Last night, I was up late and cleaning up some old thumbdrives. I scrolled throu
gh some PDFs and some writing on Aaron Swartz and decided to check out Aaron's b
log again [http://www.aaronsw.org]. 

I've done this on occasion over the years. I appreciated Aaron when he was alive
 and mourn him still. He was deeply influential to my approach to the internet, 
my thinking about what it was; its potential, the truly special thing it was in 
the scope of human history. 

So when I tried curl'ing aaronsw.org and got nothing, I went on a little journey
 through the internetarchive to find some old archives of his site. I downloaded
 a warc and fired up a local server and read old posts by someone that I felt cl
ose to. 

I thought about all the years I've lived and all the years he hasn't. These thin
gs happen. We continue on. But I guess, what I'l left thinking about is things l
ike this video: 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/63/Aaron_Swartz_-_Th
e_Network_Transformation.webm/Aaron_Swartz_-_The_Network_Transformation.webm.240
p.vp9.webm

and I thought about moxy's recent post on "web3": 

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

from the moxy's article: 

>>>
    People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for 
web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of
 content as well as a publisher and consumer of infrastructure.

    We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server 
for our own email, our own finger server for our own status messages, our own ch
argen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this 
can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to r
un their own servers.

    Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organiza
tions building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this p
oint. If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that peopl
e do not want to run their own servers. The companies that emerged offering to d
o that for you instead were successful, and the companies that iterated on new f
unctionality based on what is possible with those networks were even more succes
sful.


... and how things have changed. 

I agree with Moxy, but I also agree with Aaron. 

Very few of the people I know in meat-space have run or manage their own servers
. Most of the folks I know who talk to me about "online" are people telling me a
bout the things they saw on 1 of 5 websites recently. And its a little depressin
g. 

I'm not certain it's "nostalgia" per se ... < looks up definition of _nostaligia
_ ...*"a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a 
period or place with happy personal associations"* ... "gulp"> but even if is, I
 guess I'm ok with that. 

I started jotting this down, mostly because I thought I'd forget it, and now I'm
 going to post it because, we'll its how I'm going to even out this feeling of c
hange and sameness that this all gives me. 

If you got this far, thanks for taking the time read this. :)