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A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-th

A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-the-forests blockchain solution, or acceptance of the fact that every document will consist entirely of links to Viagra pharmacies. Unbreakable links (no 404s, no link-rot) implies the inability to ever remove anything from the system, which means no right to be forgotten, your bad takes will haunt you forever. (This lovely feature is implemented as "content-adressing" in some Web3 protocols.) Transclusion and transcopyright mean the whole system has to be surveilled to enforce IP law, and all expression is potentially financialized. Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !) Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive? The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous. More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for. [ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !) Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive? The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous. More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for. [ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]