The creator economy trap: why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end — Joan Westenberg
Craig and Jason are walking the walk here:
- Build your own damn platform.
- Treat social media like the tool it is.
- Build your technical skills.
Link tags: platforms
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“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement - Anil Dash
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.
Deplatforming Myself: A Tech Manifesto – Haste Makes Waste
The modern web is constantly, endlessly hoovering up massive amounts of data about you, only some of which is correct, and then feeding you its best guess of what will glue your eyeballs to the screen just a little bit longer, no matter what that is, whether it’s actually good for you or not.
Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.
Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.
A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.
[this is aaronland] generative adversarial therapy sessions
Mobile phones and the “app economy”, an environment controlled by exactly two companies and designed to extract a commission from almost every interaction and to promote native and not-portable applications over web applications. But we also see the same behaviour from so-called “native to the web” companies like Facebook who have explicitly monetized reach, access and discovery. Facebook is also the company that gave the world React which is difficult not to understand as deliberate attempt to embrace and extend, to redefine, HTML itself.
Perversely, nearly everything about the mobile/app economy is built on, and designed to use, HTTP precisely because it’s a common and easy to implement standard free and unencumbered by licensing.
How to fix the internet | MIT Technology Review
We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow - YouTube
A great rousing—practical—speech from Cory.
🧞♀️✨ The Real Godwin’s Law
Once a privately owned, centralized platform closes its public APIs, the platform will invariably lose any usablity except for people who publicly or privately admire Hitler.
Network effect
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.
How to Weave the Artisan Web | Whatever
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?
Wouldn’t that be great?
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I Replaced My Native iOS App with a Cross-Platform Web App and No One Noticed
It turns out that in 2022, for a lot of apps, the dream of write once run anywhere has finally arrived.
Every year browsers and web technologies become more capable and more powerful. Every year there are more kinds of app that you can make cross platform.
So before you start your next project, why don’t you take a look at cross platform web apps. Maybe they aren’t right for your project, but maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you can code once and run everywhere. And I think that’s amazing.
Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com
The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern:
selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.
The lost thread
Twitter’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification. I am totally confident about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified.
What Robin said.
A Web Renaissance
Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.
Smart analysis from Anil, though I’m not sure I’d agree with his emphasis on tools and frameworks—it’s the technology built into browsers that has really come along in leaps and bounds, allowing people to do more with less code.
But then there’s this:
So if we have the tech, then why hasn’t it happened already? The biggest thing that may be missing is just awareness of the modern web’s potential. Unlike the Facebooks and Googles of the world, the open, creative web doesn’t have a billion-dollar budget for promoting itself. Years of control from the tech titans has resulted in the conventional wisdom that somehow the web isn’t “enough”, that you have to tie yourself to proprietary platforms if you want to build a big brand or a big business.
True! Anil also points to an act of rebellion and resistance:
Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.
🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online
Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
“The internet wasn’t designed to breach national boundaries” - Rest of World
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.
Idle Sunday thoughts about web trends | Studio Tendra
Six years old. Still very astute. Still very true.
Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive
Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.
Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas – The Hulry
Some good blogging advice.
Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.