With each passing year, I saw the gradual erosion of many aspects of web publishing that were prevalent on the Web 2.0 platform.

I have been writing online about rock music since 1999. However, I have been involved with music publication since 1983, back in the days of the electronic typewriter.

I’ve seen it all over a period of four decades. The early years of the internet, during the late 90’s, where we saw hand-coded static websites being built everywhere, the early 2000s, we saw the arrival of the first search engines, like Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves. It also saw the arrival of the first CMS systems (content management system) such as Drupal snd Joomla, before an entire cascade of new CMS products came on to the market soon after.

The 2010s saw the arrival of the social media platforms. Initially we saw MySpace from the mid 2000’s, which was then superseded by Facebook, followed by Twitter. While all this was going on, Google was supplementing the market with free products, which became a surreptitious exercise in data harvesting without the public really catching on until quite some time later. Google’s main move was to capture the Search Engine market, primarily used to sell ads, but also to provide tools to allow websites and domains to optimize their SEO strategy.

Web publishing as an industry moved on from CMS platforms to larger and more widely used platforms such as WordPress. I did use WordPress for a number of years, but I felt the whole platform was designed to continuously leach money from you, due to its add-on structure for apps and third-party developers who were creating tools for it. I eventually gave up on that platform because not only were there continuous efforts to leech me of money, but the platform became unwieldy in terms of dealing with it from an admin perspective, and managing the data.

I looked at the Wiki side of things (both DokuWiki and MediaWiki), and though structurally I quite liked its overall approach (particularly about keeping all your files locally stored and upload to the webserver via FTP), I found however, that the expansion of flatfiles as you added them to your system, did not adjust that well to increasing scale. The more files you had, the worse the system performance. The other problem with Wikis is that a lot of the plugins that were created for it became unuseable as developers dropped off the map and the plugins were no longer maintained, meaning they never worked, or broke as newer core files upgraded the system, leaving unmaintained plugins in limbo. I soon left that platform too.

But my frustration with Web 2.0 really boiled over in late 2025 and early 2026 thanks to Google, due to their poor control of the Analytics and SEO stack, plus the Nazi like environment of the subsidiary YouTube which has just ended up being a censorship s**tshow nightmare now.

Plus there is the advent of AI, the latter in terms of music production and the synthetic illusion that mass produced AI music can somehow replace the organic creativity of the human mind and soul.

I have already written many articles on the whole Google-YouTube-AI debacle on my core website: https://glorydazeaor.com blog.

So this all leads me to Nostr. Not so much about web publishing or anything specifically to do with music, which is my background. More about the groundswell of effort by the powers that be to surveil and censor everyone like a true nanny state. This is particularly so in the Western world countries like Ireland, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where I’m from. The USA still has the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments, but their country is so corrupt that a lot of the framework of the Constitution has been eroded by an egrereous legal structure determined to crush Americans in every form possible. Particularly through endless taxes.

Moving away from centralized platforms like Google, Facebook/Instagram, X/Twitter to decentralized ones like Nostr, IPFS etc will go some way toward mitigating that threat.

I am pleased to be here on Nostr, and I’m gradually finding my feet through the various apps, relays and gateways that I need to get familiar with to flesh out my presence here.

Hopefully I can drag a few diehard Web 2.0 users here in the near future.

Cheers

George Thatcher

Editor, GlorydazeAOR.com