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> 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 again

> 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.
- brimble 5y ago
  > 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. I think this is where FF could have done something big, and maybe even saved themselves from irrelevance. Unfortunately, the time to start that was probably ten years ago, and if anything they've moved away from that sort of thing. Not sure it'd help, now, even if they changed course.

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.

brimble 5y ago
> 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. I think this is where FF could have done something big, and maybe even saved themselves from irrelevance. Unfortunately, the time to start that was probably ten years ago, and if anything they've moved away from that sort of thing. Not sure it'd help, now, even if they changed course.