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Remember when technology people made Standards instead of Platforms
Email. IRC. SMS. HTML and shit. The fucking internet itself
Those things would never ever be made today. Instead they'd be shitty proprietary apps that probably only work on shitty proprietary hardware and can't be used by anyone without permission from the company that patented them
That's still kinda happening today? With stuff like dat and SSB and ActivityPub. But all of that is super super niche and technical and not at all accessible to the average user (with the exception of AP as of pretty recently). And it just sucks man, web 2.0 is bullshit
Man, I wonder if search engines could've been the same way. I'm no software boy so I can't conceive of how it would work, but if search engines were all open-source and privacy-respecting and ad-free from the start, instead of being monopolized by one horrifying megaconglomerate? Damn
@socalledunitedstates I don't tech good, but I remember having literally dozens of search engines in the 90s. I dunno how things got so wrong.
@socalledunitedstates (oh yah, it went wrong where it usually does: capitalist greed:blobhyperthink: )
@socalledunitedstates Well you could take a look at #Yacy which tried to decentralise search. But it didn't succeed, maybe because of missing standards.
@socalledunitedstates Some history:
When The Web was started, Tim Berners-Lee maintained a page linking to all the other websites. As The Web grow he started splitting the page up by topic, but he eventually he had to shut it down. Others took over listing their favourite sites within a particular category, though that has died down a lot since the emergence of search engines.
But I'm still doing it, because for a topic I'm interested I didn't find search engines good enough!
@socalledunitedstates Well I do like where @matrix is going with federating instant messaging. And they are doing pretty well!
@socalledunitedstates
Youre looking in the wrong places
- bitcoin protocol
- lightning network bolts
- lightning network joule
- http3/quic
- xmpp
- ipv6
@socalledunitedstates the change happened thanks to average people seeking convenience with no interest in the underlying technology and commercial companies capitalizing on that.
They started with friendlier clients for existing protocols before realising that they can get away with closing users inside their own commercial platforms, thereby having more control over how content is delivered as well as offering even easier service to people who dont care about the technology.
It went downhill from there.
thanks to average people seeking convenience with no interest in the underlying technology
@polychrome @socalledunitedstates, I am a geek and freedom/privacy activist but I really don't like blaming "average people" like this. We all are "average" when it comes to one area or another. Maybe it is cars, bicycles, culinary, energy, medicine, psychology, social governance. There are lots of things every given person doesn't really get and just wants them to work.
It is not people. People are still the same and they will likely remain this way. If we want meaningful change it has to cater to people's needs.
Mastodon is a good example how it can be done right.
@alex @socalledunitedstates I think you're misreading what I had in mind - I am not blaming average people for wanting convenience without learning every part of the technology they're using, I am pointing out companies exploited this to slowly confine users into walled gardens until we've reached a point where introducing software into a device itself needs permission from a company, who can rescind it at a moment's notice.
) @socalledunitedstates even with standards, if the standards process is not inclusive, and the standard is needlessly complicated, it's not much better than a proprietary platform.
I think it is just too much of investment and too easily made profits that spoiled it.