5 ms·

> The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. I think it's that we stopped building, promoting, and improving new public protocols. And by "we" I mean

> The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. I think it's that we stopped building, promoting, and improving new public protocols. And by "we" I mean "tech giants". There should be an open, widely-used social layer atop the Web, supported by everything under the sun. Why isn't there? Facebook and Google and Twitter have infinity money (thanks to advertising and/or VC) to throw at free products that lock in users, instead. Why's chat more silo'd now than ever? Similar reason, deep pockets with large marketing & advertising budgets pushing products that deliberately don't interoperate well. Et cetera. We couldn't invent email today. I'm not even sure we could invent the Web, anymore. For values of "invent" that include getting enough support for something to really be a standard that's widely used, not just a few white papers and something a few enthusiasts use, doomed to obscurity. This state of things is not because we ran out of things that would make excellent, useful protocols.

rektide 5y ago
Agreed basically. The G+ era murdered the engineering driven vision of the future & replaced it with more gloss-coated shit-consumerism. Things werent going great with Buzz, Salmon, OpenSocial. But they were teething, finding themselves, evolving. That all got killed by one vain executive, who murdered an explorable interconnected future for a cheapass Facebook knock-off. It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. There's plenty of interesting-ish projects about that could, that deserve uptake, usage, advancement. Maybe BlueSky will have technics sufficiently capable to match & drive a new interconnected angle. Im so tired of the ongoing re-silo-ization of all computing.
- wolpoli 5y ago
  Also, independent (and interconnected) blogs simply have no place in their future where valuable/insightful content would be on Google+. Thus, to choke off the audience for blogs, Google Reader had to die.
  - ohCh6zos 5y ago
    This is a sad summary of the state of the web. Do you think if there was more focus on protocols it'd fix it, or is there no way back to a better web?
    - wolpoli 5y ago
      The nature open protocol makes it easy for companies to join. They could invest and insert itself somewhere in the ecosystem to add value, and once they dominate, they could evolve and close it up. Web sites with fantastic content are still out there. We just can't find them because Google search doesn't list them anymore and web sites don't link to each other.
  - astrange 5y ago
    I have been told that Reader had to die for good privacy reasons that can't be shared. But what I don't understand is, why are people so upset about it? It's not the world's only RSS client.
    - wolpoli 5y ago
      Yes, it wasn't the world's only RSS client, but the existence of it, along with Google's backing, had somewhat stifled innovations. So there weren't that many options to choose from at the point. There were a few reasons I could think of why people were upset: Reader started in the era of when Google was generous. It gave away 1GB of email storage and free Email service for your own domain. It felt like a betrayal to end the service like this. There was the same reaction when Google announced the end of Gsuite legacy free edition. Finally, Google essentially declared to the entire world that RSS was dead. Although Google claimed that usage of Reader had fallen, the users who continued to use it do get values from it and thus they very much disagree with that assessment. It wasn't like Google was a small business that had fallen on hard time.
- brimble 5y ago
  > It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. It's not just that they aren't promoting open protocols—they're competing against them at a cost to the user of $0.00, which completely sucks all the air out of the room, even for open source contributors.
  - rektide 5y ago
    Tim O'rielly had a line that captured the late aughts well, "create more value than you capture." That your value was defined not only by yourself, but by the technical ecosystem (stephen o'grady: "tecosystem") one could beget, create. Anyone who captured the majority of the value would have forgone creating a higher value system to do so, would have arrived at a suboptimal, inadequate solution. I think that still is true and applies fully. But we have seen few inspiring & motivational changes in computing in the last decade. Personal computing has been outmoded by profitable/cloudy Service-As-A-Software-Substitute (SaSS) systems. I don't think we have a lot evidence one way or another- it's just been greed & taking & ego that's made competing against cooperation/inter-networking/protocols be de-jure accepted. There just haven't been many efforts that have tried to see if improving the world has returns, creates good. These companies, as you say, are competing against