The American Pronunciation Guide Presents ''How to Pronounce Web'' Thinking about what is going on and what happened and in what kind of Internet are we? What kind of web are we? Is web a shitty place? At the first web 2.0 conference in 2004 Tim O'Reilly proclaimed that the web is a platform and pointed at the potential of content creating users to be harnessed to generate value. And for two decades since then, there has been criticism of development of practices on web platforms, criticism of walled gardens of web content, so-called silos, which invest considerable amounts of time and resources to lock the users in and lock the businesses in using algorithmic manipulation of timelines, closing down all interoperability options. Yeah, so in 2022 Jack Dorsey, the quite famous founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted that the days of Usenet, IRC, the web, even email with PGP were amazing and that centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the Internet. And he writes, I realize I'm partially to blame and regret it. So together with criticisms people were seeking solutions and alternatives and making alternatives and I kind of now present a little bit a few of them that to me felt quite inspiring. So for example, the IndieWeb, IndieWeb.org, is a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. A community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards and based on a couple of principles. So one of them is owning your domain, and the other is using a domain name as your primary online identity. Publishing on your own website first, owning your content, and using simple open standards to enable pingbacks, web fingers, and kind of even cross web comments. And then there's this other idea and actually kind of a little niche scene going on where instead of walled gardens, some people are thinking and enacting a form of techno-pastoral resistance to the paradigm of streams, you know, a collapse of information into single-track timelines of events, which only ephemerally surface zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours, and self-assertive immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments. So instead, the digital garden can be a counterbalance, presenting information in a richly linked landscape of knowledge base that grows slowly over time, unfinished and imperfect by design, unique and particular, matching the gardener's way of thinking instead of some standardized template. So diverse content is arranged and connected in ways that allow exploration, experimentation and play. So a digital garden is a small patch of the web claimed by the gardener to herself to fully own and control. And there's another direction in this kind of smallness thread is the interest in so-called small web or small net. So part of this are public unix or public Linux systems that were reinvented as so-called Tildes. These systems provide users free accounts where they can hack away using TUIs, text user interfaces, via terminals, providing shell access to the community server via SSH, offering simple minimalist web space for HTML pages and various bulletin board system-like services such as chat or finger, for example. To quote Community Wiki, it's small because it's built for friends and friends of friends. It doesn't have to scale to millions of people because those millions should build their own local small nets. So I kind of understand this as kind of like or hear this as a Silicon Valley's techno-fantasy of scale as universal human goal of planetary dimensions is replaced by the needs of small communities to stay small while being numerous. And there are more kind of initiatives. So in 2020, Molly DeBlanc and Karen M. Sandler published a declaration of digital autonomy, wherein they demand, I quote, a world in which technology is created to protect and empower those who are impacted by it. Our technology must respect the rights and freedoms of those users. We need to take control for the purpose of collectively building a better world in which technology works in service to the good of humankind, protecting our rights and digital autonomy as individuals. So some feel that in current state of things corporate platforms can never be good. So to quote a free software developer Ariadne Connell in her blog, silos, so this is corporate web content walled gardens. So silos by their very nature of being centralized services under the control of the privileged cannot be good if you look at the power structures imposed by them. So commercial silos by design are incapable of using their privilege and power to lift others up. And of course, Cory Doctorow, journalist, sci-fi writer, and activist associated with Electronic Frontier Foundation, also think that, quote, technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom, our freedom to connect, our freedom to speak, our freedom to live. So Doctorow describes so-called platform decay, or also known as enchantification, as a phenomenon of platforms' quality of use degenerating while users and businesses continue being locked in using it. So platforms use a set of deception practices, mostly lying about open and bright future and and the network effect to lure users and later business customers into the walled garden platform a closed silo into a lock-in once the platform comfortably sits between users and businesses they focus on siphoning surpluses and profits to shareholders. Those shareholders are most often venture capitalists. And because of high switching costs, switching costs are when users and businesses cannot afford to leave, even when alternatives