 There was once a dream of a decentralised web. As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate. Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens. Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here. 146 comments
@cammac I was going to mention IRC in this but it feels like it belongs earlier! I did still use it in that time period (a decade ago) but very rarely. I learned whole chunks of the protocol in the early 2000s because Napster was basically a hacked up IRC client @tomw @cammac as an aside, Twitch chat is IRC, you can use an IRC client to connect to it, and some of the people I know from back in the day do. I use an app called Chatterino that is a multichannel chat client that makes use of that fact, so when I'm on a channel that is co-streaming with others I can see/interact-with the chat from them all while just watching one video feed. @PeaEyeEnnKay @cammac That's neat – I've never really used Twitch for anything yet but this may come in handy to know someday!  «Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future»… but he told that in 2010. https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/20/berners_lee_says_facebook_a_thret_to_web/ @GustavinoBevilacqua Yes he could see the threat to web interoperability from the beginnings of social media. It has taken this long to get to a point where enough people have experienced for themselves the negatives of being locked in to a social platform. @tomw I measure my 'eras' of the Web based on if I still use bookmarks or not. Before, I'd go out and find stuff, and bookmark it to check back. Friends would recommend funny pages. You'd whisper about rumors of buying drugs online through the mail. Forums would welcome newcomers by telling them to read the sticky. Now, I go on Reddit and just click the links it brings me to and that's it. 😔 @msprout Yes it's pretty rare to go and check a site directly. As a web developer I always notice that people obsess over their site's front page layout but no one is looking at it: the traffic is all direct to the articles/pages and it's from social media (or occasionally email, WhatsApp etc). @tomw I think unfortunately that is one of the elements driving the phenomena of weaponized fake news. People are so used to coming into a news article via a link or a feed, that as long as the page passes the smell test on a single page, it's good enough. Like I have been routinely shocked at how many major fake news articles going viral just straight up have lorem Ipsum on the about page, or use another paper's legal statements, complete with the name. @msprout Yes for sure - there's no need to even have a track record of other articles, the vast majority won't check. (I mean, a lot of people share without even clicking the link, if it appears to confirm something they want to believe.) @tomw I am a former journalist and man, I am so pissed that I was required to call people and confirm facts and shit. I could have been making stuff up the whole time 😂 @tomw @msprout FWIW, I've been running a mobile tech news blog since 2008, and while traffic patterns have changed a lot over the years, the homepage is still one of my most viewed pages. But it's true that only a small portion of visitors come to the site directly. The vast majority of our traffic comes from search engines. Some people search for the name of the site. Others probably read an article then click the homepage. Most probably read an article then leave. @bradlinder @msprout Yeah, home and about pages are still high in views (so "no one is looking at it" was an exaggeration on my part), but they're rarely the entry point, they're where a minority of people go to find out more about this site they have landed on @tomw @msprout Fair. I would say that it's not necessarily the place where you'll make a first impression, but for folks that are looking to stock around, you want them to be nice and informative. I've found that since the shift to mobile, what's next to useless is the sidebar. Place as much info as you want about the site I'm the sidebar, and maybe some desktop users will notice, but good luck getting mobile visitors to scroll down and find it!  @tomw I reminisce on those days, and the more decentralized web back then I hardly participated in, but it was hecka interesting. Things definitely became more stale as they got more centralized. Instead of using a variety of different websites we slowly became addicted to single native versions of social media platforms on our phones and engaged constantly in what would become known as "doomscrolling." @Zolytech It was quite a slow transition – for example I think it's only in the last few years that a surprising number of people abandoned actual *writing* in favour of overly long Twitter threads. The instant engagement is just too tempting. But it was all built on someone else's private island. @tomw @Zolytech Unfortunately, I still think the "actual writing" via blogs is still not in style. I keep a comment section going on my blog in hopes that some day...people will want to have a conversation there instead of via social media. At least decentralized social media is a push in the right direction. @bryanruby @Zolytech Yeah, blog comments mostly died off somewhere mid-decade in favour of sharing the link with your comment :( With respect to blogs, social media and comments, I discovered something cool the other day: With the ActivityPub plugin, Wordpress blogs and Mastodon get intertwined - the blog behaves like a mastodon user that can be followed, and comments on the blog's postings in Mastodon get mirrored back to the blog. @HansZauner @bryanruby @Zolytech This does sound neat, but I wonder what it looks like in use – wouldn't want to add lots of auto posted noise to the network @tomw sometimes i have to remind myself how lucky we are that the systems and tooling that make up the internet were built in a decentralised manner to begin with. @henry I agree, though it is also I imagine that centralised models wouldn't have taken off in the same way in the first place - they couldn't have grown so globally and rapidly if some central