Nothing changes. That is the point.

The conventional web is fast, free at the point of use, and mostly excellent. Billions of people use it every day and are perfectly well served. We are not going to pretend it is a dystopia — but it is worth being clear about what the arrangement actually is, because it is easy to forget you made one.

The bargain, stated plainly

Your account is a permission, not a possession. It exists because a company allows it to, under terms they can change. That is not a conspiracy; it is what a terms-of-service relationship is.
Your domain is on the registrar's record. Registration is yearly — that part is fine, and the same shape as any name service that needs to recycle unused names. What matters is what a court order or UDRP ruling can do to it while the registrar holds that record.
Attention is the business model. Services that cost nothing are paid for by measuring what you do and selling access to your attention. Being observed is not a flaw in that design — it is the design working.
Reach is not portable. The audience you build lives inside the platform. Leaving does not take it with you, which is what makes leaving expensive.
Every layer keeps a veto. Registrar, host, CDN, certificate authority, app store, payment processor. Any one of them can decline, and each of them sometimes does.
To be fair to it. Those vetoes also stop fraud, take down malware and remove genuinely vile material, and the people operating them are mostly trying to get it right. The support desk is real, the uptime is excellent, and someone answers when it breaks. A system with nobody in charge gives all of that up too. Anyone selling you the alternative without mentioning that is selling you something.

Carry on, then

No hard feelings. The ordinary web is right through here.

Still curious what the other one actually does? It costs nothing to look, and nothing on this machine changes until you install something.

Show me the other one →

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