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.
I understand that you may not want to moderate abuse. But that's just absolving yourself of responsibility.
If you're going to let your instance be open for all registrations, then that means moderating for everyone who joins—especially for people targeted for abuse.
Don't want to moderate? Then close registrations to your instance.