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For those of you over 40, you can likely still remember the “good old days” on the internet, back when people set up their own places to visit, rather than relying on a handful of huge companies trying to lock your attention inside of their walls (which is very likely how you found this post).

Molly White recently wrote an amazing piece about the history of the web, but she’s not giving up hope that we can return there. Here is some of what she said:

Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.

She goes on to explain how things have changed, but then offered some encouragement:

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

The challenge is that the more time people spend inside of the “tall and increasingly reinforced walls” (social media networks), the harder is it to be willing to venture outside of them. For businesses, working inside of these walls makes life easier, but also can choke you out. You’re limited in what you’re able to do and you can’t take that stuff with you if you decide to leave:

If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.

The great thing is that while it feels arduous to venture outside of the walls and set up your own space on the internet, it’s literally never been easier to do.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was. In the early days, people had to fight to enter the expanse at all, and those who did were starting with little. Now, the expanse feels ubiquitous in some countries, and is becoming ever more accessible in the others. Sophisticated tools and techniques are available even to novices. Where once the walled gardens were the only viable option for novice gardeners or those without many resources, that is no longer so much the case — and the skills and resources required to establish one’s own sovereign plot become more accessible by the day.

While it’s easier than ever to set up your own space on the internet, many people simply feel less inclined to do so. This is in part due to how easy it is to set up an Instagram account versus building your own site, and the other challenge is that the majority of people spend their time inside of those big walls.

The web doesn’t have to exist entirely within those walls, and it’s completely up to us to make the web the way we want it.

Do you have any kind of website or presence outside of social media? If so, drop a link here so we can check it out and then take a few minutes to read Molly’s full, amazing post.