11 ms·

The web I want vs. the one we have

87 points by luu 2y ago

walterbell 2y ago
> This is my second day of kitchen-table blogging using wordLand, WordPress and Mastodon, and I like it even more today than I did yesterday. http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html?title=theWebLivesInWordpressAndMastodon http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html?title=theWebLive... https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/my-new-writing-environment-does-textcasting/ https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/my-new-writing-en... I have a writing tool I call wordLand, it connects directly to WordPress, and from there, one of my sites is hooked up to Mastodon via ActivityPub.. The reason I’m having so much fun with this mofo is that I have most of the features of textcasting now, and it’s all flowing out through Masto, and I’m not typing into a freaking tiny little text box! https://textcasting.org/ https://textcasting.org/ Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers need. A prototype of self-hosted editor that "publishes" format-appropriate versions to different social media sites, while the author retains copyright, data and compute control of the original source. By https://davewiner.com/ https://davewiner.com/, pioneer of weblogging, RSS syndication and more.
- dang 2y ago
  (I edited the above comment to separate the first two links more clearly)
- righthand 2y ago
  I have been trying to understand what is being suggested here and all I can think of is some Buffer.co-like posting UI for the desktop. The parts of podcasting that make it discoverable, consumable, shareable is already in the web for text…
  - walterbell 2y ago
    This post mentions using Wordpress as a proxy (?) API to Mastodon, https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/why-is-this-possible-now/ https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/why-is-this-possi... > Mastodon, while they’re doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle an already large community into a set of consistent interfaces.. Automattic has a small team whose only job is to make WordPress work with Mastodon. So I can build software that works with Mastodon without venturing into the rough seas of Mastodon-land, I can stay on the cruise-liner, which is the WordPress API.
    - righthand 2y ago
      Wordpress doesn’t have native built post to Facebook/Twitter/etc. functionality so I’m not sure what the author is still advocating for…an API layer to post to social networks still is just a Buffer.co-like. I don’t disagree but what the author is suggesting will post to social networks, then I am supposed to use whatever UI to consume the posts?
- safety1st 2y ago
  Kind of funny to see Dave Winer of all people saying he doesn't sweat the technical details here. So I think this is what's going on. Dave had an idea he called textcasting which he describes on his textcasting.org site, I didn't see anything really new there - syndicating text from your blog to any other app or social media site, seems to be the basic idea. A protocol called ActivityPub has been around for a while which enables this exact scenario, it's the core of Mastodon etc. and I believe is even supported by Threads. Dave was pleasantly surprised to discover that this all just works on his Wordpress.com blog. I think the underlying implementation is probably the ActivityPub WordPress plugin which is developed primarily by Matthias Pfefferle - https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ - you can install and run this plugin on any WordPress site. I agree with Dave where he says Automattic is sleeping on the potential here, I feel ActivityPub support should have been rolled into WP Core a few years ago. The tech for this federated media is getting pretty good. Mastodon is a thing, it works, adoption is slowly creeping up but still not really huge. WP could roll out ActivityPub support to 800 million websites and then if you so choose your own website then becomes a node in the social network and you don't have to sign up with anybody else to make that happen. This is once-in-a-generation sort of potential perhaps. Pfefferle did the original version of the plugin himself and Automattic hired him a few years ago. In theory anyone who deals with a lot of WP installs could be putting their own money/time/code into this vision (your personal website is your social media profile, basically), and piggybacking on the established fediverse as modest as it may be, and growing it.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  So it's a POSSE[0] system, like everything should be. You keep your content on systems and platforms you control. Then republish to walled gardens and silos, either via a link to your own platform (which is downranked by algorithms...) or repost the content. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
andrewstuart 2y ago
Early in my career I was greatly surprised to realise it’s often not technical people at the top.
- dexwiz 2y ago
  Money is a technology.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    ...which would benefit from more frequent updates.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  It's also pretty disheartening that certain famous 'tech' podcasts are hosted by people who've never written a line of code in their lives. Like who are you to comment on where AI will be in 10 years? You don't even know what back propagation is.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  If you only had technical people in every position, software would be designed only for technical people.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    There’s a difference between technical at the leadership positions vs every position. Nvidia’s CEO is technical. Google’s was technical for a very long time. AMD’s is technical. Amazon’s was for a very long time. Microsoft’s was for a very long time and is again. I think it’s a bold claim to make that technical people are only capable of designing for technical people. There’s plenty of people who understand how to build products that connect to the consumer and non-technical people don’t have a unique ability to do so.
  - robocat 2y ago
    You imply you believe that technical people are one-dimensional and lack some fundamental skill. You imply that some other people have this empathetic skill that technical people lack...
tolerance 2y ago
These Web elegies are starting to become a real drag to read. And I don't mean to come across as flippant in saying this. I feel a sort of concern for the spirit of the authors of these kind of pieces, which are becoming more and more commonplace.
- adriand 2y ago
  Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days. The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
