## 17 The End of the Free Web

Think about what the internet was like a few years ago. You didn't have to pay for or see many ads on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, ... And you could put a lot of your pictures on services like Flickr, Google Photos / Picasa. You could have big email services... But didn't you know that this was how it would end? 

The business model of all this was to introduce advertising and make money. But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar... and the honey here is the number of users. The more you have, the more sponsors and advertising you get, the richer you'll be. So why doesn't it continue? Because the number of users is no longer growing, because the ads are no longer paying and the users have ad blockers in their browsers... And because a rich person wants to be richer, and the solution is to reduce fixed costs or increase revenue in other ways. The trend is towards paid subscriptions, as you can see now with software like MS Word, Adobe Photoshop and cloud services. The user is trapped in these services because he doesn't want to lose contacts or the time it takes to transfer all the data he has entered.

Do you remember how many people told you 10 years ago that it was a trap? If you're reading me (especially in Gemini protocol), there's a chance that you weren't trapped, or that you weren't a user of all those services or websites. I've tried everything and I keep an account with nothing in it, just to see what's going on. But I have changed a lot in my digital life over the last 15 years. I've gone from being an early user to a smarter user. If I was a big fan of Flickr before Yahoo bought it, I was not very optimistic when Yahoo was too generous. I've been using my free space to store my pictures, but I've tried other services to do the same... and I've found one for my typical use. Oh, it's not free, but it's not too expensive. It's the same with my mail, my contacts, etc... as I told you a few weeks ago. Not free, not too expensive, but reliable and secure.

I use some free services from providers that are not in the same league as Google or Microsoft. I remember the internet in the late 90s or early 2000s .... It was harder to create and host a website. No smartphones, so no need to share all your data across all your devices... But we thought it might be a good idea for contacts. No digital images, or very few... but Photoshop and scanners were there, and freeware too. And after that, free software, GNU General Public License, became popular. Two worlds coexisted on the Internet: A truly free world to share knowledge, culture, media, etc... and a capitalist world that didn't want to be free but found a way to capture the users of the other world. When Google launched its search engine, I was a user of a meta-search engine. Google killed the game with its simple, light and free tool. But we didn't understand that their business model was our own trap. The internet was becoming truly commercial, and with it, advertising was becoming more lucrative than on tradit
ional media. Google made the right bet, as did many of today's giants.

These same giants are now making people redundant. Of course, some tasks can be automated. But the real reason is growth, growth in revenue/users. They want more users, but they also want more revenue. I learned that Discord has 450 million users and generates about 450 million dollars a year. Only $1 per user?! The shareholder will tell them that's not enough. And if you look at the evolution of Facebook's revenue per user and Meta's other products, it's the same problem for us. It's no coincidence that Google is very quick to abandon certain projects, despite their success or practicality. Not profitable enough. Sometimes they keep a project just to kill the competition. I'm not sure if Threads will be profitable for Meta, but if they have a chance to kill Twitter, they'll keep it for years. And if Whatsapp is still "free", it's only because it's useful to catch people where Facebook no longer does.

Is this the end of the free web we loved in the decade 2010-2020? Maybe for the capitalist mindset, but not for everyone. It might be easy to say "they killed my internet"... We are part of the problem.  But now it's time to change and think about it. There are smaller services that do the same thing, sometimes for a small fee. In France, Framasoft does a lot to maintain and create new free services (for example, Peertube to replace youtube... and all the framatools) that you or other competent people could install somewhere and share. That's the opposite view of the internet, with volunteerism, altruism and free funding. Just as there is Free Software, sometimes with the need to finance it, there is also the Free Web, an alternative Internet with volunteers, programmers, associations, hobbyists, ... They're not famous, not known by everyone, but if you look, you'll find a happier way of using the Internet. 

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