The Web’s Missing Interoperability
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
I almost achieved escape velocity with Matrix/Riot in my gaming group a couple years ago. Ultimately it was too buggy for them at the time and we ended up on FB messenger, but if it had worked they'd all be primed to join a Matrix-based social network right now.
Which, of course, was precisely how Facebook broke into the social network market in the first place.
Initially not just for college students, but students at specific colleges. Then connecting students between college, then bringing in family members of those students, and so on.
Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha
Some of your icons are too large for the elements they are inside of, the scaling of form elements within your filter interface is somewhat inconsistent too.
If I wasn't completely slammed at work I'd be open to submitting a PR.
(Even happy to compensate you if you email me, see links in my profile.)
I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you.
Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it could expand to a general audience too.
The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”.
Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad to see others feel the same as I do.
Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
Meaning an sqlite database hosted with the app's code? How will "host it for free" scale when your app goes viral and you have a million plus (or a billion plus) users?
So everyone has their own free hosting account with repl.it and runs an app instance on it? Yes, technically that's "free" as in "no cost", but it's not "free" as in "no effort". The latter is the kind of "free" that Facebook users expect.
I'm not talking about the effort involved in opening an account. I'm talking about the effort involved in managing one's own instance of an app. That is not zero, and nobody, not repl.it or anyone else, can magically make it zero. But it is zero for Facebook users, because they aren't managing anything; Facebook is.
If, OTOH, your idea is that repl.it does all the managing (what happens if the server hosting the app goes down? how is the data backed up? etc., etc.), then we're back to the scaling problem: how do you scale that to a huge number of users without either not being free, or adopting the same business model that Facebook has (the avoiding of which was supposed to be the reason for doing all this in the first place)?
Self hosting needs to be as easy as plugging a box into your router. This means some type of DNS or other way to find your node given all the ISPs failure to provide fixed IPs. Also a super easy management method and access controls (public, private, friends).
I have a lot more thoughts on that.
I think an internet that is mostly self-hosted is a healthy one and unlocks a lot of things I’ve been noodling with over the years. I’m hopeful someone smarter than me is close to getting us there.
A “creator” will figure out how to host, be it a Wordpress.com site on the casual end, or something more specialized for the savvier creator.
A good first step might be making a personal site generator. Put in links to your twitter/youtub/substack/medium/whatever accounts, and then you get a nice looking site with all your content in one place. Maybe throw in a subscribe button so people can get email digests of all your content.
and then, almost as a side effect, anyone who uses the site generator also is publishing it all as an atom feed.
In practice, this would probably start out with plugins for only sites that make data public. Not perfect, but still useful.
You could have the aggregate behind a paywall, you could have donations or ads as well.
The key is privacy at the data-layer, and I have a start with my programming language for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/
It's not RSS (which is a bit of a shame), but it scales better since it bakes in pushing / pulling patterns, where RSS only pulls.
Also, there is another protocol called Pubsubhubbub (yeah, I know...) which adds push on top of Atom/RSS. I know of at least one company, Superfeedr, that runs an implementation as a service (they were acquired by Medium): https://superfeedr.com/
We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon & Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller business evolution
Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. Now we have a pandemic where the big box stores and online retailers remain open while the mom & pops are closed and going bust. It's a slow moving economic disaster IMO
It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
I suspect this was done intentionally and systematically, as a kind of "shadow policy". It's resulting in massive concentration of wealth and control, which, from certain sociopathic/political perspectives, could be argued to benefit the country in terms of global economy and national security.
Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic understanding / semantics.
You might trust your banker with your money but not your personal life, and trust your friend with your personal life but not your bank account.
Therefore, you there must be explicit and implicit degrees of trust that are specifically trust "for some intention" or at even just "for some specific purpose." And then, you must trust that the meaning of any promise or guarantee is equivalent between parties.
1. Legislation makes current models impossible - I'm imagining something like Section 230 being repealed, Twitter and Facebook being on the hook for anything anyone posts, which means they can't moderate and are forced to change their business model/effectively close shop.
2. People still want to blog/share/like.
3. Federated networks become a thing again because small communities are way easier to moderate. Nerds self host, regular people get accounts as part of their ISP subscription or pay a few bucks for some SaaS offering. Maybe a forward looking country gives you an e-identity on the official Mastodon instance where the ToS equals local law so we don't have to have that whole Twitter censorship discussion ever again.
