The open web isn't dying, we're killing it
ouvre-boite.com
ouvre-boite.com
The entire industry, from IP providers to software developers, dropped this as a goal very early on. Bandwidth wasn't available, server installation and management was too complex for almost everyone, security issues turned into a swamp of nightmarish proportions.
Had we been clear in, say, 1995, that goal of IP-at-home was "run your own server (appliance), it will be as easy as using the iPhone that you haven't seen yet", the state of the web would be very, very, very different.
But that turned out not to be the goal, certainly not a goal that was even remotely close to achieved, and we're stuck with what we now have, for now at least.
I suspect the first time one of the home IP servers is hit with a large enough denial of service attack the whole thing will be reverted but it is a neat idea, and maybe with some tweaks it could be made to work.
My father complained bitterly about the hesitation of the european experts. Cooperation was still slowed down by national "pride". "Gifts" to decision takers and the (false) impression that the US tech was ripe, safe and ready to use stalled the european ideas of an internet of free access to the knowledge of human kind, an internet of enlightenment, so to say.
The european idea was that of an indestructable public infrastructure, like a public watergrid, but to fulfil the rights on education and access to knowledge rather than water.
Financed by public funding "from everyone for everyone". With open source building blocks. Like a rail network that can be enlarged and maintained from anyone anywhere. It would have been something new, something revolutionary.
He stated that the US solution would inherit the according values: militaristic, competitive, commercialised and capitalistic. When the first shops opened online and scientific publications started to be barred behind paywalls he stated: "That is the end of what the internet could have been."
Was he right? Somehow. Would the european solution have taken a different route? Maybe not. What remained from that time? The ideas and nostalgia visible in this thread. And an active open source community including the Linux ecosystem.
It is not dead. It diversified. It mirrors our societies. If my father would have survived the pandemic I am sure he would push for the creation of a new internet from scratch. With hardware that hardwires data safety, prohibits invasion of private spaces and functions as a public infrastructure. Would there be reckless drivers? Sure. But they wouldn't dictate the rules of the road including fares and up- and download rates.
Free as in liberty, not free as in freedom.
Dear ingenieurs: It's your turn.
P.S.: This comment reflects the opinion of my father as I remember it. It is not based on journalistic research.
Whether be it human dullards, scripted botfarms, or even maleficence -- none of them experience shame. If they do see it at all, it would be as one of many factors to boost engagement.
Barf.
How so?
It's getting to feel like some weird kind of AI McCarthyism where everything is suspected of being manufactured.
Since I have no idea whether something is LLM-generated or not, I've instead decided to argue things on their merits alone.
Yeah, so glad to have shoved off that shit. My own site is bare bones, hand-rolled HTML. Would that the rest of the web were like that.
I suppose it takes time.
I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!
Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population.
This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?"
Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean.
You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users.
Sites like HN will be the outlier.
Technological gravity, boss.
Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?
The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
Does it mean that each individual and company is hosting their stuff on their own physical hardware? Is it OK to use say AWS?
Does it mean that Facebook is the Open Web as long as you work at Facebook? But it's not if you don't?
Is any site with a login "not the open web"? So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
To your point, I think no one cares because the term is so meaningless that it's irrelevant. Actual real people aren't interested in some technical distinction which is completely unrelated to their goals for being on the web in the first place.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "Open web" is so poorly defined, and the reasons for caring so obscure, that it pretty much never comes up anyway. Joe Public doesn't care because there's no reason to care, and he doesn't even know it's "a thing".
A world where platform taxes and gatekeeping don't stifle innovation or put a ceiling on startups.
A world where the balance of power is more evenly distributed.
A world where single giant point of failures can't dictate the security posture and privacy of the entire civilization.
The brief period of time between 1993 and 2008.
So, like, what phone OS do you use? There's not much choice but did you choose Android over iOS because it's more open? Or did you go the whole way and use PalmOS or Symbian? Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly? Do you choose Bing over Google?
