Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
When I was recruited at my university in the early 2000s, every teacher had an ftp-accessible space with an http address like myuni.edu/~myname.
The more techie ones did html, the fancier ones even added css. Muggles would export html from a Word document.
Then one day, the IT department decided to replace this with a “learning management system”. A wysiwyg platform with dozens of modules for videoconferencing courses, homework submission, online exams, and so forth.
Except that the user (the teacher) no longer has control over his or her personal space.
What we really need today is NextCloud images that are so easy to set up that anyone can run one on their computer, phone, or a cloud hosting service with just a few clicks. And adding in federated services would be the next obvious step — first store all your own stuff where you can access it and share selected bits with others, and then have a small pool where you automatically see the stuff others in your groups have made public.
A problem I’m having these days is that a LOT of resources I used around the start of http never got indexed by Archive.org and are now offline. But people still have that stuff stored locally, and would likely be willing to share if they knew others were interested in it.
Small ISPs at the start of the internet used to provide you with space that you could ftp a few html files to and they’d be visible on the internet at myisp/~yourusername.
Of course that cost them a little bit of money and storage space so when they all got absorbed into megaISPs that kind of thing got dropped. Then it was all up to Geocities and friends or you had to go buy hosting from your ISP, both of which was enough of a hurdle to stop the average person from playing with it.
I think it’s a more global movement.
When I was recruited at my university in the early 2000s, every teacher had an ftp-accessible space with an http address like myuni.edu/~myname. The more techie ones did html, the fancier ones even added css. Muggles would export html from a Word document.
Then one day, the IT department decided to replace this with a “learning management system”. A wysiwyg platform with dozens of modules for videoconferencing courses, homework submission, online exams, and so forth.
Except that the user (the teacher) no longer has control over his or her personal space.
What we really need today is NextCloud images that are so easy to set up that anyone can run one on their computer, phone, or a cloud hosting service with just a few clicks. And adding in federated services would be the next obvious step — first store all your own stuff where you can access it and share selected bits with others, and then have a small pool where you automatically see the stuff others in your groups have made public.
A problem I’m having these days is that a LOT of resources I used around the start of http never got indexed by Archive.org and are now offline. But people still have that stuff stored locally, and would likely be willing to share if they knew others were interested in it.