What we really need today is NextCloud images that are so easy to set up that anyone can run one on their computer, phone, or a cloud hosting service with just a few clicks. And adding in federated services would be the next obvious step — first store all your own stuff where you can access it and share selected bits with others, and then have a small pool where you automatically see the stuff others in your groups have made public.
A problem I’m having these days is that a LOT of resources I used around the start of http never got indexed by Archive.org and are now offline. But people still have that stuff stored locally, and would likely be willing to share if they knew others were interested in it.
Kajo@beehaw.org 10 months ago
I think it’s a more global movement.
When I was recruited at my university in the early 2000s, every teacher had an ftp-accessible space with an http address like myuni.edu/~myname. The more techie ones did html, the fancier ones even added css. Muggles would export html from a Word document.
Then one day, the IT department decided to replace this with a “learning management system”. A wysiwyg platform with dozens of modules for videoconferencing courses, homework submission, online exams,
Except that the user (the teacher) no longer has control over his or her personal space.
tabris@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Having worked in a university web team back in the day, these user personnel spaces got dropped for various reasons. Teaching staff would push back on increasing password security, so accounts got hacked continuously. People would upload malicious applications through cgi-bins and the like. Maintenance costs skyrocketed. The cost of keeping these going because of these reasons were just not justifiable anymore, and it was much easier to provide them an account on a WYSIWYG system that could be secured, patched and maintained by an external company.
With the rise of online learning portals that included these features as standard, it became less justifiable. Why pay for two products, when one would do.