It was 1995 and I was in San Jose at a General Magic Developers conference. It was a weird week for me, since I was distracted by a referendum back home on whether Quebec would leave Canada. But something else stuck out for me that week. Wherever I went, there were billboards for companies with web URLs on them.

I had been following the web, but what really struck me that week was that this was moving out of technical world and into mainstream. Billboards in Canada didn’t have URLs on them, but I could now see that was coming, and it felt like a revolution. There was a feeling that this would democratize communications and let anyone become their own publisher. It would break the bonds on the large gatekeepers to communications: the telecom companies, the newspaper chains and the TV channels.

And it did,… for a while. Community associations and clubs and bands and special interest groups and sports teams and all sorts of other groups set up their own web sites. Everything was exciting, chaotic and dynamic. How do you set up a site? How do people find it? Eventually, how do you keep it secure.

And then, over time, a few big companies offered a simpler experience. With two clicks you could create a Facebook group. And everyone was on Facebook, weren’t they? I remember fighting to keep some groups from ditching their web site and going to a Facebook group. Once they are there, they control us. And what of people who don’t want to be on Facebook?

So, now we are all owned by a few big players: Meta, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tik Tok, Reddit, Twitter. And, as Cory Doctorow has noted, now that they have got both the users and the advertisers locked in, they are squeezing all of us. Facebook is full of ads, Google is suggesting thing only somewhat related to your search, Twitter is blocking people out and in meltdown.

So, it is time to take back ownership. The web is supposed to be a federation of equal players, not a set of large telecom-like gatekeepers. And that is where the Fediverse comes in. We can set up a new community of sharing and connecting and discussing without the worry that the gate-keeping organization will be bought out by someone with different interests and agendas.

So, here I am. Re-invigorating my blog by hooking it into the Fediverse. Perhaps the second time around we will be a little more jaded and careful about following the shiny baubles. I admit I may be too optimistic, but hope springs eternal.

I used to hoard programs. Or more specifically, installation programs. If you’re old enough, and a geek, you probably know what I’m talking about. When the web came along in the mid-90’s every geek’s computer I knew had a “downloads” directory full of stuff like:

• netscape-install-1.2.7.zip
• pkunzip.something.exe (or .sh)
• ftp-tool.or-other.zip

I don’t have that anymore. If I want an application I download the latest version or use my update manager to get or update it.

My bookmarks in the browser window used to be full of stuff too. Every time I’d see an interesting page I would bookmark it into the long list of “WORN” URLs (“Write Once Read Never”). I then moved to del.icio.us, since it had better tags and meant I could get to them from anywhere. I don’t even bother doing that anymore either. Google is my friend.

And who still doesn’t have a music folder crammed full of mp3 files, bought, ripped, downloaded or otherwise acquired?

Why did we hoard all this stuff, why don’t we any longer, and what’s up with music?

We hoarded since the cost of downloading was high and we were afraid of losing it. But we learned over time for installation programs that they were always being updated and it was only getting quicker to re-download them. Easier and safer to offload the management of them to the internet. Need to re-install Firefox? Got to http://www.getfirefox.net . Or more probably, type it into Google, and have it remind you of the URL.

Segue into bookmarks. I hardly ever looked at my bookmarks, even on del.icio.us, and so have handed the job of finding stuff to the internet. The search engines are all good enough that if I want to show my kids the “Who’s on First” routine I do a four second search.

Music remains the hoarder’s treasure. A variety of reasons make it so. There is the obvious licencing issues, but more importantly music is more like applications than links or install programs. Something that costs a lot (in time) to download but that we want to use over and over again. Faster bandwidth can reduce this download cost, but there is still the issue of ownership. Unlike videos, the value of a piece of music goes up the more you listen to it, so renting it (even through subscription services) is something unattractive to us. If copyright laws restrict us in how we can access it, we want to control the music we do have, and that means having it sit on our metal.

We hoard two things: things we use infrequently but are hard to find or expensive to get; and things we use a lot. The first go away as the network and its services improve; the second are unlikely to.

Which is why I’m skeptical of user-targeted cloud services ever taking off.