  - Centigonal 2y ago
    I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      I can write it for you: "I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
      - jamiek88 2y ago
        How when the Chinese won’t let people from China use it?
    - gonzo41 2y ago
      Lets be honest, they won't have the concentration to be able to write more than a tweet about it.
joshdavham 2y ago
Is Silicon Valley still like how the author describes it? I ask this as a Canadian considering moving down there. I want to go to a place where I feel understood.
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  Depends on you and a bunch of luck. There is a higher then average amount of technical folks, but a lot of them just are in it for a paycheck and focus on normal activities. If you put yourself out there, you can find a community, but it might involve some luck, depending on what you want out of it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fsckboy 2y ago
  nothing here is how this author describes it
dools 2y ago
> They were smart and educated, but they were English majors or studied agriculture or business. “Are you at all concerned about an uprising?”
_heimdall 2y ago
I worked in a very small corner of the modern Silicon Valley area recently. I was surprised to see so many companies, VCs, and founders giving such a similar mystique to a certain youtuber/streamer that i won't name here. Its very confusing to see people who have been in the industry for potentially decades more or less blindly following the whims of a person with very little real world experience in the industry to back up such strong, opinionated claims. Interesting to see based on the OP that its not necessarily a new phenomenon.
- Scrapemist 2y ago
  Lex?
isomorphic- 2y ago
> PPS: Here’s a link to a location on Mastodon where you can read this piece. Said link immediately redirects you back to Wordpress.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Looks like something is misconfigured. Searching for "daveverse" returns the following URL that works in the Mastodon UI, but redirects when opened standalone: https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.wordpress.com https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.w...
  - cemerick 2y ago
    The redirect only happens if you aren't logged into to mastodon.social. (Which may well be a misconfiguration ofc)
paulcole 2y ago
This is like how my dad says SNL was awesome when he was 19 and sucked when I was 19. But I think it was awesome when I was 19 and sucks now that my kid is 19.
defgeneric 2y ago
I may be missing the point of this blog but I don't think I am. I too miss the era of blogging but this isn't it. The only thing this piece does is name drop--without having the courage to actually name names--and point out how those "famous" (we can't judge, as they're unnamed) people were so wrong back then and the writer was so right. The line that actually answers the title is a cliche and isn't elaborated on: the web brings like-minded people together from all over the world.
resonious 2y ago
Isn't the web still like this? It's easy to find communities that are deep into pretty much anything.
munchler 2y ago
> I later learned that the execs at most of the tech companies were similarly clueless on what made software possible, and basic stuff like trading off time for space and vice versa. Why would an exec ever need to know about time/space tradeoffs? That's an engineering detail that is almost never relevant at the executive level. If you're pitching a business idea at this level, you're going to have a rough time.
- malfist 2y ago
  That stood out to me too. If your customers won't care about it I wouldn't expect your execs to have deep understanding of it.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I concur. The following stood out to me; >> was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it. He says this like it's a bad thing. When really the company is just trying to find out if the thing being pitched can be sold to a not-engineer. Too often engineers love an idea because it "can be done". They can list features all day long, but lack the skills to understand (or articulate) the benefits to the prospective customer.
  - onion2k 2y ago
    Prioritizing time makes a product fast. Prioritizing space makes it cheap. Customers often do care about the outcome of a tech decision even if they don't care about the decision itself. Therefore the leaders at a company should care too, or should at least empower people below them to make good decisions.
    - malfist 2y ago
      I doubt consumers at the checkout line buying software are thinking about how fast or slow the software will run on their hardware compared to the competitor software
- atoav 2y ago
Scrapemist 2y ago
Too many I’s and they’s
webprofusion 2y ago
Sorry, why is this on hackernews?
viccis 2y ago
To be honest, if the author of this communicated pitches as ineffectively as this piece communicated the topic in its title, I am not surprised that whatever nameless gatekeeper he's talking about passed on his pitch. That's not even to get into the fact that executives don't necessarily need to understand software implementation details to size up an idea. Very odd blog post.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Yeah but I think that's the point, isn't it? The author expected the people who were gatekeeping which tech got built to understand the tech that they were deciding on [0]. Instead they did not understand tech but understood business. Which means that a techie explaining the idea to them had to couch it in business terms. Y'know: a pitch. If a techie is explaining a tech idea to another techie, we use completely different language than if we're communicating to a non-techie. This blog post feels like that, like they're talking to a group of peers rather than an audience with a different viewpoint on the world. [0] I think it's a little naive, but perfectly understandable, to expect this kind of person to understand the tech. It is interesting that these decisions are made by business folk with no understanding of the tech. There are, after all, business people who do understand tech available to make this kind of decision.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tessierashpool9 2y ago
That he met Steve Jobs is the most important detail, justifying these aimlessly meandering ramblings.
AIFounder 2y ago
[dead]
082349872349872 2y ago
> ...a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience [is] the web I want back. What's wrong with dumb keyword text search for people using near-hapax interest- and experience-specific vocabulary?
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  All the fake sites that use those same words but have none of the real content