what I see as basic, moral goodness & civil open society. But for a while these companies understood there was something to be gained by begetting rich & healthy online systems. That pretense that these companies care in the least, most modest ways about anything outside their firewalls has been abandoned. The G+ era was the start of a new era of not giving a shit, thinking only of yourself, and there's been few left to hold up a light, to present a moral charge, there's been such absence of evidence after this dry up that doing the right thing, letting what you love free, can be good. Except, perhaps, in the more covert forms of tech. Projects like Kubernetes are undercurrents, demonstrating that the techies love taking advantages of & growing healthy technical ecosystems, love pushing the bounds, love creating value because they can. But in terms of consumer-facing technology, we've seen very little that matches the well accepted, reasoned, & hoped for course that tech like OpenSocial, Buzz, Salmon was trying to key up. Recently, ActiviyStreams, ActivityPub, & other social web protocols have been doing ok. But we're still seeing only a very limited, unexpanding set of adopters. There hasn't been the kind of ultra-wide-scale adoption that tech like RSS/Atom had going, had pushing it forward. It's out there, but it's niche. And 100%, it's in many ways because content providers & platform providers both are trying to trump the social-benefit of open protocols, are desperate to capture the value themselves, while giving nothing away to a broader ecosystem.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I thought Google Wave, then Google Buzz were really starting to go in the right direction. I vaguely remember following a tutorial for writing custom code for Buzz; I don’t remember the details but I remember enjoying the experience. BTW, I set up an instance of Apache Wave for some family and friends and no one was really that interested in using it. More excitement when it was a Google service, to your point that changes often rely on a “massive name.”
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Familiarity is the opioid of the normies.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Slack didn’t take over its market with advertisement & marketing (although that’s certainly helpful). It was just better than IRC, which is the open protocol people often compare it to. And if you feel the impulse to list the ways that IRC is superior to slack, you are likely to just illustrate the mismatch between features people love to talk about or implement and features that drive adoption and retention. The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. (edit: as an example, see the sister comment and its complaint about „more gloss-coated shit-consumerism“) Chat happens to be the worst possible example for this idea that bad technology is winning against OSS or open protocols by throwing money into advertisement and fooling users that are just too stupid to understand. Besides slack, Signal and Telegram, two entities completely unknown by consumers and with budgets that round to zero took over that highly competitive market.
- brimble 5y ago
  Of course, Slack had a great client. It could have been a great client for an open protocol. Maybe an existing one. Maybe a new one that they could steer entirely. But that would fail to capture the user sufficiently. > The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. Mostly true! But commercial clients for open protocols are A Thing, for the tiny handful of user-facing protocols that haven't been sent toward a slow, obscure death. I'm writing this from a (largely) closed-source Web browser. I also have a closed-source email client open.
  - astrange 5y ago
    I think IRC had decades to come up with a better protocol and never did. Just don't have netsplits, show the user the channel history when they join, and have encryption. I'll excuse the auth systems being driven by bots and so not built into clients.
    - modo_mario 5y ago
      There's Matrix and IRCv3 tho i haven't looked into the later much
eternityforest 5y ago
I wish there was some kind of Open Protocol Alliance or something. I would love to actually work on this stuff. Unfortunately, of the dozens trying, ALL are contaminated with performance hindering Web3 features. Nobody just wants to make an open social protocol. They want it to have a coin built right into it, mandatory anonymity routing, immutable scuttlebutt logs, DHT-clogging random access to individuals 256kb blocks of any file, etc. And mobile apps don't even get.discussed till the project is half dead already. I think Tox has the most potential of anything out there now and could possibly be usable if they can get the mobile bandwidth down. Matrix also has potential. Yggdrasil is a great component but not useful without applications to run on it.
- Sander_Marechal 5y ago
  > I wish there was some kind of Open Protocol Alliance or something. I would love to actually work on this stuff. IETF?

