{last change: 2025-02-23}

#BeYourOwnPlatform

a toolkit of strategies
towards ‘Radical Digital Autonomy for Musicians’

(see also wiki, /barcamp, and /stickers)

structure

  1. overview
  2. who is this for?
  3. rationale
  4. history (of internet)
  5. present
  6. future you
  7. glossary
  8. extended notes
  9. references

overview

#BeYourOwnPlatform1 is an idea that foregrounds digital autonomy of artists by rejecting Big Tech and VC (venture capital) platforms acting as middle-men and learning and using open tech in order to publish and distribute their work.

This document (available at https://BeYourOwnPlatform.site) has two main sections: discussion and a toolkit. Majority of discussion is a research into history and current state of services for artists on internet and arguments in favor of autonomy, while toolkit is presented in a form of technical glossary.

Please note: this document is in continuous construction.

who is this for?

In short: this is for artists (with a sound/noise/music bias) and other critical thinkers who are interested in digital autonomy & sovereignty in practical and analytical sense.

rationale

From ‘surveilance capitalism’ to ‘Big Tech’, it is seems obvious that those who are interested in cultural production are being exploited online in a new way. Triggered by sale of Bandcamp first to Epic Games, and then to Songtradr, this project started with research on strategies of bigger autonomy for musicians online, rejecting the extractive practices of the Big Tech, researching the history of independence movements on the internet, and looking at alternative approaches.

When Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr many responses were posted on social networks and one of them contained a small seed that resonated with future action, future direction. Music journalist Anil Prasad wrote a facebook post which they ended with

“you may want to focus as well on YOUR OWN PLATFORM. In other words, your website, which so many of you have forsaken. No-one can take your website away from you. They can’t pull that rug from under your feet. So, go back and rebuild your own web presence.”

… signing off with a hashtag #BeYourOwnPlatform

history (of internet)

Web 2.0

In their opening remarks to the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly outlined their definition of the “Web as Platform”, where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that “customers are building your business for you”. They argued that the activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures) could be “harnessed” to create value."

There is a growing body of critique of Web 2.0 from the perspective of political economy. Since Web 2.0 is based on the “customers… building your business for you (entrepreneur or a tech startup)” critics have argued that sites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are exploiting the “free labor” of user-created content. Web 2.0 sites use Terms of Service agreements to claim perpetual licenses to user-generated content, and they use that content to create profiles of users to sell to marketers. This is part of increased surveillance of user activity happening within Web 2.0 sites.

walled gardens & silos

A walled garden is “a closed platform or closed ecosystem: a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and/or media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content”. Today’s non-internet examples are probably Apples’ operating systems and iOS App Store, and Google Play on Android.This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.

A silo or web content hosting silo is a walled garden in the context of web 2.0: a centralized web site (like most social media) typically owned by a for-profit corporation that stakes some claim to content contributed to it and restricts access in some way (has walls). Silos are characterized by

power structure and digital autonomy

In a blog post titled a silo can never provide digital autonomy to its users in july 2022 Ariadne Conill, a Free software developer wrote:

“Silos, by their very nature of being centralized services under the control of the privileged, cannot be good if you look at the power structures imposed by them. Instead, we should use our privilege to lift others up, something that commercial silos, by design, are incapable of doing.” … “We should choose to participate in power structures which value our communal membership, rather than value our ability to generate or pay revenue.”

resistance

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

It is a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards and based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

Homebrew Website Club is a regular meetup of creatives passionate about improving their own websites, sharing successes and challenges with a like-minded and supportive community.

a different web (is possible)

Cryptocurrency critic, technology researcher, and software engineer Molly White, otherwise known for her well-known project “Web3 is Going Just Great”, wrote a blog post titled “We can have a different web”

“web was just better back then. Fewer trolls, and a lot fewer bots. Google search results that actually returned what you were looking for, not just the sites that paid the most. Cobbled-together blogs and LiveJournal pages written by people who felt authentic, who maybe wanted to attract more visitors to tick up their pageview counters or add entries to their guestbook pages, but who weren’t trying to cultivate a persona as an influencer or a thought leader,”build a brand", or monetize their audience. More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, … fewer and less intrusive ads, less engagement farming, less surveillance. Fewer paywalls […] l “The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.”