resources and permission were needed. You see this again and again in computing history - PC clones, the web, Linux... @tomw Thinking about messenger apps of the past & using Trillian to reach friends on all of them. #nostalgia. @allenstenhaus Yeah, I had Trillian and a list split across MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo at least. Though I suppose that was only ever loosely bolted-on 'decentralisation', it was at least possible @tomw I’ve found the growth of centralized social media to be a demoralizing thing. I wonder about the “positives” that you posit for centralized social media - ease of discovery is the only one that comes to mind… and even there, it brings other downsides: you now need to have “verification” to know if the person you found is the person that you actually wanted. All I know is that the just the idea of decentralized social media makes me happier than I was. @uhl_me I think it is generally far easier for most people to post a quick update about what they're doing than to go and eg. update their website. Especially for small local things, they feel able to post a lot more info up on social media and have it seen vs struggling to update a website that mostly isn't looked at. And the info doesn't just sit there, it is pushed out to their followers, at least in theory. @uhl_me I wrote it that way because I think it's clear that most people experienced it as a significant upgrade in ease of use compared to the setup and maintenance of a website. Unfortunately. @tomw I do understand, and sympathize with, that point of view. It’s more than a little frustrating, however, that despite the fact that applications built on open protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP) fueled the growth of the early public Internet, the builders of “Web 2.0” chose a closed path. Nothing against a profit motive, but I’d prefer that you seek that profit by being the best at doing something - not by being the only choice. @uhl_me Worse, they made a big song and dance at first about being "open" at least in terms of APIs, then cut all of that off after they had built a user base! @uhl_me While I support your point that you seek being best at doing something, it also can be seen that users or customers sometimes do not seek 'the' best solution - but rather the most convenient one... @Linkmeister Yes, lots! But there's less of a "blogosphere" scene around it than there was. A lot of people have moved to writing on centralised platforms, first Medium and then most recently Substack @tomw Yeah, my blogroll is probably half dead links (some literally; this summer I deleted three blogs of people who've died in the last few years). @Linkmeister I ran a UK political left blogroll thing for years, but yeah link rot set in badly until it wasn't really worth it any more, there were only a few blogs on it that were still active. (It had auto post to birdsite too but they banned it a few years ago) @tomw Maybe there'll be a resurgence. I used to be an everyday blogger but over the past four years it's been more like once every six months as FB ate up blogs. @tomw the decentralized internet never went away. it lost to the voluntary convenience offered by centralizing advertisers who continue to leverage hidden externalities of data extraction and collection to explicit cost of development and infrastructure. there were no viable options to google reader when it shut down. why? @crt0_S Yeah, also the network effect of having everyone on one platform. Similarly there are hundreds of RSS readers, just none of them was able to get a critical mass again. I think that's really down to the decline of blogs though, not a lack of will  @tomw I read this and weep a bit at how some of the bigger writers have gone to #substack. The lack of support for #rss within paid #substack blogs is shifty at best. If you’re going to charge money for writing on your platform, creating an authenticated feed with full content should be table stakes. @raineer Yeah Substack is annoying. I can see why writers go for it (easier to get paid than eg a Patreon) but it's effectively an extension of newspaper-style paywalls to even smaller/'indie' writers @tomw Matrix is part of that dream. I've have often said something about how podcasting is no longer what it used to be because it is closed off now. @kf4yfa I haven't really tried Matrix yet – I've recently used Discord, which kinda worked, and Slack, which really didn't. I think the issue is that it's whoever sets up the group (not me in those cases!) that ends up deciding it  @tomw Back in the day, we owned our own data and maintained it on our own servers. Now, that data is hosted on a Mastodon instance. We can export our own data to preserve it. But does this preserve the conversations? If we want to braise the sea level, and get the mainstream decentralized, how do we make this easy enough for general adoption while remaining sustainable and decentralized? Seems we need to make the mental overhead required to own and operate trivial. @tomw And we net-oldbies will be here to guide the young ones back to the Promised Land. 😎 @tomw Also weird how Zuck's metaverse consciously harkens back to that early walled garden Information Superhighway vision as Neal Stephenson portrayed it. @tomw I remember reading "Snow Crash," and Piercy's "He, She and It," and thinking "Thank God we didn't actually wind up with that kind of shitty Internet." @tomw Messenger apps rarely interoperated. (Yahoo and MSN did for a bit, I think?) But we did have cool apps like Trillian and Pidgin that reimplemented proprietary messenger apps' protocols. @arktronic I really miss using Adium (Mac client using the libpurple library from Pidgin). I recall adding Facebook Messenger for a bit when it supported XMPP. @TheCurbau Yeah, the huge scale of #wordpress use is the main thing keeping RSS (just about) going - a lot of sites that don't mention support anywhere do still support it, probably without knowing in a lot of cases @rj In a certain way... especially if you use wordpress.com, Blogger etc. But if you download the software and put it on a web server yourself then it is arguably more decentralised than this system of multi-user instances @schuga Yeah - there are some other corners but not much. Even Wikipedia is centralised of course, it has just managed to continue as a non-profit, but a bad leadership could change that at some future point (which would presumably lead to attempted forks) @tomw I agree. It's time to dust off RSS readers too. I remember when everyone used to collect their favourite RSS feeds and share OPML. Those were the days! 