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Yeah, I'm really not doing a great job here. By 'network' I mean that the Web is the network. I'm not romanticizing needing separate accounts for every topic. I

Yeah, I'm really not doing a great job here. By 'network' I mean that the Web is the network. I'm not romanticizing needing separate accounts for every topic. I'm not sure how to isolate the part that I am romanticizing from the part that I'm not. :D I mean let's say we forked the Web before social media and simply had unified accounts for the variety of small sites we participated in. That seems like progress to me.

krapp 7y ago
> mean let's say we forked the Web before social media and simply had unified accounts for the variety of small sites we participated in. That seems like progress to me. That wouldn't stop the network effect of social media, or centralization. Facebook, Twitter, etc. would still be built and people would still congregate to them, just using whatever their "unified accounts" were. And remember, Google tried unifying accounts with G+, albeit just within their network. One day everyone on Youtube found their G+ comments merged with their Youtube comments because Google decided Youtube was just the video-sharing part of G+, and a lot of real names and data were exposed, because the two platforms were designed around completely different social paradigms. The obvious questions with something like a unified account is who controls them and defines the standard, and how do you make the rest of the web comply with using them? All of the potential problems of centralization are still there, anywhere you have an attempt at a common standard.
- kickscondor 7y ago
  Sure, it’s fine if these networks exist - I understand that people like Twitter and identify with it, even if I can’t fathom it. It’s just that they all close themselves off to interoperating with the Web. I’m not trying to make a strict decentralization argument either - it’s just this draconian closedness to the larger network. (At least we’ve been able to hang on to email - imagine if we had separate email networks!) RSS and REST were great advances - and then our good open protocols stopped or something. Thank you for reading and responding, though.

krapp 7y ago

> mean let's say we forked the Web before social media and simply had unified accounts for the variety of small sites we participated in. That seems like progress to me. That wouldn't stop the network effect of social media, or centralization. Facebook, Twitter, etc. would still be built and people would still congregate to them, just using whatever their "unified accounts" were. And remember, Google tried unifying accounts with G+, albeit just within their network. One day everyone on Youtube found their G+ comments merged with their Youtube comments because Google decided Youtube was just the video-sharing part of G+, and a lot of real names and data were exposed, because the two platforms were designed around completely different social paradigms. The obvious questions with something like a unified account is who controls them and defines the standard, and how do you make the rest of the web comply with using them? All of the potential problems of centralization are still there, anywhere you have an attempt at a common standard.

kickscondor 7y ago
Sure, it’s fine if these networks exist - I understand that people like Twitter and identify with it, even if I can’t fathom it. It’s just that they all close themselves off to interoperating with the Web. I’m not trying to make a strict decentralization argument either - it’s just this draconian closedness to the larger network. (At least we’ve been able to hang on to email - imagine if we had separate email networks!) RSS and REST were great advances - and then our good open protocols stopped or something. Thank you for reading and responding, though.