I say this not to judge but rather to highlight the wide gap between principle and reality. We live in a real world, and the world consolidates behind a small number of providers because that has proven to be a beneficial strategy. (And yes, those providers can then abuse us.)
But I don't want to choose between 20 political parties, or 10 credit card processors or have to build apps for 15 phone OS's.
The sadness of losing the early days of choice and wildness are not limited to the web. Before that we lost the 20 brands of PC (all with custom OS) that we had in the 80s. Every new industry goes through this process, and every generation misses the wild heady days of its youth.
Nokia N800.
> Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly?
I stopped flying entirely.
> Do you choose Bing over Google?
Still using Google but working very hard on moving away from it.
Yes, I too live in the real world and I'm a really annoying customer for banks, insurance companies and my government by insisting they serve me without bending over and adopting some eco-system that I do not subscribe to. I have a need to interact with my bank, my government, my insurance company and my kids schools and I point blank refuse to be sucked into any of their app driven eco systems.
I'll take it to court if that's what it takes.
Unfortunately you are an outlier and society is not built for outliers.
Equally, unfortunately, the opinion of outliers does not really help the argument for a more open web. Yes there's some small number of people on mastodon but telling my hairdresser to not use Facebook is not terribly useful to her.
I don't have a smart phone or a mobile phone .. and yes, I do stay in touch with a good many people via land lines, email, some encrypted apps, radio and IRL face to face conversation.
I pick aircraft for their stability at near ground level flight, Cresco STOL's for example, and or ability to land on water, have high wings, mostly twin props, etc. Quite fond of Robinson R22 and Cabri G2 helicopters.
Typically elections here have 10 or so parties, three or four major parties, several minor single issue parties, and 10 or so independants in many districts. It's a preferential ranked voting system that allows you to 1, 2, 3 your main interests and tail off there if that's all you care to do.
I still largely use paper maps (despite having processed a great deal of digital GIS data into digital mapping pipelines).
So, yeah - we're happy being off to the side and not part of the great urban monoculture.
Although, TBH, he's fallen prey to the clutches of the iPhone (sans any account stuff and pretty much limited to phone calls, text messages, and logging his daily walks).
I am working with smart phones for other people, they're more and more integrated with tractors, drones, boom sprays, ag equipment .. but many people are mindful of routing data and control through { cloud } which often means the US and are still attached to ways of working that can still work when { stuff breaks }, like internet connections, US clouds.
Fuel and fertilizer is a big issue ATM .. there are a lot of people all wanting to seed seperate 4,000 Ha farm blocks ATM - and that ability to do or not do so will have a rolling impact about the world in a few months.
Fertilizer and fuel are a massive problem and once reserves run out (and we're not that far from that depending on where you live, in some places we're already there) the problems will multiply very rapidly. Trump is the biggest idiot that ever sat in a seat of power and the whole world (but of course, as always, the poorer parts first) will end up paying the price, and if the harvest is bad quite possibly the ultimate one.
Ehh, worst comes to worst _we_'ll get by - there just won't be much excess for others .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45623799
( Yes, I realise that'd entail the kind of hard physical long hour labour my father grew up with .. but the means are there and the kids and grandkids are all pretty fit )
You could be talking about food, or insurance or cars or planes or health or (dare I say it?) politics.
Of course there are well understood commercial reasons for industries consolidating. Primarily because consumers prefer it.
But while your post is good on rhetoric, it still lacks the concrete definition I seek. Specifically what hardware, OS, VM software, site-creation tools, subscription options, advertising networks, payment processors, and so on must I use to reach "Open web" status?
You're describing a world, which is a fair desire. But when I go to the local bakery to pitch an online presence, what exactly am I pitching, and how does this pitch serve the goals of that bakery?
This one. The open web is freely accessible to anyone on the internet.
> So if I'm hosting on my own metal, paid for by paying subscribers, then I'm not Open Web?
