> The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-complex technologies we have today. Even vanilla web is quite complex if you take into consideration all the W3 standardization.
With that title I didn't expect Javascript to be part of the equation. To me "vanilla" is CERN's HTTP+HTML.
The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.
There are some secessionists - Gopher is still alive, Gemini - but alternatives have a hard time to compete with the content companies can provide apparently for free. Most of the content we want costs time and/or money. Content creators can be fine with contributing from their own pocket, but this is not really sustainable. User sponsorship (donations via Paypal, Patreon, Kofi, ...) don't work well either.
Also, since the supporters of the alternatives are generally supporters of freedom (who isn't? Well, people don't reject freedom, they are "just" making compromises), they have to deal with illegal content and other forms of abuse.
So there are 3 problems an alternative web must solve: protocols, moderation and repayment.
> The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.
and most importantly - we lost our right to search the content that the community generates. it is now walled off behind FAANG services, that threw us directly in the dark ages of internet, when even your own content is out of reach.
here's as simple example - a group of friends been throwing parties for 20 years, like raves. all these are announced on the FB and now-and then on some other services. more than 400+ events for 20 years. trying to find these again is impossible. google won't index them, fb won't allow you to scrape then, insta also. perhaps some obscure snapshot lives of it in internet archive, perhaps not. so one reason to own the content you publish is to be able to actually use it yourself after a while.
Even with JavaScript in the equation, the vanilla web is a good option to reclaim all that, and honestly bringing a personal site up in 2025 takes... less than a day to setup with all the VMs, DNS, CF tunnel, DB, FE/BE hassle that stands in the way. It's more available than ever, people just need to brave and embrace this... but something tells me the majority will not do it.
With that title I didn't expect Javascript to be part of the equation. To me "vanilla" is CERN's HTTP+HTML.
The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.
There are some secessionists - Gopher is still alive, Gemini - but alternatives have a hard time to compete with the content companies can provide apparently for free. Most of the content we want costs time and/or money. Content creators can be fine with contributing from their own pocket, but this is not really sustainable. User sponsorship (donations via Paypal, Patreon, Kofi, ...) don't work well either.
Also, since the supporters of the alternatives are generally supporters of freedom (who isn't? Well, people don't reject freedom, they are "just" making compromises), they have to deal with illegal content and other forms of abuse.
So there are 3 problems an alternative web must solve: protocols, moderation and repayment.