Happy Friday Everyone,

tldr: What times has the modern web frustrated you by forcing you to create an account or use a platform you don’t want to?

A food truck that I love, and learned by serendipity that it serves the public more than once a week… Has thrown me into a fit of rage. But not the truck itself.

Coming to Lemmy has been an overall benefit for my psyche and has helped me overcome some executive function issues I’ve dealt with throughout my life. I have enjoyed chatting with many of you, and am glad that corporate social media platforms are now all gone from my life.

Less algorithmic ensnarement, more thoughtful interactions with community members among other positives. I’m sure that many of us are also the Linux weirdo of our respective spheres of influence. It has also helped me encourage others to be more mindful of the technologies they use and has resulted in deeper friendships.

However, living in today’s world, it is impossible to go more than 2 feet or several links without being met with a Linktree, Facebook page, Instagram, or some larger company to gatekeep.

I’d imagine this food truck would not get nearly the publicity they do without utilizing the most common ways people interact with their pocket electronic boxes… But when I forgot the password to the Facebook account, the displayed automated message implied I was abusing the reset password feature and that I was blocked from doing so.

It made me wonder, what ever happened to people having their own websites?? I’m in the intermediate age where I didn't grow up with dial-up or less-abstracted computing systems, but remember how ubiquitous personal sites were.

This has made me want to get into spinning up my own website. I have acquired a domain name as well as a server for storage hosted by a provider. I do not want to start with anything complicated, nor do I intend to use a corporate service like Wordpress to host this site. However, because I am new to this, I don’t want to accidentally dox myself or do something idiotic with the server.

Since this is not a technology page, I would like this post to open up discussion about your own frustrations with local businesses being inaccessible without a larger big brother platform like Meta or Google gatekeeping the advertisement and accessibility of a service.

Thanks and stay cool and weird,

-G