Having an Open Web available for humanity is not a guaranteed outcome; we may end up in a future where easily available information is greatly diminished or even absent.

With that and all of the observations above in mind, what’s most apparent to me is that we should focus on finding ways to create and strengthen incentives to publish content that’s open (for some definition of open) – understanding that people might have a variety of motivations for doing so. If environmental factors like AI change their incentives, we need to understand why and address the underlying concerns if possible.

In other words, we have to create an Internet where people want to publish content openly – for some definition of “open.” Doing that may challenge the assumptions we’ve made about the Web as well as what we want “open” to be. What’s worked before may no longer create the incentive structure that leads to the greatest amount of content available to the greatest number of people for the greatest number of purposes.

Source: Some Thoughts on the Open Web

This one made me think. Mark presents the “open web” as a mixture of different webs. I appreciate the effort to not be singular. I agree with his conclusion in this post - we don’t know how (yet), but we need the “open web” to survive. That requires people to publish, made available sans gatekeepers and cheap enough for people to continue to publish independent of the “monetary” outcome.

Personally, I think this is where the indieweb shines. Most people are self publishing and in most cases - self hosting (or at least owning the costs of hosting). Scale is not an issue for most things on the indieweb. There might come a time where an indieweb site might hit billions of people. I don’t know of any - yet. Feel free to write to me and educate me.

I am not including things like Wikipedia that require a LOT more resources to both operate, publish and kept free so that the information can be provided. However, the web existed pre-wikipedia and I think the indie web will persist in a post-wikipedia world as well. The information will be scattered and harder to find. And we might not have Google - as it exists today. However, if there is a need, usually there will exist services and markets that will attempt to solve it and the constraint of not having Google around might actually be interesting.

Open is not free to provide. And it takes effort, generosity and goodwill. Like with things like democracy and good utilities, sometimes, losing it might be a key requirement to build it back again robustly.