this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I don't know if I'm ready to believe, but I hope decentralization is the next shape of the internet, as it was before.
For years I've watched smaller businesses give up on having websites in favor of just a Facebook page, or businesses built entirely on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, with the very real risk of having the rug arbitrarily pulled out from under then for some dumb reason. It's totally unsustainable to rely on the whims of these platforms to house your canonical home or as a base for your income stream.
Sure it's nice to reach a wide audience by publishing to platforms with many users, but companies still need to be in control of their identity, so if some platform goes south, it's not a catastrophe.
I hope so too. It’s frustrating when I look up a local business while I’m out, find only their Facebook page, and then it asks me to log in just to read it. I can’t/won’t do that. I’ve not been on Facebook for years, I’m not faffing about with that rubbish.
That’s losing money for these small businesses, because I can’t even check their opening hours or if there’s food I can eat. Meanwhile Big Chain Restaurant has everything on their own site. The small companies could be doing so much more, but they need to give up using Facebook as their sole website publishing service.
I know I'm getting off topic here but, that made me think of what's going on with Etsy right now. A lot of small businesses just have Etsy pages and not their own website. I've been hearing from a lot of people that Etsy isn't paying them or, holding their money for months before releasing funds.
All of that plus this really makes you think about being in control of your own things.
The problem is people will still just use Etsy rather than going direct to the business, even if going direct is significantly cheaper, because it's easier.
You see it with fast food deliveries as well. People would rather just order through just eat or deliveroo rather than ringing the place up and saving quite a decent amount on their order for both themselves and the local restaurant.
Unfortunately people just want convenience these days.