
FB's Instant Articles and Google AMP are making it harder to publish on web - Jerry2
http://www.recode.net/2016/10/20/13318746/online-publishing-platform-amp-facebook-instant-articles-apple-news
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niftich
I write about AMP on here [1][2]. Some of the author's points reflect my own;
but I don't quite agree on how he arrives at his point.

It's true that the big gatekeepers like Google and Facebook are treating their
proprietary formats preferentially. I don't _in itself_ see this as
problematic.

It's true that these formats are not plain text, so code or the aid of some
framework or publishing platform is wise if one wants to publish in such a
way. This isn't a new development, because Wordpress and other platforms have
been around for more than a decade, and hand-posting plaintext documents went
out of fashion precisely because of the ease of manageability that publishing
and blogging tools provide.

The original incarnation of self-publishing on the Web died when most ISPs
decided not to allow home servers on residential plans, and truly became
nonsensical when DDOS attacks became commonplace.

Once we moved to the loosely-interpreted re-imagining of self-publishing where
we host our files out of someone else's server, there's little point to not
relying on an application that ingests your text and transforms it into
whatever form is most advantageous for the given situation: AMP when serving
through Google, FB Instant Articles when serving through Facebook, plain text
or plain HTML if so preferred.

EDIT: I don't disagree that it's unfortunate that the web is less
decentralized, more proprietary, less open-access than it used to be. A large
contributor is that a few big players control most discoverability, and
alternatives are slow to take off due to network effects. Other decentralized
networks always grapple with discoverability; ones that have it solved also
rely on a few big players, but in most cases this is perceived as less of a
problem.

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20"AMP"&sort=byDate&ty...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20"AMP"&sort=byDate&type=comment)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722969)