technically exist. So because of high switching costs, the platform can afford to lower quality of its service. So that's in certification, but Doctorow also writes about the state of US antitrust law which fully enables technology monopolies today called big tech and their strategies of disabling competition by simply buying out their competitors so this is kind of like thinking about what why is it a shock that Bandcamp is just bought by some other company? So at this point my question is, what is then our possible direct action? And I will just kind of like go further. So when Bandcamp was sold to SongTrader, so to the second company, music journalist Anil Prasad wrote a Facebook post with this advice to artists in a post-Bandcamp, even post-platform world. So, quote, you may want to focus as well on your own platform. In other words, your website, which so many of you have forsaken. No one can take your website away from you. They can't pull that rock from under your feet. So go back and rebuild your own web presence. Hashtag be your own platform. So that was kind of like inspiration. So I was through kind of this research for a couple of those months. through kind of this research for a couple of those months, the question was, how can we be our own platforms? And this research currently gives me a checklist with three main points. Own your content on your own website. Own the path, all contact information to your audience. Fund your work via memberships, subscriptions and donations. So, quickly, Austin Kleon in the book Share Your Work writes, your website doesn't have to look pretty, it just has to exist. Don't think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Well, email is old, you know, and the people who sign up for your mailing list will be some of your biggest supporters just by the simple fact that they signed up for the potential to be spammed by you. And okay, so here is kind of like my kind of personal, possibly radical premise about artists. I think that the success for an artist is to have an audience. So, of course, crucially, funding is an important part of production. We need to pay bills, we need food on the table, we need a roof over our head, a place to work and some equipment. we need roof over our head, a place to work and some equipment. But somehow I feel like that today there's really no need for basing your income on selling of artificial scarcity. So since unprecedented accessibility of digital technology and existing internet capabilities, selling countable virtual objects make absolutely no sense anymore. So instead of being a seller, perhaps you can lean into your audience, ask for support, donations, maybe offer subscriptions and special membership projects. But above all, perhaps consider your audience as your community. So in the line when I was kind of setting up this web page, beourownplatform.site, at first I thought like to write some kind of like a how-to or guide and then do reviews of platforms that are, you know, this kind of like really, really practical information. But somehow it didn't make sense to me so much. So after a while I kind of like started to think about strategies and kind of like more what is the sustainable knowledge. So because platforms come and go and we cannot maintain a website with reviews of platforms. So and these are kind of like the seeds of strategies from which I hope that we will grow more. So taking time, so this is against speed. So inconvenience shouldn't be an obstacle. Invest in the sustainable, experiment and play. Technical knowledge is an important factor. If you can do self-learning, do it. Learn in public, do it with others, use open source, self-host and so on. So, but at the end, like in practical way, it seemed to me like the most kind of radical manifestation of this kind of like a toolkit maybe would be this. Buy a domain name, write your own HTML or maybe write your own software that produces your website. Self-host everything, possibly at home or with your local community or community like online, host web, host email mailing list, use free and liberal open source software, and lean into donations, memberships, or subscriptions. Because I'm quite long, I just want to finish this. So I have like two things done in a way, like strategies and directions. OK. And the other one. Can you work? I mean, I can say things anyway. So, a Be Our Own Platform toolkit has this, for now it has these strategies and kind of these directions and also what we've seen this example of the most radical way. But I also hope to create a technical glossary which would be kind of like a sustainable knowledge base. And also this whole analysis and discussion about platforms, I hope we can support with this project still on. Yeah. Just so you see where you have to go. But have you connected it? On the other side? No. Okay. So maybe it's my problem. Anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, so first of all, thanks a lot. I find it really inspiring, and I have to say that it resonates a lot with me, the message to be our own platform. That being said, I mean, so just as a comment, I guess, I agree very much that it's very important to remain independent as an artist because doing art is inherently political and you are welcome on these platforms only as long as you don't hold political stance or that your stance actually aligns very well with the policies of this platform so once you start breaking out of it you might lose everything in one day which we see happening a lot recently and I support a lot the idea for this reason but I think for many people including me