websites aren't a social network because they're not a network at all. there's no genuine connection between the sites apart from the occasional accidental link

websites aren't a social network because they're not a network at all. there's no genuine connection between the sites apart from the occasional accidental link, but websites themselves don't interact in any structured way. The 'semantic web' or RSS, as the article mentions, which are protocol-like solutions suffer from three things. The first one is that they're slow. Standards for large sets of people are by necessity developed through collaboration, and they cannot compete with the speed of private products. (point also often made by Moxie at Signal) Secondly, these kinds of internet protocols rely on uniform, machine-readable content. Rich, personalized, app-like experiences are hard to index, Search engines are starting to suffer from this, it's a reason everyone puts "reddit" at the end of the search and tries to get the opinions of people, and why they're not super relevant in China which leapfrogged the 'plain text' internet into private platforms. Thirdly with protocol based solutions there's no good answer or even incentive to make sure the information is correct or protected, this was one of the major problems of the semantic web. Spammers, attention seekers, fraudsters and so on can game these systems with impunity, siloed company-controlled platforms can fend these bad actors off. I think each one of these is a deep, structural issue and I haven't really seen a solution to any of these by people who still advocate for returning to individual sites, and I think the trend in what people consume points into the other direction.