87 points by luu 2y ago

> This is my second day of kitchen-table blogging using wordLand, WordPress and Mastodon, and I like it even more today than I did yesterday. http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html?title=theWebLivesInWordpressAndMastodon http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html?title=theWebLive... https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/my-new-writing-environment-does-textcasting/ https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/my-new-writing-en... I have a writing tool I call wordLand, it connects directly to WordPress, and from there, one of my sites is hooked up to Mastodon via ActivityPub.. The reason I’m having so much fun with this mofo is that I have most of the features of textcasting now, and it’s all flowing out through Masto, and I’m not typing into a freaking tiny little text box! https://textcasting.org/ https://textcasting.org/ Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers need. A prototype of self-hosted editor that "publishes" format-appropriate versions to different social media sites, while the author retains copyright, data and compute control of the original source. By https://davewiner.com/ https://davewiner.com/, pioneer of weblogging, RSS syndication and more.

dang 2y ago
(I edited the above comment to separate the first two links more clearly)
righthand 2y ago
I have been trying to understand what is being suggested here and all I can think of is some Buffer.co-like posting UI for the desktop. The parts of podcasting that make it discoverable, consumable, shareable is already in the web for text…
- walterbell 2y ago
  This post mentions using Wordpress as a proxy (?) API to Mastodon, https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/why-is-this-possible-now/ https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/why-is-this-possi... > Mastodon, while they’re doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle an already large community into a set of consistent interfaces.. Automattic has a small team whose only job is to make WordPress work with Mastodon. So I can build software that works with Mastodon without venturing into the rough seas of Mastodon-land, I can stay on the cruise-liner, which is the WordPress API.
  - righthand 2y ago
    Wordpress doesn’t have native built post to Facebook/Twitter/etc. functionality so I’m not sure what the author is still advocating for…an API layer to post to social networks still is just a Buffer.co-like. I don’t disagree but what the author is suggesting will post to social networks, then I am supposed to use whatever UI to consume the posts?
safety1st 2y ago
Kind of funny to see Dave Winer of all people saying he doesn't sweat the technical details here. So I think this is what's going on. Dave had an idea he called textcasting which he describes on his textcasting.org site, I didn't see anything really new there - syndicating text from your blog to any other app or social media site, seems to be the basic idea. A protocol called ActivityPub has been around for a while which enables this exact scenario, it's the core of Mastodon etc. and I believe is even supported by Threads. Dave was pleasantly surprised to discover that this all just works on his Wordpress.com blog. I think the underlying implementation is probably the ActivityPub WordPress plugin which is developed primarily by Matthias Pfefferle - https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ - you can install and run this plugin on any WordPress site. I agree with Dave where he says Automattic is sleeping on the potential here, I feel ActivityPub support should have been rolled into WP Core a few years ago. The tech for this federated media is getting pretty good. Mastodon is a thing, it works, adoption is slowly creeping up but still not really huge. WP could roll out ActivityPub support to 800 million websites and then if you so choose your own website then becomes a node in the social network and you don't have to sign up with anybody else to make that happen. This is once-in-a-generation sort of potential perhaps. Pfefferle did the original version of the plugin himself and Automattic hired him a few years ago. In theory anyone who deals with a lot of WP installs could be putting their own money/time/code into this vision (your personal website is your social media profile, basically), and piggybacking on the established fediverse as modest as it may be, and growing it.
