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I see all of your points about ‘success’ and ‘inferiority’ if I look at this from the perspective of Facebook being an ‘upgrade’ to the Web - ease of use, friends at your fingertips, a landslide of short simple updates.

However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday.

I don’t even care about decentralization or P2P - I actually don’t see that as a central part of the Indieweb. The above is what is important to me. And the Indieweb has been surprisingly satisfying in this way. And it’s actually growing. Not much, but I’m happy with the friends I’ve made. I’m happy with HN as well, for learning things and staying out of my face - but it gets to feel a bit faceless at times because it’s just a bunch of gray comments with often very little to distinguish the people here.

> However, I don’t actually see it that way. I would have preferred to fork the Web back in 2007 or so. This is going to sound out of touch, perhaps, but the future of the Web for me, personally, consists of entirely different things. Something like: a place to store my writings/conversations that’s mine and can be organized and designed like I prefer, a good way of finding new people (random little out-of-the-way folks of any stripe), and I don’t want a big feed of random garbage - I want to visit other sites now and then, like I would visit friends IRL - I don’t need everyone in my life everyday.

that's nice but it's not what prints money

> that's nice but it's not what prints money

Then it's a self-authenticating firewall / Grail quest.

Search engines found a way to scale and profit from the long tail.

The web should be a library, a collective knowledge. F money. We're in the friggin 21st century it should be time to look beyond.

> The web should be a library, a collective knowledge.

Sounds like an ad for Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. :-)

The web already is the biggest, most comprehensive library and store of collective knowledge in human history.

But it shouldn't just be that.

> But it shouldn't just be that.

No, it shouldn't, true, it's also a media and a connectivity platform.

However, in my opinion, the web always should have been strictly non-profit. (Note: non profit means employees are paid properly but the "profit" goes back straight into development, infrastructure, and future proofing). Money involved is only destroying and splitting it.

The thing is, you still can have both on the modern web. The web isn't all FAANG, and there's nothing stopping anyone from changing their browsing habits or not participating in social media if they want, or building sites the way they were built in the 90s.

Oh I absolutely agree. If I think of those large sites as a kind of flypaper, it’s a bit helpful. On the other hand, I don’t think people should be thought of as flies - and I also still kind of believe that Internet can do better.

As someone who was an early social media insider (FB, Bebo) — I completely agree. I can't speak for the larger indie web space, but within the social media niche, the concept of friend portability would go a long way towards making indie platforms viable again. See https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/friends-wherever/

> It requires you to learn concepts [..] that does not benefit you in any real way in your day-to-day use, adds additional complexity, and makes things less practical on the user end in the real world, even if in abstract it does improve the ideas underlying.

No offense, but this is a good summary of what people were saying about the www in the 90s.

And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy.

Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with.

The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around.

The web of the early 90s had little resemblance to the web of the late 90s, for that matter.

Aether looks cool (I want to dig in deeper); the continual revivals and evolution of the Usenet-like ideas keep me hoping that something like it will catch and get big again.

The latest wave of the eternal September is using terminals that make it damn hard to enter text, and I wonder if that is a killer stumbling block, or a critical and necessary filter.

> And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists, and on the other end by adding actual real world uses like making shopping easy.

All of this can happen with "Indie" Social Media too.

> Most importantly, it did not have a full blown competitor that everyone was already using that it had to contend with.

We had telephones and fax machines, which many people were happy with. Just as an example: Things like Internet Chat were seen as toys by the grown-ups and few people had the foresight that 25 years later people will spend more time sending messages than they spend on the phone.

The so called "Indie" Social Media could have benefits that will kill traditional Social Media one day - or maybe there are good reasons this will never happen. Not practical, hard to use and not having a real use case are no good reasons. They just apply to any new technology in the early stages.

> The past is a foreign country. Web of the ‘90s has almost no likeness to the web we have today. Had it stayed like that, we’d still be faxing things around.

Agreed. Same applies for "Indie" Social Media.

> And the web fixed these issues, one by one, on one end by being simplified by generations and generations of technologists

Creating a website today is much more complicated than it was in the 90s, where the web standards (e.g. HTML) were comparatively simple.

No, it isn't. You can literally create a website exactly the same way and it will work, excepting maybe some deprecated tags like <marquee> and <blink>.

The only thing that's become more complicated is enterprise web design, for professional sites.

>No offense, but this is a good summary of what people were saying about the www in the 90s.

And the web solved a huge swath of those problems with centralization.

Centralization helped to mitigate some of the problems and there is no reason to think that these couldn't have been solved in a decentralized manner as well. Moreover centralization introduced a swath of new problems.

I think the reason centralization has won is because it is the way of least resistance in our current environment.

You don't need to understand federation to use Mastodon.

If you want to comment on a post on a different instance, you need to know what is going on at some trivial level to get the addressing/login right. It's not obvious, and some instances have surprising restrictions that make life more complicated. That's probably what is meant here by "understanding federation". The zero institution of federation is... The thing is broken up into multiple parts.

Most of the time you'd come across a post on a different instance in your home feed which just takes a click to reply to, the same as any other post.

To get to the point of having a "home feed" you have to choose an instance. It's not like Usenet where there was a default local NNRP server, no decision to be made

Having a basic grasp of what federation means is about as important in Mastodon as knowing what a "group" was on Usenet: it's the first concept one needs to learn.

I wonder why the fediverse decided to deviate from the email syntax.

It's anecdotal, but when I tried to push for ActivityPub the major source of confusion was the prepending @: once I started aliasing <account>@<instance> to @<account>@<instance> everybody stopped asking.

> In reality, it doesn’t even come to that. The indie web is, as of now, inferior to the point that no honest product comparison could make it seem an alternative.

Here's one user that prefers the distributed alternatives. Yes, they are less polished but waaay more exiting and usable.

and Mastodon is pretty polished actually