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mft_today at 10:59 AM0 repliesview on HN

This is kinda why the (fucking) platforms that you hate exist.

Small business wants a presence on the internet for reasons.

Originally, small business would have to pay $$$ to engage an expert, who will assist them in creating a website, hosting it, keeping it secure, keeping it up to date, figuring out the SEO to make it findable, etc.

It's obvious given 3s of thought that this sucks for a non-technical small business owner and can be optimised, so someone creates a platform to enable non-technical small business owners to do most of this without the cost/hassle of dealing with experts and owning the website themselves. This gets you to somewhere like MySpace, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, even Blogger, etc. But of course, such offerings aren't stable - they change, fail, or enshittify over time.

Facebook also sees an opportunity, and businesses start creating their own Facebook pages. Easy, and maybe even great for a while; except you're even more locked into the platform, only people who use Facebook can engage with you, and then trends move on and Facebook is less popular with your customer base than it once was.

You also want more of a visual presence to show off your cupcakes, or whatever. So an Instagram page.

TL;DR: there's no perfect solution for non-techies with a business. You either have a fucking website with all of the cost, hassle, and friction that comes with that, or you choose one of platforms that simplifies this but comes with unpredictable downsides over time.