🧓 @tomw I dream of it. I want it back badly. I hope we can figure out how to make mastodon run a little leaner though because self hosting this is way more complicated and resource intensive than an RSS feed. Fingers crossed for some Rust based fork lol @techsquidtv It is all open protocols underneath so lighter weight servers will likely appear – I'm guessing a few exist already but haven't heard yet of one that emphasises ease of setup @tomw exactly. I have just learned of Pleroma which appears to be a viable replacement but the process of migrating isnt the cleanest it seems. But from what I understand, Pleroma is able to run on a Raspberry pi with under 2Gb of ram usage. Vs Mastodon which needs 4 and costs roughly $25/m for a small instance because of it  Oh, yea we fell into the trap set for us. I worked with Microformats, OpenID, FOAF - then it just all disappeared - we got lazy. @tanepiper @ohmrun Hmm, I think it's also that – while I'm aware of those things' existence – I never saw them used to solve a real problem. FOAF for example is both overengineered and more limiting than even Facebook's ideas of personal relationships (which are very limiting) @tomw @ohmrun oh yes only now am I seeing the tech and the use cases come to fruition. The only people could effectively run a graph until a few years ago were the big companies. Now it's easier to run and work on these problems. I see lots of people including is going back to server side, stopping SPA development (which is another thing that killed the web) @tomw Time and again, crisis after crisis, we have seen and lived through the perils of centralisation. Whether is the centralisation and control of the internet, our food systems, our energy systems etc etc. And in all those moments of crises, it was the local decentralised solutions that stepped in to help us through. Yet, everytime we surpass a crisis, the powers that be push for more control and centralisation! @raaphorst I'm sure there are more since there are lots of old ones still up that haven't been posted on for a long time, but I really doubt there are more *active* blogs. Though it would be hard to count since eg Wordpress is used for many things now that are really just websites, not recognisable as blogs @tomw I googled it a bit a while ago, seems that people read more blogs nowadays also. In the past it was only us, but later on the mainstream joined.  I actually reinstalled an RSS feed reader onto my ipad shortly before leaving Twitter for Mastodon. Works for web dev content I'm professionally interested in. But I'm happy Mastodon is experiencing such an influx of all kinds of content creators and people by now. Internet by the people for the people — really hope this feeling will last. @tomw I can't help but think the #Fediverse may be a return to the "old web" @tomw @marchog Yeah! Still around for some topics but slowly dying out even now. I have been in Facebook groups a couple of times over the years but ugh  @tomw And still using an RSS reader! 😆 It's useful! I'm not going to go check like ten individual websites every day.  @tomw I wish more people used RSS. It’s bloody great. I bang on about it as much as editors allow, but it feels like shouting into the void. @tomw I'm still irked that Firefox used to have a robust "live bookmarks" feature and would prominently tell you if a site advertised an RSS feed and they just let that feature wither and die. If they had half a brain they would bring RSS back and add Fediverse support and god forbid an email client and make Firefox a hub for all your notifications across the web instead of things we didn't ask for like "Firefox view" @tomw Chris Anderson predicted the demise of the Web in 2010. Back then, I thought it was a big call but it was ultimately proven true https://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff-webrip/ @tomw I have read more blog posts (signposted from Mastodon) in a week that I read in six months from the Other Place. This is a *Good Thing* ™ The web is 100% decentralized by design. The fact that 99% of users may only visit 5 "sites" is a social occurrence not a technical one. In fact with things like CDN they are visiting hundreds of sites to fetch content..they just don't know it  @tomw the biggest thing that killed off the blogosphere (most of which was on Google-owned Blogspot) was Google shutting down Reader, in yet another incredibly terrible decision @tomw I love the image/idea of "corporate walled gardens", it also helps me think about the web and this new... ?platform?, and how I'd like to use it. @tomw You might enjoy my 5-year old write-up on what caused centralization https://medium.com/newco/what-has-internet-done-to-media-becbb610006b -- it's a cautionary tale for Mastodon as well. @tomw I see what you're saying, but it's equally true that the opposite may be the case. Even though they don't intend to, lots of new users may have the effect of centralising Mastodon. Yes, yes. I know about the decentralised architecture, open source, blah, blah. But a huge number of users constitute a huge market, and that'll attract someone, somewhere to create a value-added layer to Mastodon that'll have the EFFECT of centralising it. I reckon data-mining may be the mechanism.   Fun fact, this is all RSS still. As an example, you can see all of my posts here: https://ioc.exchange/users/MikeMathia.rss Replace that with your username/instance and works for you, or anyone, as well. @tomw How I loved being a part of the blogosphere. I actually have kept both my blogs active, but I miss the camaraderie! |
Gregory's Server
@tomw am I old for remembering MiRC?