I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is

    - A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
    - I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
    ...
    [9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.

There's a whole meme subgenre dedicated to this type of argument. Search for "Yet you participate in society, curious!"

Yes, but that person owns their website, its content, and the address it lives at. They can publish anything they want, in any format they want.

Hosting on GitHub is merely a convenience; they can up and leave anytime.

But Github's publishing is at least _highly_ portable. You could move the same web site to a vanilla nginx setup on some random domain.

The nice part here is that you can update your site via git version control, and have easy rollback etc... assuming you can deal with git.

I don't think it's such a problem to have big corporations involved in your publishing efforts; the problem is when they lock users in with proprietary technology, and create barriers to entry like high costs and technical complexity.

I don't have a need to mix anticapitalist fervor with the desire for an easy way to make durable, portable web sites. The internet has always involved paying some kind of piper. Corporations are too big & monopolization is a problem, but one thing at a time...

For reals. I love the general premise behind the article, but to me how you publish it, and how others access it, is the sauce. Creating static sites is hardly the problem.