rektide 5y ago

Agreed basically. The G+ era murdered the engineering driven vision of the future & replaced it with more gloss-coated shit-consumerism. Things werent going great with Buzz, Salmon, OpenSocial. But they were teething, finding themselves, evolving. That all got killed by one vain executive, who murdered an explorable interconnected future for a cheapass Facebook knock-off. It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. There's plenty of interesting-ish projects about that could, that deserve uptake, usage, advancement. Maybe BlueSky will have technics sufficiently capable to match & drive a new interconnected angle. Im so tired of the ongoing re-silo-ization of all computing.

wolpoli 5y ago
Also, independent (and interconnected) blogs simply have no place in their future where valuable/insightful content would be on Google+. Thus, to choke off the audience for blogs, Google Reader had to die.
- ohCh6zos 5y ago
  This is a sad summary of the state of the web. Do you think if there was more focus on protocols it'd fix it, or is there no way back to a better web?
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    The nature open protocol makes it easy for companies to join. They could invest and insert itself somewhere in the ecosystem to add value, and once they dominate, they could evolve and close it up. Web sites with fantastic content are still out there. We just can't find them because Google search doesn't list them anymore and web sites don't link to each other.
- astrange 5y ago
  I have been told that Reader had to die for good privacy reasons that can't be shared. But what I don't understand is, why are people so upset about it? It's not the world's only RSS client.
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    Yes, it wasn't the world's only RSS client, but the existence of it, along with Google's backing, had somewhat stifled innovations. So there weren't that many options to choose from at the point. There were a few reasons I could think of why people were upset: Reader started in the era of when Google was generous. It gave away 1GB of email storage and free Email service for your own domain. It felt like a betrayal to end the service like this. There was the same reaction when Google announced the end of Gsuite legacy free edition. Finally, Google essentially declared to the entire world that RSS was dead. Although Google claimed that usage of Reader had fallen, the users who continued to use it do get values from it and thus they very much disagree with that assessment. It wasn't like Google was a small business that had fallen on hard time.
brimble 5y ago
> It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. It's not just that they aren't promoting open protocols—they're competing against them at a cost to the user of $0.00, which completely sucks all the air out of the room, even for open source contributors.
- rektide 5y ago
  Tim O'rielly had a line that captured the late aughts well, "create more value than you capture." That your value was defined not only by yourself, but by the technical ecosystem (stephen o'grady: "tecosystem") one could beget, create. Anyone who captured the majority of the value would have forgone creating a higher value system to do so, would have arrived at a suboptimal, inadequate solution. I think that still is true and applies fully. But we have seen few inspiring & motivational changes in computing in the last decade. Personal computing has been outmoded by profitable/cloudy Service-As-A-Software-Substitute (SaSS) systems. I don't think we have a lot evidence one way or another- it's just been greed & taking & ego that's made competing against cooperation/inter-networking/protocols be de-jure accepted. There just haven't been many efforts that have tried to see if improving the world has returns, creates good. These companies, as you say, are competing against what I see as basic, moral goodness & civil open society. But for a while these companies understood there was something to be gained by begetting rich & healthy online systems. That pretense that these companies care in the least, most modest ways about anything outside their firewalls has been abandoned. The G+ era was the start of a new era of not giving a shit, thinking only of yourself, and there's been few left to hold up a light, to present a moral charge, there's been such absence of evidence after this dry up that doing the right thing, letting what you love free, can be good. Except, perhaps, in the more covert forms of tech. Projects like Kubernetes are undercurrents, demonstrating that the techies love taking advantages of & growing healthy technical ecosystems, love pushing the bounds, love creating value because they can. But in terms of consumer-facing technology, we've seen very little that matches the well accepted, reasoned, & hoped for course that tech like OpenSocial, Buzz, Salmon was trying to key up. Recently, ActiviyStreams, ActivityPub, & other social web protocols have been doing ok. But we're still seeing only a very limited, unexpanding set of adopters. There hasn't been the kind of ultra-wide-scale adoption that tech like RSS/Atom had going, had pushing it forward. It's out there, but it's niche. And 100%, it's in many ways because content providers & platform providers both are trying to trump the social-benefit of open protocols, are desperate to capture the value themselves, while giving nothing away to a broader ecosystem.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I thought Google Wave, then Google Buzz were really starting to go in the right direction. I vaguely remember following a tutorial for writing custom code for Buzz; I don’t remember the details but I remember enjoying the experience. BTW, I set up an instance of Apache Wave for some family and friends and no one was really that interested in using it. More excitement when it was a Google service, to your point that changes often rely on a “massive name.”
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Familiarity is the opioid of the normies.

KarlKemp 5y ago

Slack didn’t take over its market with advertisement & marketing (although that’s certainly helpful). It was just better than IRC, which is the open protocol people often compare it to. And if you feel the impulse to list the ways that IRC is superior to slack, you are likely to just illustrate the mismatch between features people love to talk about or implement and features that drive adoption and retention. The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. (edit: as an example, see the sister comment and its complaint about „more gloss-coated shit-consumerism“) Chat happens to be the worst possible example for this idea that bad technology is winning against OSS or open protocols by throwing money into advertisement and fooling users that are just too stupid to understand. Besides slack, Signal and Telegram, two entities completely unknown by consumers and with budgets that round to zero took over that highly competitive market.

brimble 5y ago
Of course, Slack had a great client. It could have been a great client for an open protocol. Maybe an existing one. Maybe a new one that they could steer entirely. But that would fail to capture the user sufficiently. > The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. Mostly true! But commercial clients for open protocols are A Thing, for the tiny handful of user-facing protocols that haven't been sent toward a slow, obscure death. I'm writing this from a (largely) closed-source Web browser. I also have a closed-source email client open.
- astrange 5y ago
  I think IRC had decades to come up with a better protocol and never did. Just don't have netsplits, show the user the channel history when they join, and have encryption. I'll excuse the auth systems being driven by bots and so not built into clients.
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    There's Matrix and IRCv3 tho i haven't looked into the later much

eternityforest 5y ago

I wish there was some kind of Open Protocol Alliance or something. I would love to actually work on this stuff. Unfortunately, of the dozens trying, ALL are contaminated with performance hindering Web3 features. Nobody just wants to make an open social protocol. They want it to have a coin built right into it, mandatory anonymity routing, immutable scuttlebutt logs, DHT-clogging random access to individuals 256kb blocks of any file, etc. And mobile apps don't even get.discussed till the project is half dead already. I think Tox has the most potential of anything out there now and could possibly be usable if they can get the mobile bandwidth down. Matrix also has potential. Yggdrasil is a great component but not useful without applications to run on it.

Sander_Marechal 5y ago
> I wish there was some kind of Open Protocol Alliance or something. I would love to actually work on this stuff. IETF?