Native mobile apps became the next walled garden. People loved them. They were faster, smoother, more integrated, and easier to monetize. They had app stores, push notifications, payments, device APIs, ratings, updates, and distribution. The Web remained open, but mobile apps became the interface people used all day.

For a while, I had tons of apps on my phone. I’m talking back in the early days — when everyone started realizing there’s an app for that!

These days, I have so few third party apps installed, they all fit on one home screen page. I hate how invasive apps have become. I hate how you can’t visit a website like Reddit, or even most news sites without getting slapped around by popup iT lOoKs bEtTeR iN tHe ApP banners.

I’m leaning into the open web now more than ever, and I think a lot of fellow nerds are too. People who are sick of corporate social media — let alone AI-everything. I do use AI more than I’d like to admit, but for me, it’s no replacement for the weird wide web. I understand that most users don’t share that feeling though.

For more than two decades, search engines were the front door of the Web. You wanted something. You searched. You clicked. You visited a website. That website received traffic, attention, analytics, ad impressions, newsletter signups, brand recognition, or maybe just the satisfaction of being read by another human being. That model is weakening.

And here I am; no makeup on, my hair a mess, and my own SearXNG instance ticking away in the background. But I can’t deny that classic web search like that is weakening. You can pay for something like Kagi and disable AI overviews, or you can go into DuckDuckGo’s settings and shut it off. But the overviews are infuriatingly convenient, and even I’ll admit I actually considered duct taping on a third-party AI overview mod to SearXNG. I decided against it because I already use ChatGPT to handle more in-depth searches. And I like how peaceful and simple it is without all that.

Switching to SearXNG helped me to remember the good old days of Google. Especially with a few good APIs — Marginalia, Wiby, Kagi, to name a few. I’m surfacing a lot more personal/indie sites than I ever did on Google or DuckDuckGo. It’s really nice.

People will not say, “Today I reject the open Web.” They will simply ask the assistant because it is faster. Convenience wins. Convenience replaces nostalgy, all the time. It almost always wins. The Web’s biggest enemy is not ideology. It is not regulation (well, a bit yes). It is not even AI itself. It is convenience.

For your average individual scrolling TikTok and chatting with their phone’s built-in assistant, yeah. Half the people I know rarely look outside of Facebook and a few other apps on their phone. My girlfriend uses Chrome on her iPhone for fuck’s sake. You can’t even use a proper ad blocker. She’s just raw dogging the internet. But I guess that’s not too crazy if the only time you go to an old-fashioned web page is to check your pay stubs, or buy tickets for a concert every once in a while.

After pondering on it for a bit, I honestly think we’re further along than I realized before reading this post. Personally, the web browser is my favorite app. It’s this little rectangle of infinite possibility; of infinite exploration. They fit a lot of crazy stuff into that little rectangle.

But for most people? It doesn’t even have a pulse anymore.