The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow. Even the biggest companies in the world can’t displace these kinds of systems once they find their audiences.
Anil says the glass is half full:
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
The bedrock of the World Wide Web is solid. Built atop the protocols of the internet (TCP/IP), its fundamental building blocks remain: URLs of HTML files transmitted over HTTP. Baldur Bjarnason writes:
Even today, the web is like living fossil, a preserved relic from a different era. Anybody can put up a website. Anybody can run a business over it. I can build an app or service, send the URL to anybody I like, and most people in the world will be able to run it without asking anybody’s permission.
Still, the web has evolved. In fact, that evolution is something that’s also built into its fundamental design. Rather than try to optimise the World Wide Web for one particular use-case, Tim Berners-Lee realised the power of being flexible. Like the internet, the World Wide Web is deliberately dumb.
(I get very annoyed when people talk about the web as being designed for scientific work at CERN. That was merely the first use-case. The web was designed for everything …and nothing in particular.)
Robin Berjon compares the web’s evolution to the ship of Theseus:
That’s why it’s been so hard to agree about what the Web is: the Web is architected for resilience which means that it adapts and transforms. That flexibility is the reason why I’m talking about some mythological dude’s boat. Altogether too often, we consider some aspects of the Web as being invariants when they’re potentially just as replaceable as any other part. This isn’t to say that there are no invariants on the Web.
The web can be changed. That’s both a comfort and a warning. There’s plenty that we should change about today’s web. But there’s also plenty—at the root level—that we should fight to preserve.
And if you want change, the worst way to go about it is to promulgate the notion of burning everything down and starting from scratch. As Erin says in the fourth and final part of her devastating series on Meta in Myanmar:
We don’t get a do-over planet. We won’t get a do-over network.
Instead, we have to work with the internet we made and find a way to rebuild and fortify it to support the much larger projects of repair—political, cultural, environmental—that are required for our survival.
Though, as Robin points out, that doesn’t preclude us from sharing a vision:
Proceeding via small, incremental changes can be a laudable approach, but even then it helps to have a sense for what it is that those small steps are supposed to be incrementing towards.
I’m looking forward to reading what Robin puts forward, particularly because he says “I’m no technosolutionist.”
From a technical perspective, the web has never been better. We have incredible features in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all standardised and with amazing interoperability between browsers. The challenges that face the web today are not technical.
That’s one of the reasons why I have no patience for the web3 crowd. Apart from the ridiculous name, they’re focusing on exactly the wrong part of the stack.
Listening to their pitch, they’ll point out that while yes, the fundamental bedrock of the web is indeed decentralised—TCP/IP, HTTP(S)—what’s been constructed on that foundation is increasingly centralised; the power brokers of Google, Meta, Amazon.
And what’s the solution they propose? Replace the underlying infrastructure with something-something-blockchain.
Would that it were so simple.
The problems of today’s web are not technical in nature. The problems of today’s web won’t be solved by technology. If we’re going to solve the problems of today’s web, we’ll need to do it through law, culture, societal norms, and co-operation.
(Feel free to substitute “today’s web” with “tomorrow’s climate”.)
The more I look at this “issue” the more I’m convinced the solution is already right there and it’s called the web. Want to have an unblockable, unbannable user profile? Buy yourself a domain and get a personal website. Want to have a space where you can say and do whatever the fuck you want? Get a webspace and put up a blog.
Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.
I’ve been a part of this for many years until I gave up hope. How would you compete against the VC money, the technical and economical benefits of centralised platforms? It was a fight between David and Gloiath. But now Mastodon could be the stone.
I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll.
Same.
I can see no good arguments for redirecting my voice into anyone else’s for-profit venture-funded algorithm-driven engagement-maximizing wet dream.
Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!
A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.
I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:
A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.
Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.
This is spot-on:
Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.
The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
I share Brent’s optimism:
The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.
Despite growing pains and potential problems, I think this could be one of the most interesting movements on the web in recent years. Let’s see where it goes.
I’m getting the same vibe as Bastian about Mastodon:
Suddenly there was this old Twitter vibe. Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.
This could really work!
Speaking of hosting your own reading list, Maggie recently attended an indie web pop-up on personal libraries, which prompted these interesting thoughts on decentralised book clubs—ad hoc reading groups:
Taking a book-first, rather than a group-first approach would enable reading groups who don’t have to compromise on their book choices. They could gather only once or twice to discuss the book, then go their seperate ways. No long-term committment to organising and maintaining a bookclub required.
This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).
Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.
A great analysis of the system of smoke and mirrors that constitutes so-called web3:
Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.
A balanced, even-handed look at actually using so-called web3 technology. It turns out that even if you leave the ethical and environmental concerns aside, the technological underpinning are, um, troublesome to say the least.
A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.
The term “web3” is a transparent attempt to associate technologies diametrically opposed to the web with its success; an effort to launder the reputation of systems that have most effectively served as vehicles for money laundering, fraud, and the acceleration of ransomware using the good name of a system that I help maintain.
Perhaps this play to appropriate the value of the web is what it smells like: a desperate move by bag-holders to lure in a new tranche of suckers, allowing them to clear speculative positions. Or perhaps it’s honest confusion. Technically speaking, whatever it is, it isn’t the web or any iteration of it.
Web3 is like a combination of pyramid schemes, scientology and Tamagotchi. There’s the fact that ultimately anything you do on blockchains costs you real money and that once you’ve paid that, you’re one of the people who need to get the next cohort of buyers onboard or lose your money. There’s believing that you’re joining a movement that’s in the know, with all kinds of interesting words and sci-fi stuff that normies just don’t understand. And there’s your portfolio, your pretty JPGs, wallets, apps and everything you spent so much time on understanding and maintaining. Good luck avoiding sunk cost fallacy there.
Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn’t matter — you’re free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system.
Say you’re into the indie web without saying you’re into the indie web…
The internet wasn’t really convenient in 1994 or 1995, but it was a very collaborative space.
There was a moment where we replaced this idea of the internet being a medium that we can all write to and participate in to one that is mediated. That happened at some point after social networks started to arrive and when the smartphone started to arrive. It’s a combination of the nature of those platforms and the prevalence of the technologies, which meant the economic rewards of getting this right rose significantly.
And so there’s a really distinctly different feel in the 2013, or 2014, internet to the one that you might have had in 1997, or 1998. It’s not just that it’s easier and I’m yearning for a world of cars with manual choke and manual transmission and crank-up starter handles, but it’s that the programmability of the internet and its endpoints has turned into something that is increasingly permissioned by major platforms.