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3 months ago
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Over the years, I have gradually come to see the value of not accepting the terms established by whatever "system" has been created to provide me with what I need. Inevitably, the most benefits accrue to those who set up the system. This applies to working for a corporation, renting a home from a real estate agency, paying a professional mechanic to work on my car, being involved with a religion, being subject to a government, and to many other established systems in life. This also applies to Internet services. The billionaires and others who run services on the Internet have created online systems to benefit themselves first and us second. If we want an Internet that is more favorable to us, we will have to create it.
People who provide Internet services do so for all sorts of reasons, but most probably involve the expectation of some sort of eventual payoff. This applies 100% of the time to people who form companies for that purpose. In fact, the only reason to form a company is that the owners expect to make a profit, and they hope for a favorable tax treatment for the income they expect to generate. I realize such things as non-profit companies exist, but their only purpose is to inform the government that the owners of the company intend to follow certain rules so that they can have even more favorable tax treatments.
Unfortunately, most people who own shares of companies are interested in profit above every other consideration, and that means when a group of them get together, increasing pressure exists to boost the company's profits. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, this inevitably leads to what he called the "enshittification" of whatever service the company offers in exchange for the money the customers pay. Although this has a host of implications, the most important one for the people who depend on a service provided by a company is that the implicit or explicit deal they have made with the company will sooner or later deteriorate to the point where they will be forced to find a better service elsewhere.
Where Internet services are concerned, the most obvious examples of the enshittification phenomenon exist among social media networks run by corporations. Literally hundreds have been enshittified over the years to the point at which they have either gone bankrupt or been abandoned by essentially all of their users and become mere husks of their former selves. In many cases, other contributing factors are at play, but in a nutshell this is what happens.
I have tried to give a thorough introduction to this topic because so many Internet users seem either unwilling or incapable of facing these basic facts about the Internet and the people who run it. If the social media network you love so much today is run by a profit-seeking company, sooner or later you will be forced to abandon it. If you have grasped the essence of what I am saying, the question you should be asking yourself (especially if you are in your teens or twenties) is why you would want to go to all of the trouble of investing your time in a social network that you will be forced to leave? Wouldn't you prefer not to switch social media networks multiple times during your lifetime? I can imagine your response, "All things in life are temporary. I have no guarantee that a social media site run by an individual or group of individuals will end any differently. I like the services that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WeChat, or Bluesky provide." I hear you, but is the value you derive today from those corporate-run social media networks worth the inevitable outcome when they crash and burn? And they will. In the long run--over the course of your lifetime--wouldn't you be better served by a social media network and other online services that have at least some chance of enduring? Please think about that question for a moment before reading on.
If you agree that the question I have raised is at least reasonable to contemplate, how would you find such a social media network, or any long-term Internet service for that matter? How would you know which one to place your trust in? I could answer these questions a number of ways, but in this article I will explore one answer. Trust yourself. Run your own Internet services, or at least some of them. Before you throw up your hands and stop reading, please allow me to explain why this makes sense, even if you are not technically inclined.
Running your own social media platform comes with a number of significant benefits that should be readily apparent to anyone who is paying attention in these days of over-moderated, over-regulated social media where any user can be "de-platformed" for even the most trivial of reasons. After being kicked off of ten social media platforms, the benefit that finally convinced me to create my own was that no one could ever do that to me again. For those who worry about being de-platformed, that peace of mind is an enormous relief. In addition, you can make virtually any rules you like on your own platform and have an enormous influence over how it works. Your own site can be your ultimate free-speech platform. Elon Musk valued these benefits so highly that he paid 44 billion dollars for Twitter. But you don't have to pay anything like that to feel secure on your own small site. If you know how, you can begin running your service for very little money. I calculated my cost of running my social media site, Blue Dwarf, and it was less than $2.34/month.
Running your own site means you don't have to accept Elon Musk's or Mark Zuckerberg's rules or be limited by the way they run their sites. You can create your own rules and run whatever flavor of social media platform you want: chat group, old-style forum, or full-featured platform with DM's and user groups and even an Internet email service. It can be centralized or decentralized. It will probably start out small, and if you prefer that it remain that way, you can set a limit on the number of users. You can focus on whatever topic you want or make a general site on which users can discuss whatever they like. Even if your hobby is something really niche like collecting stamps with images of post-modernist paintings, you can make a blog or social media site for it. You can do pretty much whatever you like.
If you doubt your ability to create your own Internet services, know that the technology now exists for you to set up your own web server running a variety of services. Even if you are some kind of techno-boob, you are capable of doing this. One of the best tools is a free application called YunoHost, which allows you to run a number of Internet-connected web services all at the same time from a home server. Its website says, "YunoHost is a system that installs itself on a server and allows you to install and maintain - with very little technical knowledge - digital services (apps) that you control." I reviewed YunoHost nearly five years ago and concluded that it was the first such application that I had found that I felt could honestly make that claim. Among other applications, YunoHost allows you to run a WordPress site (blog, online magazine, company website, ecommerce site, forum, etc.) and a small Mastodon instance.
Options also exist for those who for a number of reasons may prefer not to run a web server from their home. You should avoid at all costs the temptation of running your new social media site on some company's dedicated server, like for instance a Discord server, where you are effectively an unpaid employee and the company owns all the rights to the service you are running and will in all likelihood go bankrupt one day or stop providing the service. Don't fall into that kind of trap and then realize too late that all your users' data is in jeopardy. Having said that, however, an acceptable approach for those who would prefer not to run a server in their physical possessions is renting a server from a web-hosting company.
