It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile.
Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions
Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group
It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except tiktok) which is another interesting angle.
This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too. There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently.
I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online especially, and probably offline too.
This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these people just don't need their own website. They may come to regret that decision later, but it's their decision to make.
If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes, it's more work, but it was always more work to do it yourself, and always will be.
The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook groups that never get indexed.
Check out https://bibliogram.art
Plenty of rights would involve in it (copyright, privacy, and so on). Also, all kind of crimes are another issue. It is hard for people to keep monitoring if contents are safe or not.
I think we need a network version of the War of Independence.
It's obvious that things like Twitter and Instagram provide value to celebrities and people who follow them. It's just that there are some serious externalities not factored in.
Yes, please! More and faster.
Centralized services are easy to build, because they offer an obvious location to do some of the things that are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also, by the way, far easier to for small numbers of coordinating people to control, which makes them popular with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths.
Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But, unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace won't go away.
The reason central platforms win is because they have to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users. Decentralized platforms get their initial users because of how cool the technology is, but those people (people like me and you) aren’t UX experts and don’t prioritize UX.
It has to be easier than the central platform, and the central platform has the benefit of millions/billions of dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized platforms have to work even harder to overcome that. It’s not impossible, but it does require engineers to overcome their desire to build cool things and instead focusing on building a user experience that’s better than what Facebook/Twitter/etc can provide.
This isn't difficult, per se, but it's not as easy as signing up for Twitter for the simple dumb reason that you don't need to make that choice. And the concerns about "wrong choices" aren't entirely unfounded; the first Mastodon instance I signed up for was effectively abandoned by its sysadmin. The decentralization still makes it hard to search for new users to follow compared to Twitter (checking right this moment, when I click on someone I follow to see who they follow, it only shows me people they follow on the same instance); depending on the Mastodon client I'm using, it can actually be a little hard to follow someone even when I find them if they're not on the same instance I am. Again, technically none of this is super difficult, but for a user who isn't philosophically committed to the fediverse, tiny little frustrations start to add up quickly.
Most public mastodon instances usually have an about page that describes what their intended audience is. You can also look through the public timeline to see what users are saying first before signing up. If you aren't sure, pick a larger general instance.
Despite all that, in my opinion you'll probably get more mileage out of joining an instance run by someone you know and trust.
>What if I choose wrong? What if I need to move?
On newer versions of mastodon there is already a migration option to import/export your data between servers. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...
Regarding your second paragraph: If you'd like to fix bugs in your chosen mastodon client, I'm sure that would be welcomed.
What if you don't know or trust anyone that runs a Mastodon instance? And don't have the time/means/expertise/motivation to run one yourself?
People really, really want to argue that decentralization of social networks doesn't make things harder, but eventually the defense always shifts to "well, you have to be willing to jump through a few hoops if you believe in the advantages of a decentralized/indie internet, which you totally should," because the truth is that the decentralized way does make things harder. Personally, I do believe in the advantages of the IndieWeb, and I do think it's worth jumping through those hoops. I just think we need to acknowledge those hoops exist, and always be thinking about ways we can reduce the friction for people who say "I like all those ideas in theory, but in practice it's too frustrating."
It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and think “if it works for email it’ll work here” and don’t understand that people deal with email because they have to, not because they want to. I don’t want to have to change my email address when I switch providers and I don’t want to have to move all my stuff if my favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down.
That’s not a solution that’s just another problem. It’s bad user experience.
Not sure how that's worse than something like Facebook, where you literally don't get that option. If you want your asserted identity to be reasonably secure and easy to assess for other users, you have to find a trusted host or do your own hosting; that's no different from any other service.
Seriously this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is a textbook example of what I’m talking about.
No end user hosts their own email service.
I ran my own for a while using mail-in-a-box but ended up moving to fastmail because I didn't trust myself to maintain the setup. I need my email system to just work and that's likely the same for the majority of people.
(I validated that lack of trust in myself even with fastmail by not realizing for almost 3 days that I let my domain expire, thus causing emails to bounce with no way of me knowing that was happening)
Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one.
Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful.
Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
I like trains, and I started a website back in 2001 for people to share their photos. It was reasonably popular. One of my drivers was taxonomy and archiving of images for future enthusiasts.
Today, it's dead. People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure. The comments - from people who worked on the railways, knew people involved - useful to historians of the future, are fantastic. But if you can't find them, what point?
I get why Facebooks succeeded. For my site, I was a total geek: why would I dirty the site with anything social? Well, look who's laughing now.
Not even a week if you consider the target audience for what's posted as opposed to the poster. Algorithmic sorting and infinity scrolling have pretty much eliminated the ability to go back and look at something you saw a few days ago (unless the algorithm decides to boost it back into your feed).
By contrast, Facebook is at best like a magazine, at worst a radio phone-in about trains.
Reference works in the form of websites have amazing value in and of themselves. I don’t think they need to be measured by social eyeballs when they attain an outright high level of quality.
I happen to be particularly fond of a reference website that is a taxonomy and history of British traffic lights:
Newsfeed is RSS/Atom.
Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss.
The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like.
Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
ActivityPub solves most RSS limitations.
Because these compete with the interests of browser vendors, interests which finance a degree of development that dominates and ultimately stifles independent efforts.
Remember that Google pitched Google+ as an "identity service". They're now accomplishing this through Android, Doubleclick, GA, Gmail, and ReCaptcha, far more effectively. And sell ads on it.
Facebook isn't going to pay for social integration development by Mozilla: Zuck wants that pie to himself.
Channel monopolies would prefer RSS died and browsers (or apps) served their specific feed directly and exclusively.
Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is.
Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2]
[1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
[2]: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-cus...
But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
In my country, all physical books and magazines which are published must be submitted to the government in X copies. The government then keeps an archive.
With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages like it always did with books?
Services provided by a company typically don't survive the end of the contract to provide that service. If the company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be provdided immediately.
Typically the only organisations which can credibly commit to providing a service for more than a few years/decades is the government of a country, a well-funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or similar.
However, if they create a monopoly on that data they have an obligation to preserve it, especially in the case of a corporation outright aquiring data instead of simply "out competing" for data. And as everyone mentions, of course they are in no way legally obligated to do so, but they are by any reasonable standard ethically obligated.
I do think that the government could and should archive data, but there is currently no system in place for doing so and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. Corporations would simply have to maintain the data that they already have.
They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an ephemeral medium.
The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet connection.
Some of that is because search engines have simply stopped returning them in results even though they're still online.