THE WEB WE LOST

The Web We Lost

Author: Anil Dash

Why I Saved This

This essay perfectly captures the transition from Web 1.0 to the social media era, and what we lost in the process. Anil Dash articulates something I've felt but couldn't quite express about the early web.

Key Points

• The early web was built on open protocols and personal websites
• Social platforms replaced many of these distributed systems
• We traded control and ownership for convenience
• RSS, trackbacks, and blogrolls enabled a different kind of social web
• The centralization wasn't inevitable—we chose it

My Notes

Reading this in 2025, it's even more relevant. The consolidation Anil warned about has only intensified. But the article also reminds me that the tools to build a different web still exist—we just have to choose to use them.

This is part of why I'm building this site. Not as nostalgia, but as a small act of resistance against the assumption that the web must be centralized.

← Back to Articles