Mastodawn

Submitted without commentary: "AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web" by Mike Masnick https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web

I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…

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FoolishOwl 5d ago

@cwebber I don't understand people claiming they can self-host an independent "AI agent". It doesn't square with how I understand they work. It doesn't square with the immense data centers being built.

And while at first I'm sympathetic to his complaint about losing the open Web, he goes off the rails. You can still create web pages. It's just text. HTML tags are optional. He's fantasizing about singlehandedly competing with Microsoft or something.

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vv 💫 [follow my new artist profile!]5d ago

@foolishowl @cwebber His description of CSS makes it sound like it is inscrutable, when browser dev tools like Inspect Element (the successor to "view source") have never been better...

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vv 💫 [follow my new artist profile!]5d ago

@foolishowl @cwebber the more i think about this article the angrier i get. when i was a kid doing "view source" there was no integrated web IDE that would help you understand the DOM and even edit it in real time. what exists today is light years ahead of that. it's never been easier to learn about how websites work!

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FoolishOwl

@vv @cwebber Yes.

Like, there are real difficulties with the open web. But, it's not that hard to self-host a website. An SBC or a used computer is less expensive than a computer capable of web hosting was in the 90s.

But, he's the Techdirt guy. He already has a website. So what's he complaining about? Not being able to create new, more complicated applications, apparently.

He's complaining about the loss of an open web the way some USonian writers complained about the closing of the frontier in the early 1900s. It's probably easier to go horseback riding in Wyoming now than it was then. But that's not what he's missing.