(https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/)

declaration of digital autonomy

(by Molly de Blanc and Karen M. Sandler, 2020)

We demand a world in which technology is created to protect and empower those who are impacted by it. Our technology must respect the rights and freedoms of those users. We need to take control for the purpose of collectively building a better world in which technology works in service to the good of human kind, protecting our rights and digital autonomy as individuals.

We therefore call for the adoption of the following principles for ethical technology:

techautonomy, archived dec/2024

ethos of the digital gardens

Maggie Appleton in beautiful article “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” about the main argument of Mike Caufield in his essay The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral was that we have become swept away by streams – the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events. … only concerned with self-assertive immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments … streams only surface the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time.

  1. Topography over Timelines
  2. Continuous Growth
  3. Imperfection & Learning in Public
  4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental
  5. Intercropping & Content Diversity
  6. Independent Ownership (avoid walled gardens)

The garden is our counterbalance. Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. […] The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

Appleton tries to define patterns of digital gardens:

  1. Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it’s connected to others.
  2. Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing.
  3. Gardens are imperfect by design. They don’t hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
  4. Gardens are non-homogenous by nature, just as unique and particular as their vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it’s a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else’s standardised template.
  5. Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. … we’re living in an audio-visual cornucopia that the web makes possible. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the garden.
  6. Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control. This patch should not live on the servers of corporate SILOs like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc… None of these platforms are designed to help you slowly build and weave personal knowledge. Most of them actively fight against it.

internet rights

present

resistance of the smol

“Nowadays, hardware resources of our personal devices are essentially oversized to manage bloated websites. If we incite web designers to return to a lighter web, small devices such as old PC, old smartphones, retro-machines and small boards could be usable.” – https://smolweb.org

“Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and ‘convert’. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.” – Parimal Satyal, 25 May 2020, via https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/

“The Small Web, quite simply, is the polar opposite of the Big Web. It applies the Small Technology principles to the web. […] The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments). On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes). […] Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people. – Aral Balkan, https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

“However, it’s not just about raw size, but about an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers. Building a website from scratch is not everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of us who do it, maybe we can promote templates and tools that produce small sites that encourage quality over quantity." – https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/

"It’s small because it is build for friends and friends of friends. It doesn’t have to scale to millions of people because those millions should build their own local small nets. Servers are small, with fewer resources (cores, RAM, disk space) and communities are small (sometimes the number of accounts are limited arbitrarily) – https://communitywiki.org/wiki/SmolNet

see more:

pubnixes

Public Access UNIX Systems (PAUS) are a type of server that provide various services to a multi-user community. They first began in the early 1980’s and continue today. Early servers ran various flavors of UNIX, hence the name Public Access “UNIX” Systems, but later generations saw a large mix of Unix-variants and, of course, GNU/Linux. To recognize the many different operating systems online today, these systems are increasingly referred to generically as “pubnixes”.

One of the enduring characteristics of pubnixes, beyond the simple access to computational services, is the community that develops among each system’s users. These communities tend to have a particular flavor of shared interests, and in many ways it is within these communities that the vision of a non-corporate Internet remains alive.

— https://github.com/cwmccabe/pubnixhist

tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of <tilde.club>, which was created in 2014 by Paul Ford:

“Tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages” — https://tilde.club/

A tilde is a multi-user online system designed to be a “home” for users by providing services such as shell access via SSH, email, small site hosting (on www, gopher, gemini), chat, or other programs. It is a loose term, akin to a public access unix systems (a.k.a. pubnixes), but with some connotations of a small community.

