The internet used to feel like it belonged to people. You'd stumble across a stranger's homepage about their train collection,
or a forum where people just helped each other with things. It was weird and generous and human.
That feeling is mostly gone. The spaces we share now are owned by companies whose business model is to keep us engaged,
harvest what they learn about us, and sell it. Our conversations, our relationships, our taste in music, our arguments —
all of it is raw material for someone else's profit. The platforms don't mediate our lives because they care about us.
They mediate our lives because attention is the product.
We've handed over something important without quite noticing.
Imagine you upload your holiday pictures to Facebook so your friends can see them together.
What you've actually done is taken your pictures and put them in a giant warehouse inside a carnival —
a carnival full of algorithmically targeted attractions, engineered to distract and keep people inside
as long as possible. Your friends have to wade through a stream of personalised, emotionally calibrated content
just to get to your photos.
Your holiday pictures didn't belong in that warehouse. They're your pictures, and your friends
should see them in your house — metaphorically, and with Canopy, literally.
Your home already has a router, a hard drive, a screen. It already stores your photos, your films, your music.
What it's missing is software that makes those things properly yours — accessible from anywhere, shareable with
people you actually trust, not contingent on any platform's continued existence or goodwill.
But self-hosting as it exists today requires real knowledge, real time, and real tolerance for things breaking.
Digital sovereignty shouldn't be a privilege reserved for people who already know what a reverse proxy is.
A person who just wants to stream their own films and share a recipe with their mum shouldn't have to learn
Linux networking to do it.
And self-sufficiency alone misses something. The most natural thing in the world is to share — a music collection,
a film library, a household calendar with a relative on another node. None of that requires a platform.
It just requires the pipes to connect people directly, without a middleman taking a cut of their attention.
Solarpunk imagines futures where technology serves communities rather than extracting from them.
Canopy is a practical attempt at that, in a narrow domain. If it makes it easier for ordinary people
to own their media, communicate without being surveilled, and share with friends on their own terms —
that's worth doing.