3/ Let's now consider what makes hyperlinking explicitly social.
Virtually every website has a hyperlink. Most of the time, these hyperlinks reference other pages on the site.
But they can do something else: reference pages on OTHER sites.
This is important because visitors to your website don't need to be siloed to your website. They can now become aware of a much wider world of creativity.
5/ If you want to know what this older version of the web looked like, and how it was explicitly social, I recommend browsing through Neocities.
Sites like these were why people literally just surfed the web as a hobby -- because there was so much social creativity going on that it could entertain you for days, weeks, months -- even years.
8/ Now I'm not the biggest booster of the web. In fact, I've long since said that the Internet needs to decentralize away from it.
Nevertheless, the web is a tool -- an important tool -- and we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that basic HTML (with hyperlinking) can do a whole lot of things that can address inequality on the Internet.
If you're an activist and you worry about censorship from Meta and Facebook, building your own website and self-hosting it is an incredible tool.
10/ That said, we should never look at the web as the only tool for re-building the public square.
The Internet is bigger than the web.
To work for a more equitable, fair Internet, we need to build for:
The Web
Email
Chat (IRC, XMPP, The Matrix, etc.)
Social Media
File sharing
We can't let our foot off the gas pedal because certain powers-that-be are trying to do their damnedest to make us forget that the Internet was designed to be decentralized.
BIG NEWS: Pawoo.net, the world's 2nd biggest Mastodon instance, has just been acquired.
The entity acquiring them is the Mask Group, a business that also runs mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud. They are also active in the so-called "Web 3.0" space.
If you haven't heard of pawoo.net, it's because many instances have de-federated from it.