See https://tildeverse.org/ for more.

platform decay (enshittification)

Cory Doctorow tries to analyse how the corporate web platforms in the context of monopolisation of the web and its reduction to five companies that are called The Big Tech enabled by holes in US anti-trust legislation are doomed to decay and why.

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a”two sided market“, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

“new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders. Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. … high switching costs prevent either users or suppliers from leaving even when alternatives technically exist”

(source: wikipedia)

solutions against platform decay

Doctorow’s long-term solutions are more or less the change of legislation and better market regulation

  1. a respect of the end-to-end principle, a fundamental principle of the Internet in which the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present.
  2. the right of exit, where users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that “lock in” users and prevent market competition between platforms

(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)

future you

Based on discussion and research we just had, the “highest level of autonomy” that an artist can reach in practical terms, is to:

However, there must be acknowledged that everyone has different resources at their hands, and having time to learn a big amount of new technical knowledge is, from some perspective, also a privilege not everyone has. Therefore, a set of guiding principles are also in order for the reader to situate themselves sustainably on a journey and set themselves their own milestones according to their capabilities:

glossary

Understanding technical terminology is at the core of digital autonomy. Glossary is a toolkit that explains most technical terms needed to understand to build sustainable and independent infrastructure for publishing and distribution on the internet.

BASICS

INTERNET

In simple terms, internet includes web, email, and everyting that uses TCP/IP.

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, internet telephony, and file sharing.

—(wikipedia)

WWW/WEB

The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

—(wikipedia)

IP

Can mean ‘IP number’ or ‘IP address’, internet protocol, and also intellectual property.

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.

Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets.

SERVER

A server is a computer that provides information to other computers called “clients” on a computer network. Servers can provide various functionalities, often called “services”, such as sharing data or resources among multiple clients or performing computations for a client. A single server can serve multiple clients, and a single client can use multiple servers. A client process may run on the same device or may connect over a network to a server on a different device. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers.

VPS

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. A virtual private server runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. For many purposes, it is functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server and, being software-defined, can be created and configured more easily. A virtual server costs less than an equivalent physical server. However, as virtual servers share the underlying physical hardware with other VPS, performance may be lower depending on the workload of any other executing virtual machines.

LINUX

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel released 1991. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries—most of which are provided by third parties—to create a complete operating system. Thousands of Linux distributions exist, many based directly or indirectly on other distributions; popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu. Linux distributions are frequently used in server platforms. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open-source software collaboration and is used on a wide variety of devices including PCs, workstations, mainframes and embedded systems. Linux is the predominant operating system for servers and is also used on all of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. When combined with Android, which is Linux-based and designed for smartphones, they have the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems.

OPEN SOURCE

Open-source software shares similarities with free software and is part of the broader term free and open-source software. Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative, public manner.

Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed “free” if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

–

DOMAIN NAME

Domain names serve to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with a text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the Internet protocols. A domain name may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, also called hostnames.

In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer.

REGISTRAR

The right to use a domain name is delegated by domain name registrars, which are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization charged with overseeing the name and number systems of the Internet.

Registries and registrars usually charge an annual fee for the service of delegating a domain name to a user and providing a default set of name servers. Often, this transaction is termed a sale or lease of the domain name, and the registrant may sometimes be called an “owner”, but no such legal relationship is actually associated with the transaction, only the exclusive right to use the domain name. More correctly, authorized users are known as “registrants” or as “domain holders”.

DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names (identification strings) assigned to each of the associated entities. Most prominently, it translates readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols. The Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985.

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HOSTING

An Internet hosting service is a service that runs servers connected to the Internet, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content or host services connected to the Internet.

A common kind of hosting is web hosting. Most hosting providers offer a combination of services – e-mail hosting, website hosting, and database hosting, for example. DNS hosting service, another type of service usually provided by hosting providers, is often bundled with domain name registration.