theshrike79 2y ago
So it's a POSSE[0] system, like everything should be. You keep your content on systems and platforms you control. Then republish to walled gardens and silos, either via a link to your own platform (which is downranked by algorithms...) or repost the content. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

andrewstuart 2y ago

Early in my career I was greatly surprised to realise it’s often not technical people at the top.

dexwiz 2y ago
Money is a technology.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  ...which would benefit from more frequent updates.
joshdavham 2y ago
It's also pretty disheartening that certain famous 'tech' podcasts are hosted by people who've never written a line of code in their lives. Like who are you to comment on where AI will be in 10 years? You don't even know what back propagation is.
cortesoft 2y ago
If you only had technical people in every position, software would be designed only for technical people.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  There’s a difference between technical at the leadership positions vs every position. Nvidia’s CEO is technical. Google’s was technical for a very long time. AMD’s is technical. Amazon’s was for a very long time. Microsoft’s was for a very long time and is again. I think it’s a bold claim to make that technical people are only capable of designing for technical people. There’s plenty of people who understand how to build products that connect to the consumer and non-technical people don’t have a unique ability to do so.
- robocat 2y ago
  You imply you believe that technical people are one-dimensional and lack some fundamental skill. You imply that some other people have this empathetic skill that technical people lack...

tolerance 2y ago

These Web elegies are starting to become a real drag to read. And I don't mean to come across as flippant in saying this. I feel a sort of concern for the spirit of the authors of these kind of pieces, which are becoming more and more commonplace.

adriand 2y ago
Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days. The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.
- Centigonal 2y ago
  I'm looking forward to reading an aging GenZ-er's elegy of the web that looks fondly back on the age of TikTok and algorithmic feeds, back when people actually made things.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    I can write it for you: "I miss when the internet was an international gathering place, not a carefully guarded forum for communicating misinformation-free messaging about foreign policy and corporate life in the United States of America, England and Wales. I had a friend from China."
    - jamiek88 2y ago
      How when the Chinese won’t let people from China use it?
  - gonzo41 2y ago
    Lets be honest, they won't have the concentration to be able to write more than a tweet about it.

joshdavham 2y ago

Is Silicon Valley still like how the author describes it? I ask this as a Canadian considering moving down there. I want to go to a place where I feel understood.

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
Depends on you and a bunch of luck. There is a higher then average amount of technical folks, but a lot of them just are in it for a paycheck and focus on normal activities. If you put yourself out there, you can find a community, but it might involve some luck, depending on what you want out of it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fsckboy 2y ago
nothing here is how this author describes it

dools 2y ago

> They were smart and educated, but they were English majors or studied agriculture or business. “Are you at all concerned about an uprising?”

