The web that we love and use every day is fragile. And honestly? We can't afford to ignore it anymore.
Humanity is online now. Billions of people depend on the web to communicate, share, and learn. It's where we do business, build movements, fall in love, and argue about movies. The web has become the infrastructure of modern thought.
But that infrastructure has some serious problems. Problems that most of us don't notice until it's too late.
The web forgets
Try clicking links in a blog post from 2010.
Half of them are dead, right? This isn't a bug—it's how the web works. There's no built-in system for preservation. When a server goes down or a company pivots or someone forgets to renew their domain, the content just... vanishes.
Researchers call this "link rot," and it's eating the web alive. Studies suggest that over 20% of web content disappears every decade. The collective knowledge we're building online is being slowly erased.
The web is untrustworthy
Here's a weird thing about the web: there's no way to verify who wrote something.
Sure, if you're reading nytimes.com, you trust that it's really the New York Times because of domain certificates and brand recognition. But what about everything else? Blog posts, articles, social media threads—any of it could be edited, faked, or misattributed.
Content isn't signed. There's no version history. Information can change without warning, and you'd never know.
The open web is expensive
Want to publish something on the web that you actually own and control? Here's your shopping list:
A domain name (~$15/year, forever)
A server or hosting (~$5-50/month, forever)
Technical knowledge to set it all up
Time to maintain it
Most people look at that list and think: "Or I could just post on Instagram for free."
And that's exactly what happened. Social media won because it made publishing easy. But the price was everything else—your identity, your data, your freedom to speak, your ability to leave.
This is why social media took over
The big platforms solved real problems. They made it trivially easy to publish, discover, and connect. They handled the servers, the domains, the technical complexity.
But they also captured us. Your identity on Twitter belongs to Twitter. Your social graph on Facebook belongs to Facebook. Your ability to reach your own audience depends on an algorithm you don't control, run by a company that doesn't answer to you.
We traded the open web for convenience. And now we're stuck.
We can fix this
Here's the good news: these problems aren't laws of physics. They're design choices. And we can make different choices.
At Seed Hypermedia, we're building open source software and an open protocol that fixes these problems without asking you to give up control:
Archival becomes a community responsibility. Instead of relying on one company to preserve everything, anyone in your network can back up and redistribute your content—with cryptographic proof that it came from you.
Identity becomes truly yours. Your credentials are secured by math, not by a company's terms of service. No one can take your identity away or lock you out of your own account.
Publishing becomes accessible. With just a computer and an internet connection, you can publish to the open web. No server required. No domain required. No permission required.
Trust becomes verifiable. Content is cryptographically signed by its author. Version history is permanent. You can always see what changed, when, and by whom.
The web was supposed to be decentralized. It was supposed to be a place where anyone could publish, where ideas could link freely, where no single entity controlled the flow of information.
That vision got lost somewhere along the way. We're here to find it again.