New intro text for new website / meandering thoughts

I'm trying to engage the jump-start cables to get the project back to where it should be, after having to leave the project for half a year after what already was a very protracted v11 development.

I've written probably too much about my personal struggles now that my life has completely changed.

What I have not written so much about, and I strongly believe others have not written enough about (instead placating themselves to it) - is how much the tech industry and the web as a whole has changed. The ground has been shifting for a long time from a freedom-orientated web where small creators could do what they want fairly easily with some basic tech skills, to a corporate/VC/silicon-valley dominated web where things are very controlled, owned, policed, etc - and most critically, expensive. Even most YouTube channels are expensive to run if you want success. Society as a whole has been getting heavily fractured across politics, class, income, geography. Social media has been very damaging to us in many ways. It's a very different world from where Composr (ocPortal) started in 2004.

If I was planning a website for some reasonably-sized company, I would need a whole team of experts to even build something basic, and it would very easily run into 6-figures. That's what you'd get from any serious agency.
It's an exclusive process, with emphasis on the exclude. It is a dance between particular people done in the service of a very polished consumer culture that nominally benefits a lot of people but at the same time is distant from nearly all of them.

It's certainly not why I am here and it's ultimately why I did not take the Composr project in a particular direction. Composr here is first and foremost here to help regular people do fun/useful/practical things.

Given how much has changed I don't think it's necessarily good to try and differentiate Composr based on features anymore. Any feature Composr has can be achieved in Drupal, Wordpress, etc, with enough effort and/or plugins - which people are achieving every day. The difference is who we are catering for and what web we believe in.

To that end, this is what I came up this afternoon as draft copy for the intro to our own new site, for when we relaunch it…

Composr CMS:

• The most powerful Open Source CMS out-of-the-box
• A community-run project, with control based solely on level of contribution (think DAO *)
• Zero control or capture by outside investors, banks, or big tech giants
• Standing up for the original ideals of the web and the freedom of individual creators
• Maintain full self-custody of your website, run the code you want, how you want, to do what you want

* Control is based on points, which are awarded in various ways to those making various kinds of contributions. Composr (formerly ocPortal) was originally developed for 18 years by a small bootstrapped business run by the original developer, working with small clients. This kept the quality high and the product free, but the world moved on and so did Composr.

It's not slick. It's not polished. We don't have the resources to be even if we want to be given some of the choices I/we've made TBH. IMO: It is good marketing because it speaks to what we need to be speaking to now. It's a bit of a bleep-you to the industry as a whole, which is going in a bad direction. It puts us where we should be.

What do people think?