When people say "the open web"...
... what does this mean to you, exactly?
I'd love a broad range of answers including "I have no idea" if that's what's true for you.
When people say "the open web"... ... what does this mean to you, exactly? I'd love a broad range of answers including "I have no idea" if that's what's true for you. 33 comments
@netopwibby @jalcine Interesting! Can I ask a follow-up: which "Open Web Standards" do you have in mind, which exclude what that would allow for better experiences? @j12t open web to me means available across all browsers and built with non-proprietary web standards @j12t Pages that can be read in a web browser without demanding login-wall, paywall etc or some proprietary plugin/extension/hardware key @j12t A decentralized town square where citizens own their content and can take it with them to other open web sites. @spinbackwards Can you give some examples for that decentralized town square and how they take content to some other sites? @j12t It means pre-web 2.0 when people were more likely to have their website and reference each other either in posts, web rings, etc and open formats like RSS to genuinely share information. Basically everything was a hustle for money while trying to control every aspect of a user's experience even if that means providing a worse experience to squeeze out a few more clicks. @fds So in your view, the "open web" is long dead and it's better that it is? "Worse experience" compared to what? (I don't understand the "hustle for money" part. In that era, how did anybody make money with their sites? Ads were very rare and paid subscriptions unheard of as I recall...) @j12t I would not say it's dead. It feels like it's going that way but it's not there yet. Examples of worse would be: Linkedin turning the network section into yet another area to promote things out of your network. Seeing your connections is now an extra click for not logic reason. News sites making reading nearly impossible with ads and videos and things popping into view. They can claim someone watch the video because it ran in someone's browser even if its impact was negative. @j12t @j12t stateless urls (fuck paywalls and content behind a subscription) with content accessible in the html without the need for a JavaScript engine. @j12t Something that is not a walled garden - I would expect to be able to see content without login or paywall, and maybe even some kind of interoperability @j12t It canāt be accurately described in few words, but at a summary level: The open web is a place where each site has a limited scope, does nothing in particular to prevent you from moving on to other sites, and nobody controls a significant share of the total traffic. @j12t Itās what the web looks like when a spider hasnāt caught any food yet. Itās closed when the spider wraps up the stuck bugs for dinner. @j12t a system of interconnected platforms designed to work together and share content as opposed to trying to lock it up for clicks/eyes @j12t the web as it could have been if profiteers hadnāt distorted its development. Everything interoperable, links that work (no need to invent the term ādeep linkā), browsers that donāt spy on you, sites made by people who care about their content (no SEO or LLM gibberish), and social platforms that enable communication rather than capturing ad views. (Maybe even portable identities, but that might be a stretch.) Basically, an internet made for enrichment rather than extraction @j12t my sense is sites put up for their own purposes, serving their users. So, not a Facebook-only marketplace page, or a search engine subsisting on selling user data to advertisers. Craigslist or Wikipedia come to mind. Also protocols over sites; email vs slack Un-minified source code, semantic HTML, accessible pages, lots of public APIs, web pages built with mostly open source packages and crediting them. No (fewer?) nations blocking sites. @j12t meaning you don't need an account and a docile browser to access the data contained therein. |
@j12t @jalcine It means using Open Web Standards to build subpar experiences that benefits technical folks only.
This isn't a knock against it, just my observation.