Digital Homeownership
Homeownership on the web is highly analogous to the physical world.
We're all born under someone else's roof, inhabiting the shared space of our parents or guardians until it's time to "leave the nest". Unlike our feathered friends however, it is extremely rare for us to have a place of our own in adolescence.
In the beforetimes we would just pick out a nice spot close to our neighbors, throw an animal hide over a bunch of sticks and call it a day. In modern times there's not a plot of land that isn't already owned, almost certainly by a feudal lord who bought it up in bulk for the purpose of renting it back to you.
Modern homeownership therefore is mostly a story of home-rentership, not real ownership.
Incredibly, this matches the online experience, even though the world wide web has an infinite amount of real-estate!
Most people's home on the internet is situated in some hyper-scale condominium, like
facebook.com/yourhome
You don't own that place, you're merely renting it in exchange for your data and attention, which Facebook and its ilk uses to sell you things. (I.e. manipulating you into buying stuff you don't need.)
Impoverished agency
It's common knowledge now that so called "free" platforms come at a very high price indeed: your agency.
The chilling truth is that Facebook isn't contented just showing you ads. For attention-economy platforms, the ideal customer is a perfectly predictable consumer.
A predictable consumer is someone who can be nudged in whichever direction benefits the primary objective of the platform, which is ceaseless accumulation of profits.
It begins with wasteful consumerism. It ends with maligned shaping of opinions through manufactured consent.
The extractive mega-platforms are in the business of commercial surveillance and data brokering; they will happily help you amuse yourself to death with their gamified dopamine feeds, so long as you don’t do it too quickly.
Be safe
You deserve a home on the World Wide Web that’s built to keep you safe; a magical place for virtual living that‘s yours for life, existing in a sociable web.
I'm interested in a social form that uses as its foundation the web itself. Where anyone can participate just by having a website. Where the existing networks are, to some degree, part of that form already simply by virtue of being accessible over HTTPS.
We believe agency on the web begins with a personal website on your own domain. At its most essential, that’s what Weird does.
The domain is your piece of digital real-estate on the interwebs;
the website is your house on top.
Domain
Root domains are by far the best for digital agency, but even the cheapest internet domain names cost between $10-30/yr. To accommodate as many people as possible, weird.one offers free website hosting on subdomains:
yoursite.weird.one
You can stay on a subdomain for as long as you’d like, but we will never stop trying to upsell you on a custom domain (Weird will eventually charge for the use of custom domains, among other things), as it is in fact your insurance against insufficient service by Weird.one!
Should weird.one ever cease operations - whether by neglect or bankruptcy etc. - a custom domain lets you easily move your 🏡website elsewhere without changing your 📮web-address.
Real-estate on the web is less static, like floating islands! 🏝️
(or walking houses)
Website
To fully inhabit the World Wide Web you must embody your digital self within it.
For your domain to really work, there needs to be something there. That something is a website, which you can make to look and function much like a door sign or a business card, or you can complexify it into an encyclopedic theme park!
For a lot of us, the “simple” prospect of filling in that web page with content presents an insurmountable writer’s block.
That’s why Weird starts with link lists as a primitive building block. Make a list of however many links that say something, anything, about you.
Whatever you’ve listed, you’ve done it! You’re participating in the social knowledge graph.
In so doing you have also told us something about your self, and with that you are taking up a bit of space on the web, as you should.
A face to call my own
I realized I needed Weird when I had signed one too many emails as
github.com/erlend-sh
While it’s a far more agentic platform than Facebook, GitHub is owned by an even bigger and equally ominous company. My agency on Microsoft’s platform is more a result of market forces (developers are slightly more discerning about lock-in effects) than a core value and priority on their part.
Today, the cornerstone of my re-constructed identity has been placed firmly in the ground!
erlend.sh 🪨
As a weird web nerd I feel like the coolest person on the planet when I signed my email like this the other day:
Sincerely,
erlend.sh
Come ooon! #nerdgoals
v0.2 stealth release
For those who scrolled to the end, it is with great trepidation that we invite you to test Weird v0.2 with us.
muni-townToday, we cater to one very specific kind of person: nerds in possession of an unused domain name they’d like to put something on, quick-like.
As of v0.2 that is our extremely niche ‘target market’. That target will widen ever so slightly with every subsequent release.
You can currently:
- Add profile information (avatar, description, socials, tags)
- Add links
- Apply a custom domain.
Please help us test all of the above! Do keep in mind however that you are presently the earliest of early adopters, so nothing is expected to work well yet.
Up next we'll be talking about web passports, ATProto logins and our open business plan.