The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property!
> Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future!
For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want?
We're basically right about to launch this at my company right now. It's going to be one of the first platform products we launch and will be based on our static site generator called Statue https://github.com/accretional/statue. We styled the default Statue site as a SaaS landing page because that's what we needed when we started working on it, but I really want to explore a more Myspace/Blog oriented UX
Actually, making a second web is not so hard, that's arguably what Facebook is, it's making a web that is able to occupy the same privileged position on the Internet that is difficult. DNS, Domains, CAs, and IP allocations are all de-facto centralized. You could in theory convince a bunch of friends to use different DNS/Domains/CAs but IP touches real infrastructure so you need it for anything of notable size. But regardless, go ahead. Unless people can make HTTP GET requests to your Domain A/CNAME records and receive HTML it'll probably be like your web doesn't exist.
Our network includes identity as a first-class citizen, and when you make internal-internal requests, terminates both ends of the connection, so it does do crazy stuff to cache/serve/resolve data, including site contents. It's kind of like a "shadow realm" for the Internet because it only lives in datacenters and whatever "wormhole" connections you make into that network from outside of it. That does allow us to evade the icy grip of Big Internet Protocol, but not the ghost of internet protocol past and present.
Actually the problem with the web is that nobody wants it in its current form, I think. Partially maybe because it got polluted/embrace-extend-extinguished as a consequence of platforms like Reddit, Google Search, Facebook, etc. But also because the cost and time complexity is too high for regular people, or even most technical people, to make full use of it on a personal basis. My hope is that we/someone can make it dead-simple and cheap to setup, create, and host non-trivial websites used by real humans to do real human things besides marketing and the content that enables marketing.
>Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?
Because you don't understand the problem with the current web.
1. You find something interesting and put it on a site.
2. Other people find it interesting too come to your site.
3. Those other people have their own interesting things too, so you decide to allow them to put it on your site.
4. Your site grows bigger.
5. Other people see the people on your interesting site as targets to advertise to and the cycle of spamming and filtering spammers begins.
6. You give up because it's too much work fighting the spammers.
7. Only large sites exist.
---
>here could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS
No the web isn't authoritative, so how is your 'person web' going to prevent non-personal sites. How is it going to prevent proxies that take IP and allow it to access your whichama-protocol?
>even build a web from scratch
It's both easy to do and useless. Who is going to access it, they don't have your software. And, this is what major providers already do with their lockin since they have a means of distributing their software.
No. CERN (aka, Tim Berners-Lee) came up with HTTP and HTML, but he built on top of TCP/IP and DNS.
> using different protocols besides TCP
QUIC is going in that direction, by running on top of UDP.
---
In any case, without replacing the protocol stack we already have different webs, thanks to the walled-garden nature of modern social networking platforms. Linking to an Instagram reel or a Tiktok video is a pain in the neck; if you do not have an account there's a good chance you won't be able to see the content anyway. X is going in a similar direction. This (as well as their non-textual nature, of course) makes them hard to crawl and index for search engines. Fragmentation and niches inevitably ensue.
There is that web still but Google either doesn’t implement or kills off any tech it doesn’t like.
XSLT, XML, Gopher, Js-free web, etc. are all different parts of the multivaried web.
As soon as you make a case for more technologies. Google or the React team or someone tied to the Business Web will tell you it’s not a good idea because security or lack of support or some side stepping reason.
And that someone who sayd years over years that the web will die now says again that the web will die means that the other people which say the web will die are wrong?
Most content is now on <10 big platforms. nearby no one has a website just to tell other people some stuff or what he has done for fun. only reason to have a website today is profit. active websites write in the first part of a article only bullshit to get found by google. Sites that are really like in 1999, just fun sites would never been found via google anymore. And now AI crawls all this and steals traffic from this sites without giving credits until no one beside of bot's will reads them anymore.
The web is not dying, the web is already dead! A commercialized part of the money making machine, nothing more anymore.
Next step: AI is dying because there are no new data to learn because it makes no sense anymore to create websites. Welcome to the stone age.
Its weird how people keep saying the rise of AI generated content will "kill AI" as though the companies training models don't have complete archives of all the data they already scraped from the Internet.
It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models.
Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.
I'm just surprised there is still only one web after all this time.
Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?
There could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS.
Or have we forgotten how to simply even build a web from scratch? Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?
What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS? Why spend time to build an alternative solution? Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Honestly there kinda is a new web, they call it web 3 and it's only crypto scams. I'll stick to TCP and html for now I think.
> What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS?
The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property!
> Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?
Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future!
For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
We're basically right about to launch this at my company right now. It's going to be one of the first platform products we launch and will be based on our static site generator called Statue https://github.com/accretional/statue. We styled the default Statue site as a SaaS landing page because that's what we needed when we started working on it, but I really want to explore a more Myspace/Blog oriented UX
Actually, making a second web is not so hard, that's arguably what Facebook is, it's making a web that is able to occupy the same privileged position on the Internet that is difficult. DNS, Domains, CAs, and IP allocations are all de-facto centralized. You could in theory convince a bunch of friends to use different DNS/Domains/CAs but IP touches real infrastructure so you need it for anything of notable size. But regardless, go ahead. Unless people can make HTTP GET requests to your Domain A/CNAME records and receive HTML it'll probably be like your web doesn't exist.
Our network includes identity as a first-class citizen, and when you make internal-internal requests, terminates both ends of the connection, so it does do crazy stuff to cache/serve/resolve data, including site contents. It's kind of like a "shadow realm" for the Internet because it only lives in datacenters and whatever "wormhole" connections you make into that network from outside of it. That does allow us to evade the icy grip of Big Internet Protocol, but not the ghost of internet protocol past and present.
Actually the problem with the web is that nobody wants it in its current form, I think. Partially maybe because it got polluted/embrace-extend-extinguished as a consequence of platforms like Reddit, Google Search, Facebook, etc. But also because the cost and time complexity is too high for regular people, or even most technical people, to make full use of it on a personal basis. My hope is that we/someone can make it dead-simple and cheap to setup, create, and host non-trivial websites used by real humans to do real human things besides marketing and the content that enables marketing.
There's Gemini https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/10/gemini-protocol/
>Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?
Because you don't understand the problem with the current web.
1. You find something interesting and put it on a site.
2. Other people find it interesting too come to your site.
3. Those other people have their own interesting things too, so you decide to allow them to put it on your site.
4. Your site grows bigger.
5. Other people see the people on your interesting site as targets to advertise to and the cycle of spamming and filtering spammers begins.
6. You give up because it's too much work fighting the spammers.
7. Only large sites exist.
---
>here could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS
No the web isn't authoritative, so how is your 'person web' going to prevent non-personal sites. How is it going to prevent proxies that take IP and allow it to access your whichama-protocol?
>even build a web from scratch
It's both easy to do and useless. Who is going to access it, they don't have your software. And, this is what major providers already do with their lockin since they have a means of distributing their software.
Step 3 is the mistake. Don't allow anyone to put anything on your site. They can make their own site if they're that keen.
> Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?
Those are called "websites"
sorry to hear you weren't invited
There's still BBS, it's hugely popular in Taiwan.
I'd argue Discord servers are another Web as well.
> Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?
No. CERN (aka, Tim Berners-Lee) came up with HTTP and HTML, but he built on top of TCP/IP and DNS.
> using different protocols besides TCP
QUIC is going in that direction, by running on top of UDP.
---
In any case, without replacing the protocol stack we already have different webs, thanks to the walled-garden nature of modern social networking platforms. Linking to an Instagram reel or a Tiktok video is a pain in the neck; if you do not have an account there's a good chance you won't be able to see the content anyway. X is going in a similar direction. This (as well as their non-textual nature, of course) makes them hard to crawl and index for search engines. Fragmentation and niches inevitably ensue.
There is that web still but Google either doesn’t implement or kills off any tech it doesn’t like.
XSLT, XML, Gopher, Js-free web, etc. are all different parts of the multivaried web.
As soon as you make a case for more technologies. Google or the React team or someone tied to the Business Web will tell you it’s not a good idea because security or lack of support or some side stepping reason.
And that someone who sayd years over years that the web will die now says again that the web will die means that the other people which say the web will die are wrong?
Most content is now on <10 big platforms. nearby no one has a website just to tell other people some stuff or what he has done for fun. only reason to have a website today is profit. active websites write in the first part of a article only bullshit to get found by google. Sites that are really like in 1999, just fun sites would never been found via google anymore. And now AI crawls all this and steals traffic from this sites without giving credits until no one beside of bot's will reads them anymore.
The web is not dying, the web is already dead! A commercialized part of the money making machine, nothing more anymore.
Next step: AI is dying because there are no new data to learn because it makes no sense anymore to create websites. Welcome to the stone age.
Its weird how people keep saying the rise of AI generated content will "kill AI" as though the companies training models don't have complete archives of all the data they already scraped from the Internet.
It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models.
Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.