Imagine you're playing Minecraft: endless digital world, boundless possibilities. Anyone can walk far enough, find their own spot, settle in and carve their niche on the server. Imagine a few enterprising players individually and at random close off the first 1,000 blocks in every direction from spawn and begin a distribution scheme where they give you some of the land they own, but with conditions. The terrain they own is peppered enough that if you want to settle in a single 16x16 chunk, you have to open 3-5 accounts, each with their own terms on what can be built there. Now, at any point you can walk past 1,000 blocks and just find free land. You can either find or craft a bed easily and reset your spawn. And yet, imagine all the players settle in to the land scheme, paying diamonds and resources for a handful of blocks.

I guess that's where we are with the web: everyone could have their own site, with their own data, and just figure out a way to communicate that content with the software people could use to find it. You could host your own writing, images and videos and distribute them to whichever platforms accept them. You could allow people to find them with a search engine, or deliver them to their inbox. But no, instead everyone is using somebody else's service, and having to stick to the terms of that platform (and more pernicious but less relevant, their operating algorithms).

I understand the reason: as a developer, I'm capable of running and maintaining my own blog for free, and yet the place I've been publishing anything beyond inane internet comments is here, a little space I get from my email service. It's nice, it's easy. Still, it's silly. We live in an endless digital world, but we stick to maintaining small chunks on someone else's land.