This article on Forbes delivers a call for a decentralised web where people have control over their own data and run their own applications such as email. This is in contrast to dependence on the Big Few companies that have come to dominate several layers of the modern internet: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba.
Over the last few days I moved my domain, my hosting and my WordPress installation from one host to another. The web hosting and configuration experience has not changed substantially in the last 18 years I have hosted my own domain and blog. It required a substantial amount of technical know-how even though it did not involve email (which runs separately on GSuite) and calendars/contacts/documents, which all live on iCloud. If I had self-hosted all of that, it would have been an even more arduous and technically challenging effort.
I have long thought that web hosts have a huge opportunity to make it really easy for people to privately host not just their site but also their data and personal applications.
All of these exist: Nextcloud for contacts, calendars, documents. Open-source XMPP servers for chat. Photo gallery applications. Personal wikis and note apps. Your web host already offers email; use the beautiful Rainloop for webmail. SpamAssassin or Mailcleaner for self-hosted spam filtering. Mattermost for Slack-like close-group messaging, just run our own IRC server – there are well-designed IRC mobile apps. WordPress for blogging and even micro-blogging.
Web hosts could take it further and offer hosted VPNs and DNS-based ad-blockers like Pi-hole as hosted services.
Services like Softaculous, built into self-hosted control panels like CPanel, are a great easy way to install these pieces of software, but cPanel itself needs to become much simpler.
It’s hard to overstate how much the relationship between today’s internet giants and ordinary people like you and me will change if decentralised identity, self-hosted applications and self-owned data become a reality. That alternate world though is becoming harder every passing year to even imagine, leave alone bring about.