4. Everyone lives happily ever after.
It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.
How do you create a software application that exists and runs independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned decentralized consensus system?
Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.
If we were really sticking to versions being meaningful we probably should have bumped a version when frontend UI frameworks and javascript began dominating web application development, since best I could tell at the time Web 2.0 was just the addition of flat design and ajax calls.
Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.
Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as well.
Maybe I don't understand what "monetize a platform-based storefront" means exactly. He's talking about the particular store on shopify making money, not shopify itself getting customers, right?
> its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in one place and convert them in another
Somehow I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for business models affected by this.
A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person.
As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization, and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility and you and I as readers.
What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit of a formal social anti-pattern.
Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of your posts on your "feed".
That's not to say what social media sites have done with those user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a lot of people. I'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories.
Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized concepts.
It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media users.
> I get the argument around banning contact exports; unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the wake of Clubhouse’s rise (never mind the fact that contacts have been accessible — and thus have been accessed! — in this way for years). What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition.
what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends.
where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.
some standards for social network users to be able too interlink & declare their other networks would be great, as a start. second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be looking at my associates.
we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's standardize some good base level cross-social systems.
> where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.
Clubhouse actually is both push and pull. Yes, you can send invites to friends to get them onto the app, but having your contacts also lets them connect you to those already there when you first log on.
Of course this isn't the open pull model you're talking about, where I can discover new things my friend is doing, or find out where he is most active. But using the phone number as an identifier for social graphs is kind of a hack around the non-existence of such a thing.
(Ignore the token part and read the rest.)
Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the eye balls are, so instead of just marketing on Facebook (or Twitter, or Reddit) you want to market and convert your audience all on the same platform(s) because its increasingly difficult to do otherwise.
My counter point being of course, that this may have been inevitable anyway, since this really is increasingly the way people interact, is via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc and less and less on the open web. Of course large corporations can and should and will kicking or screaming or no, comply with the laws, but little thought has been given how much those laws don't disrupt the fundamental problem: disrupting the stranglehold these companies have on interaction. I think a good amount of the GDPR, and Apple's recent moves have good ideas and net wins, but after reading this article, I can also see how it will simply, in the long term, act as a form of regulatory capture where only the largest entrenched companies can comply and small companies, particularly non tech small businesses, will be increasingly more reliant on those platforms going forward.
The solution isn't of course, to get rid of things like the GDPR, but like all laws and regulation, it needs to be re-thought and re-shaped as it affects the marketplace, and that's the crux of the problem, most regulation is set it and forget (particularly in the US) where there is little after thought given or follow up to it and augmenting it appropriately to minimize real downsides (not perceived ones that corporations complain about, but more barriers it creates to new businesses) and asking the question of is this acceptable or do we need to re-think some aspect of this?
I know this won't play that well either, its not going to be a popular debate among my peers, but its important we consider all the facts, none the less.
[0]: I may be reducing the article a little too much here, forgive me, I really do think everyone should read it first
If you don't have many users yet, not many such requests will come in, so I don't think this is an undue burden. In the beginning, the burden will be roughly proportional to the number of users you have. If the burden becomes too high, it's easily automatable. So personally I don't think an explicit exemption for small businesses is really necessary.
Believe me, it is no easy thing to do.
So far this has been enough, but the apps we have are fairly simple (e.g. no media!). We'll see. Maybe media can be handled off browser.
Mike is working on it as well:
Maybe we don't need more "social media companies" of the type that GDPR is "a disaster" for.
And then goes on to
> Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable data (from a business perspective, anyways) is the social graph
So what does he propose then, huh? "Oh, forget about privacy. Since Facebook sits on a trove of personal data the never asked consent for, everyone should have the same access to the same trove of data"?
The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA.
Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.
None of these are really first class citizens in computing. They are all application level concepts/implementations. Some are hardware dependent (margins, when we choose a printer with settings).
My point is that we would benefit if these "human needs" were met at a lower level. If a grid was a grid, an image was an image, a drawing a drawing, etc. At the application level, there could be enrichment, but the essence of a thing could be universal. Like a protocol. Once these things are protocols, everything would start functioning more alike and be able to interoperate in a better way. Including the web.
Some of these things (idioms, actions) appear to work across the board, but they are fragile, unpredictable, and often fail just when you need them the most. That's because every application solves these problems for itself. (Please don't say Windows Clipboard).