Spotted this thread by Kavaeric over on Bluesky, and felt it was important to boost it over here.
I don't feel there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to set up a nice little static HTML homestead on Neocities to live out your digital cottagecore fantasies, but I do think the real problem rears its ugly head when it's assumed that everyone should build a house just like yours.
Even if we could, in good faith, put a proper desktop or notebook computer in front of every person on Earth so they weren't stuck with, say, a flip phone or something, those people would still need to know English to comprehend almost all code, and the tutorials from which to learn that code. They will have no choice but to learn our way of doing things in our language and using our concepts.
In another post, Kavaeric highlights work to escape that digital colonialism, and I've seen efforts elsewhere to shape and understand technology on the terms of the peoples and cultures who will be using it.
Animikii had put out an ebook a while back (that I can't seem to find a link to on their site now, darn it) on indigenous data sovereignty, of also creating programming languages and storing data in a way that is meaningful to them.
One particular passage I remember from that ebook is the difference in expression of a treaty between a first nation and european colonizers, with the colonizers using pages and pages of elaborate legal documentation to describe how the land was to be parsed and treated, and the indigenous peoples using a simple band of beads depicting parallel lines astride a river to describe a succinct summation of non-interaction--the lines would never intersect, end of story. Or at least, it would have been nice if it ended there, and what everyone learned the hard way is that excessive colonialist verbiage scrawled on pages and pages of dead trees didn't make concepts more precise; that excessive verbiage enabled the atrocities to come. Which of those forms of data storage would these people find to be superior, to serve their best interests? The beads? Or the data storage method that led to most of their deaths?
At some point there needs to be an understanding that these people need to be asked what they want out of this fantastic future we find ourselves in that delivers cat pictures on demand. It isn't right to give them our tools and our building plans and a book of standards that interface with our plugs and pipes and say, "try to catch up." That is, frankly, an insult. Arguably, there's a lot of other things that maybe have a higher priority right now for some groups; I don't think a village struggling with a lack of clean water is really thinking about what data sovereignty looks like for them. Also, it's not like any of us can individually snap our fingers and solve the world's ills. We can't even convince our own governments to give a shit about climate change.
It's something to think about, nonetheless, that our little CSS crimes here on Cohost are an indication of extreme privilege, as is forklifting our social lives from Twitter or Tumbler over to alternatives like Bluesky or even Threads, heaven forbid. Most of the Internet-connected world will only ever see the Internet through a billionaire's phone app, and even that is privilege.