Yes. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not open.
I suppose, is the converse free? Is a site that allows access without a login Open Web? Like say YouTube?
So imho drawing the distinction at not requiring payment/login works as an open web definition. And if self-hosting is a requirement for some people, there are other terms to use.
Youtube, Substack, Medium and the like are open-ish. They're far more of a heavyweight platform than a web host or publishing tool. They could become walled with the flip of a switch. And they can be ad-walled which is testing the limits of openness.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
You do realize Hacker News is social media right? And that too owned and operated by YCombinator.
And unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years. Heck, there's a fairly robust live HN dataset on Hugging Face right now [0].
OP is right.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
Social media requires social network effects, where a large part of the draw is the network effect, and that just isn’t a part of HN.
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
d) forced Messenger and read receipts can be addiction especially given bullshit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 so FB wants to subvert email
I'm fine with people railing against all this. I just want people to quantify it more
This is already happening on HN now via HackerSmacker [0].
I've found a couple HN users who have that have apparently been using it to follow and target me with comments whenever I post.
No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data.
> unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years
They've been mining every byte of data that's visible on the web for years. That doesn't make every single website on the Internet social media.
Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? Will HN?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you?
> Will HN?
I guess we'd have to ask the HN moderators that question.
This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.
Personally, I did a bunch of labeling of my indieweb index. Hopefully a fair chunk of HN users read a blog or two but its understandable if the news has stolen a lot of attention.
That's all it takes. Nobody has to quit their day job or create an open Tiktok alternative, the old web just needs patrons (with clicks, comments, or hrefs).
If you prefer the walled gardens, there is nothing wrong with that. But there are a lot of open web contributors out there.
Feel prophetic in regards to the fate of democracy.
The "small web" is a different phenomenon. When accessing the Web was cumbersome and unglamorous, that served as a filter for motivated and skillful people. Those who care, those who are inclined to create so strongly that they would overcome all these hurdles for it. Similar dynamics exist among open source software contributors.
Once the internet became a zero-effort communication channel, it started to attract people who just want some quick dopamine fix, but who have a lot of other, more important things to mind. That is, the majority, the regular people. These are not bad people! They just don't focus on the internet, or art, or whimsical texts and projects.
This is just literally normal, in the statistical sense. There's an old saying about not blaming a mirror for the image it shows.
Recycling from a prior discussion [0] a Terry Pratchett quote, involving two characters that are inventing print journalism as they go along, with a focus on "the public interest" and short-term audience desires versus civic priorities...
> "Are you saying people aren't interested in the truth?"
> "Listen, what's true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week." [holding up document as example] "This is a report of the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society [...] They've got no say in who runs the city but they can damn well see to it that cockatoos aren't lumped in with parrots. It's not their fault. It's just how things are."
> [...] "It's important! Someone has to care about the... the big truth. [...] if they don't care about anything much beyond things that go squawk in cages then one day there'll be someone in charge of this place who'll make them choke on their own budgies. You want that to happen?"
So you're the ones who did it!
But youtube is actually pretty great with the appropriate extensions and scripts.
If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).
People still play guitar nevertheless. They do it for the enjoyment of the few friends sitting next to them, and, most of all, for the fun they personally have in the process. If your motivation is seriously different, especially it it involves fame, influence, or money, you are holding it wrong.
You can still journal for the love of writing, but why put the effort into publishing for so little return?
Well, yes, so what? Are you creating it for your own enjoyment, or are you holding yourself back to stick it to the greedy capitalist? It would be hard to find your site using Google, unless you know a perfect long fragment, but it was equally hard, or harder, to find it using AltaVista in 1995! People who care link to each other and participate in webrings, much like they did 30 years ago.
Everything is dust in the wind, everything we create is most likely going to perish, make peace with that. Then you notice that there is a gap between the moment you create something, and the time it perishes, and it's plenty long enough to bring joy to you and those you care about, and maybe even random passers-by.