Literally thousands of web-hosting companies allow individuals just like you and me to rent their servers. And they will never own your data. They usually charge rather modest monthly fees of between $1 and $20 (including bandwidth costs) for low-traffic websites--as yours will certainly be, at least initially. Renting a server by the month normally requires a few more technical skills than running a YunoHost server, but many web-hosting companies also make it possible for you to easily set up a Mastodon instance, perhaps as easily as with the push of a button. Here are five. By some miracle, the first web-hosting company on the list, Hostinger, is one of the few with which I have had experience. I wrote about it in my article, In July the Cheapskate's Guide Experienced the Self-Hoster's Worst Nightmare. Don't let the title confuse you. The nightmare had nothing to do with Hostinger. It was about the heatwave the US experienced in the Summer of 2023 knocking my home web server off line while I was out of town for several weeks. In July of 2025, Hostinger offered "Mastodon VPS hosting" for as low as $4.99/mo ($6.99/mo recommended). Generally, running a website from a VPS requires more technical skills than employing a simple web-hosting service, so before spending your money, you should be sure you understand what Hostinger will do and what you will have to do to keep your Mastodon instance on line.
Another option for renting a server for those who don't have strong technical skills is what is known as a "managed VPS", a "managed service", or "managed cloud hosting". This is where you tell the web-hosting company what you want and they take care of setting it up and running it. Be aware however that the costs of a managed service may be considerably more than a rented server that you set up and maintain yourself; however, some appear to be so reasonably priced that I wonder how they can provide what I am stating here. Hostinger currently charges as little as $7.99/month for managed cloud hosting for the first 48 months (which you apparently have to pay for in one lump sum), followed by $25.99/month at renewal, and you have 30 days to cancel if you don't like the service. Before you put down all that money, be sure you understand exactly what you are purchasing. I also strongly recommend that where possible you initially rent a server first by the month (like a month-by-month apartment lease), so you can determine whether the service you have chosen really meets your needs before locking yourself into a one, two, or more year commitment.
For those who don't like the Mastodon micro-blogging format and are willing to bear the not-insignificant burden of running an unmanaged server, other software exists that can be run on a home server, web-hosting service, or VPS that gives a more traditional forum experience but may require some specialized knowledge to set up and maintain. Lemmy, Akkoma, or Pleroma servers may be worth looking into for those who have caught the vision of the decentralized Fediverse. I also wrote about 18 free open-source software applications for creating centralized social media servers on the Web in How to Bypass the Corporate-Controlled Social Media Trap, in which you can find some additional details about self hosting your own small social media website.
If you choose, you can make creating your own social media network difficult indeed. The approach I chose for creating Blue Dwarf three years ago was writing my own social media software. I can't say I recommend that unless you are absolutely fixated on running exactly the social media website you envision. In my case, I wanted a social media site that would provide a free speech platform for as many as 50,000 registered users, yet still run over just about any residential Internet connection from a Raspberry Pi 3 home server. That is what Blue Dwarf has been for the past three years, however, with only about 700 registered users so far.
I hope I have made my point that anyone with virtually any level of technical knowledge can now acquire the tools to run at least a blog or small social media network of his own without the aid of big tech or its billionaires. You can make the creation process as easy as installing YunoHost on a Raspberry Pi or old laptop connected your home router or as complicated as you can imagine. But regardless of the approach you pick, the most important thing to realize is that you have the power to run many of your own Internet services. So, no one today is forced to jump to the latest billionaire-provided service like Bluesky. We all have options.
Something important to understand about running your own Internet service or services is that you can embark on a cumulative learning experience. By that, I mean you have the opportunity to learn gradually through experimentation with each tool that you try. You may want to begin by taking out that old laptop that has been sitting on a shelf in your closet for years, installing YunoHost on it, and using it to host your first personal WordPress blog. If that meets your needs, you may stop there. Or, after a year or two, you may want to experiment with other blogging software or a blogging platform like blogger. Next, you may want to experiment with renting a server from a web-hosting company or running a different kind of service. Maybe you become enthusiastic about running a Mastodon instance or starting your own ecommerce site. Maybe after a few years of making friends with other bloggers you decided to get a group together and publish your own online magazine. All of the skills and knowledge that you acquire along the way will continue to benefit you and will lead through a natural progression that will empower you to make the next fascinating step in your online content or service-hosting experience. You are in no rush, because you are doing this at your own pace, not for a paycheck (unless you want to do that). So, you can spend the rest of your life experimenting and learning. The only catch is that you have to begin. You have to take the first baby step. The sooner you begin, the farther you may ultimately travel along the path of freedom away from the restrictive and unpredictable services provided by the Internet billionaires. The sooner you begin, the more you will learn, and the more you will be able to accomplish.
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Related Articles:
How to Bypass the Corporate-Controlled Social Media Trap
What I have Learned from Two Years of Running a Small Social Media Website
The Joys and Sorrows of Maintaining a Personal Website
In July the Cheapskate's Guide Experienced the Self-Hoster's Worst Nightmare
After Being Banned from More than Ten Social Media Sites, I Decided to Create My Own
The Experiences of People Running Mastodon Servers Suggest a Bumpy Road Ahead
Running a Small Website without Commercial Software or Hosting Services: Lessons Learned