although I have recently logged out from many platforms because of that. It's a huge challenge, as you mentioned, artists need to eat and make their money and for that they need the audience. You mentioned the high switching cost, that I guess is a very nice way to describe this phenomenon and I wonder if there are or you thought you dug in this topic to think how to deal with the switching costs because i think that it might be kind of a suicide move for many to log out of the kind of dominant social media platforms and start or try to host especially if you don't have a big enough audience that you could convince to follow you on your independent kind of platform. Yeah, thanks again. Yeah, so maybe just a comment. So switching costs is something that Quarry Doctorow brought in and it's just kind of like a metric. And there's no solution to it apart from platforms going down. Absolutely, I agree. I also have to say that this project, very soon I really didn't want it to be like a prescriptive guide Very soon I really didn't want it to be like a prescriptive guide saying what artists should be doing and that if they don't do that then it's bad. Of course, spending time learning, making your own pages, uploading stuff, writing programs takes time not everybody have time so it's definitely saying you have to do it it's completely privileged positions of course so it's more like that's why I want to talk about strategies so and the toolkit where anybody can pick up pick out what they are able to do in that direction so my the most radical form is of course something, I think it's attainable goal for some, but for all others is just something that you can look in there in direction but you walk the path. And whatever you can do, you can do. So yes, of course, people would not be on Instagram if it would be easy to switch to your own hosted WordPress, for example, and to have all the audience. So each person has to kind of like judge for themselves what to do. Yeah. But on that note, maybe it also is worth kind of making a note that, or at least in my opinion, being fully independent is really nice. But it's also probably that we need the platforms that work better and serve better, more democratic, more open. So in the same time, I guess we should be trying maybe to build fair platforms, right? Yeah, so I was thinking a lot about actually the term be our own platform for me is really useful for this moment to kind of rethink what's happened with Bandcamp and what's happening with platforms. But it's not useful for kind of like future in a way because it emphasizes individuality and independence. And I really, really like much more the term autonomy that implies leaning into your community. So I don't believe in full independence. There's no, nobody can give you a certificate you are now independent. So I think this is really kind of like wider phenomenon or kind of wider concept where you just kind of try, I mean it's not even possible, I mean like the part with funding and donations and stuff, this is impossible to do without something like Stripe or PayPal or maybe even, you know, your bank at the end of the day. If you put SEPA account number online so people can send you this, you know, you're still going through something. So, no, I mean, we are in an environment and we should lean into it, but maybe we choose who we lean onto. And I think the communities around us, there are technical communities that are kind of using just open source and so on, so... Yeah. First of all, thank you for the presentation and thank you so, so much for all the effort that you've put into this. Bandcamp was such an important way for me to support musicians for such a long time and it was absolutely horrifying when you started providing this information about what was going on. And I think it's also important what you're saying about not being, not an individual being independent. It's about, yeah, lean into your community means not only money, but how many people love your music who are willing to help you support this. In that sense, I wanted to ask you, are you gathering more of a community now? Are there more people working with you on this? Because you've done so much, but I hope you're not doing it by yourself. Thank you. Yeah, so beourownplatform.site is a website that is actually hosted on Codeberg. So anybody who, you can make a free account on Codeberg, it's kind of like an alternative to GitHub, and you can submit changes. And so it's open, it's like a wiki essentially. Anybody can kind of add to that. For now, I don't have a team of or I don't have a community regarding this exactly but I must say that there is a big support on Fediverse and on Mastodon. People are actually using hashtag Be Our Own Platform. There's another initiative called Fair Music Friday. And they feature actually a link to the Be Our Own Platform. So there is a network of people who are kind of digging this idea and they're using the hashtag and they're linking to this website or they're talking about this. So, and there are actually a number of Mastodon instances that are pretty much of this opinion that I presented here, I think. So, of those corporate silos, so I don't know if you know Mastodon or if you know Fediverse, these are open source and interoperable networks which makes a huge difference. They are not controlled by algorithms by and by kind of like private investors and things like that. So that is the community that we are leaning into. Okay. Are there any questions? Then I am the time gatekeeper. I'm sorry about that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. you