
We need a better web, not an open Twitter - julien
http://blog.superfeedr.com/better-web/
======
seiji
(cross-posting and expanding from
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4296416> because that thread got dead'd
and I crave more attention).

We've reached a dangerous point. Everybody in the world joining the internet
combined with a lack of knowledge about how things work means the unwashed
masses gravitate towards centralized services. Instead of building distributed
competitive services on top of a distributed fault-tolerant bi-directional
network, we have rampant mass centralization. Protocols and interoperability
are dead.

People aren't building billion dollar companies on top of application level
protocols because open protocols would invite competition. Why compete when
you can do a land grab for average people mindshare and lock 'em in forever?

We are fighting pressure of hundreds of millions of new pocketputers being
sold every year. Our tiny idealistic cries of "more decentralization, no ads,
and open data!" have the importance of a fish farting in the ocean. The
teenagers and moms want to access their monkeysphere gossip. Their only care
about technology is if somebody they find attractive is using it.

We can now almost legitimately say "The Internet is down!" when AWS goes tits
up. People can't get news from their favorite boy bands when mysql hoses
twitter (for the 7,000th time). Apple is centralizing document and data
structure storage. Google could reproduce the thought patterns of a billion
people if they cared enough. Distributed openness lost about five years ago.

I forgot my point. Anyway, go read
[http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-
_Overclocked...](http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-
_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html)

~~~
julien
I generally agree, our web is increasingly made of huge corporations, silos
and less and less made of small indie websites which would guarantee that no
one is ever powerful enough to decide for everybody else. Yet, I'm not as
pessimistic as you seem to be. We can make things better: we just have to do
it.

~~~
seiji
We should definitely try, but centralization does give some dangerous
benefits.

It would be difficult to have trending topics in a completely decentralized
twitter (everybody would have to report to some central "trending topic
collector" service, right?). You could still notify someone of @ mentions, but
then @foo turns into an email address (or something with lookupable routing
information). Not very pretty.

With tumblr, half the benefit of the service is seeing who posted the same
thing somewhere else. Unless you are Google, we can't quite cross reference
the entire web in real time to see who posts the same thing or who forked it
from whom.

Centralization gives us many nice features we can't get from distributed
systems, but it also gives us single points of failure, arbitrary internet
dictatorships, and fad driven startup cargo cult fetishism.

~~~
misuba
Trending topics are this decade's flagpole sitting. Replace it with something
just as dumb-joinable-fun that's only possible with a decentralized web, and
people will forget about the old thing after a while. Easier said than done,
of course, but not an inherent advantage to centralization.

And Google used to be impossible too. There's always a chance that someone
reading this site will do to Google exactly what Google did to AltaVista, and
for the exact reasons you cite here.

~~~
untog
_Trending topics are this decade's flagpole sitting_

I don't think that's true. Identifying trending topics can be hugely
important. I forget where I saw it, but someone did an analysis of tweets
about "earthquake", when one occurred on the east coast of the US some months
ago. It followed the path of the quake almost exactly. When people are posting
about events before the news does, it's great to be able to detect it.

------
webwanderings
"The goal is a better open web. One on which I can chose which tools I use,
without forcing my friends to do the same decision..."

Very well said. This is exactly how it started with emails and it continues as
is. You can't force people, to make them follow your social network stream,
you can only join the stream which should be independent.

------
Argorak
Didn't identi.ca the attempt to do just that, through AtomPub and OStatus? The
OStatus page even mentions PubSubHubbub as a future plan.

<http://status.net/wiki/OStatus>

Sadly, it seems like the Twitter compatible API gets much more love...

~~~
julien
You are right, Ostatus is an excellent stack. However, as you pointed,
developer decided to go with the "sexier" looking Twitter. Needless to say
that they eventually all got rejected by the cutie.

------
nchuhoai
I think we have seen this trend for a while now. The fundamental question
seems to be around how open/closed an essential part of the web experience can
be. As always there is a delicate balance somewhere between crazy open and
crazy closed.

Without leaning towards one side or another, it seems to open side seems to be
losing over time. We have seen it with discussions about open standards like
OAuth:

<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4294959>

It seems (maybe) like there is a ultimate trade-off between openness and ease
of use/convenience and we as users usually decide with out wallet where to go.
And it seems like we have voted indeed.

------
username3
We just need all information in one place with an easy way to add original
thoughts and an easy way to curate and discover what has been said already.
Information is repeated and all over the place in pieces or outdated.

~~~
icebraining
So that the people running that "one place" can then lock it down and demand
money for the content?

~~~
username3
Centralized or decentralized, just a resource everyone will know.

------
darkhorn
You mean Distributed Social Networking Protocol
<https://github.com/ilhanyumer/DSNP>

------
i04n
We need something like a next generation Usenet.
<http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet>

