recommend The Forest! It's a conglomeration of thousands of other sites just like this one that talk about a variety of things. You just hit the button, and it will take you! Many sites also link other sites they enjoy to read, often with similar interests and points-of-discussion. TheCoup has also been indexed into The Forest, if you find it, let me know! Do check it out!

Setting up your own

If you're technologically illiterate when it comes to servers and whatnot, do not fret! My suggestion for you is to visit Neocities, they are free to start out with and you get a website you can do whatever you'd like with, they are actually where this site was originally hosted for a while (an old version is still up for historical reasons).

If you're a little more ambitious, then I recommend checking out Derek Sivers' Technology Independence, it's a step-by-step guide on setting up your own website and domain name for cheap and completely beginner friendly. If you want some extra doohickeys for your site, do check out LandChad.net by Luke Smith, just be aware guides on LandChad may not be compatible with Sivers' guide.

Conclusion

The internet is not dying, our intranet is. The handful of sites most people treat as “the web” are tightening their grip, trading user well-being for engagement metrics and ad dollars. That squeeze feels like the sky is falling, but only because we’ve forgotten how vast the sky really is.

The remedy is not to beg the intranet’s gatekeepers to be kinder; it is to walk out the gate. Reclaim a corner of the network you can tend yourself: a blog, a wiki, a tiny podcast, a federated timeline, anything you can back up, move, or delete on your own terms. Each new domain, each new RSS feed, each new peer-to-peer connection is a vote for an internet that belongs to people instead of platforms.

Start small. A free Neocities page today can become a self-hosted site tomorrow. A single link in The Forest can lead to a dozen more. One person choosing the indieweb path encourages another, and the network effect that once centralized the web can just as easily decentralize it again.

The intranet may keep shrinking, but the internet is still limitless. All you have to do is step outside.

73