Dedicated server hosts, provide a server, usually housed in a datacenter and connected to the Internet where clients can run anything they want (including web servers and other servers). The hosting provider ensures that the servers have Internet connections with good upstream bandwidth and reliable power sources.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language[a] for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript, a programming language.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for its appearance.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for specifying the presentation and styling of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.

CSS is designed to enable the separation of content and presentation, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, since the content can be written without concern for its presentation; provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics; enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file, which reduces complexity and repetition in the structural content; and enable the .css file to be cached to improve the page load speed between the pages that share the file and its formatting.

JAVASCRIPT

JavaScript is a scripting or programming language that allows user to implement complex features on web pages — every time a web page does more than just sit there and display static information for you to look at — displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated 2D/3D graphics, scrolling video jukeboxes, etc. — JavaScript is probably involved. It is the third layer of the layer cake of standard web technologies, two of which are HTML and CSS.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol for transmitting files between computers over TCP/IP connections. FTP is useful for anyone who transfers or downloads files over the internet or to the cloud, as well as for developers who manage websites.

In an FTP transaction, the end user’s computer is typically called the local host. The second computer involved in FTP is a remote host, which is usually a server. Both computers must be connected via a network and configured properly to transfer files via FTP.

SSH

When traveling, the owner of a store might give their employees instructions from afar to ensure the store runs smoothly while they are gone. Similarly, SSH allows administrators to manage servers and devices from afar. Therefore the secure shell (SSH) is often used for controlling servers remotely, for managing infrastructure, and for transferring files. It is a method for securely sending commands to a computer over an unsecured network. SSH uses cryptography to authenticate and encrypt connections between devices.

PHP

PHP is an acronym for – Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development. Unlike client-side languages like JavaScript, CSS and HTML, which are executed on the user’s browser, PHP scripts run on the server. The results are then sent to the client’s web browser as plain HTML. PHP can actually do anything related to server-side scripting or more popularly known as the backend of a website. For example, PHP can receive data from forms, generate dynamic page content, can work with databases, create sessions, send and receive cookies, send emails, etc.

DATABASE

In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze the data. The DBMS additionally encompasses the core facilities provided to administer the database. The sum total of the database, the DBMS and the associated applications can be referred to as a database system. Often the term “database” is also used loosely to refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database.

COOKIES

Cookies (often known as internet cookies, http cookies, or browser cookies) are text files with small pieces of data — like a username and password — that are used to identify your computer as you use a network. Specific cookies are used to identify specific users and improve their web browsing experience. Data stored in a cookie is created by the server upon your connection. This data is labeled with an ID unique to you and your computer. When the cookie is exchanged between your computer and the network server, the server reads the ID and knows what information to specifically serve you. Cookies are usually stored “in a browser”, usually even when browser is closed.

extended notes

presentations

This project was presented as lecture and/or lecture-performance in 2024 in Prague, Dresden, Linz and Valletta by Luka Prinčič

references

on homepages

Austin Kleon in his book Share Your Work writes:

“…nothing beats owning your own space online, a place that you control, a place that no one can take away from you, a world headquarters where people can always find you.[…] Your website doesn’t have to look pretty; it just has to exist. Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.”

on email

Austin Kleon:

“You’ll notice a pattern with technology—often the most boring and utilitarian technologies are the ones that stick around the longest. Email is decades and decades old, but it’s nowhere close to being dead. Even though almost everybody hates it, everybody has an email address. And unlike RSS and social media feeds, if you send someone an email, it will land in her inbox, and it will come to her attention. She might not open it, but she definitely has to go to the trouble of deleting it.”

“The people who sign up for your list will be some of your biggest supporters, just by the simple fact that they signed up for the potential to be spammed by you. Don’t betray their trust and don’t push your luck. Build your list and treat it with respect. It will come in handy.”

  1. #BeYourOwnPlatform as a hashtag was first noticed by author of this document in the FaceBook post by Anil Prasad but was then subsequently popularized on fediverse around musicians communities.↩