_heimdall 2y ago

I worked in a very small corner of the modern Silicon Valley area recently. I was surprised to see so many companies, VCs, and founders giving such a similar mystique to a certain youtuber/streamer that i won't name here. Its very confusing to see people who have been in the industry for potentially decades more or less blindly following the whims of a person with very little real world experience in the industry to back up such strong, opinionated claims. Interesting to see based on the OP that its not necessarily a new phenomenon.

Scrapemist 2y ago
Lex?

isomorphic- 2y ago

> PPS: Here’s a link to a location on Mastodon where you can read this piece. Said link immediately redirects you back to Wordpress.

walterbell 2y ago
Looks like something is misconfigured. Searching for "daveverse" returns the following URL that works in the Mastodon UI, but redirects when opened standalone: https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.wordpress.com https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.w...
- cemerick 2y ago
  The redirect only happens if you aren't logged into to mastodon.social. (Which may well be a misconfiguration ofc)

paulcole 2y ago

This is like how my dad says SNL was awesome when he was 19 and sucked when I was 19. But I think it was awesome when I was 19 and sucks now that my kid is 19.

defgeneric 2y ago

I may be missing the point of this blog but I don't think I am. I too miss the era of blogging but this isn't it. The only thing this piece does is name drop--without having the courage to actually name names--and point out how those "famous" (we can't judge, as they're unnamed) people were so wrong back then and the writer was so right. The line that actually answers the title is a cliche and isn't elaborated on: the web brings like-minded people together from all over the world.

resonious 2y ago

Isn't the web still like this? It's easy to find communities that are deep into pretty much anything.

munchler 2y ago

> I later learned that the execs at most of the tech companies were similarly clueless on what made software possible, and basic stuff like trading off time for space and vice versa. Why would an exec ever need to know about time/space tradeoffs? That's an engineering detail that is almost never relevant at the executive level. If you're pitching a business idea at this level, you're going to have a rough time.

malfist 2y ago
That stood out to me too. If your customers won't care about it I wouldn't expect your execs to have deep understanding of it.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I concur. The following stood out to me; >> was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it. He says this like it's a bad thing. When really the company is just trying to find out if the thing being pitched can be sold to a not-engineer. Too often engineers love an idea because it "can be done". They can list features all day long, but lack the skills to understand (or articulate) the benefits to the prospective customer.
- onion2k 2y ago
  Prioritizing time makes a product fast. Prioritizing space makes it cheap. Customers often do care about the outcome of a tech decision even if they don't care about the decision itself. Therefore the leaders at a company should care too, or should at least empower people below them to make good decisions.
  - malfist 2y ago
    I doubt consumers at the checkout line buying software are thinking about how fast or slow the software will run on their hardware compared to the competitor software
atoav 2y ago

Scrapemist 2y ago

Too many I’s and they’s

webprofusion 2y ago

Sorry, why is this on hackernews?

viccis 2y ago

To be honest, if the author of this communicated pitches as ineffectively as this piece communicated the topic in its title, I am not surprised that whatever nameless gatekeeper he's talking about passed on his pitch. That's not even to get into the fact that executives don't necessarily need to understand software implementation details to size up an idea. Very odd blog post.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
Yeah but I think that's the point, isn't it? The author expected the people who were gatekeeping which tech got built to understand the tech that they were deciding on [0]. Instead they did not understand tech but understood business. Which means that a techie explaining the idea to them had to couch it in business terms. Y'know: a pitch. If a techie is explaining a tech idea to another techie, we use completely different language than if we're communicating to a non-techie. This blog post feels like that, like they're talking to a group of peers rather than an audience with a different viewpoint on the world. [0] I think it's a little naive, but perfectly understandable, to expect this kind of person to understand the tech. It is interesting that these decisions are made by business folk with no understanding of the tech. There are, after all, business people who do understand tech available to make this kind of decision.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tessierashpool9 2y ago

That he met Steve Jobs is the most important detail, justifying these aimlessly meandering ramblings.

AIFounder 2y ago

[dead]

082349872349872 2y ago

> ...a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience [is] the web I want back. What's wrong with dumb keyword text search for people using near-hapax interest- and experience-specific vocabulary?

sieabahlpark 2y ago
All the fake sites that use those same words but have none of the real content