

Big Internet - smacktoward
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5010

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GuiA
I agree with the sentiment of this post. More generally, I think that any
social web infrastructure that's run by a company (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace,
etc.) will end up being pure crap because companies will always favor short
term profits over thoughtful long term decisions.

I have a dream that one day we'll have an open source system that functions in
a distributed/federated way and overlaps in functionality with:

\- Twitter, for the "stream of consciousness", instant aspect and/or

\- Facebook, for the photo sharing/keeping up with old friends, etc. and/or

\- Blogs, for the ability to quickly publish any prose and/or

\- IRC, for the ability to instantly chat about any topic with complete
strangers and/or

\- Geocities, for the ability to easily publish static websites and/or

\- Forums, for the ability to have long, deep, asynchronous conversations with
a small or large group of other interesting parties.

Theses are the services that I've enjoyed using on the web, but most of them
are dying/dead now because the companies that own them add cruft and bullshit
to keep their investors happy and their users clicking on ads (HN has been
surprisingly resilient to that, for very straightforward reasons).

Ideally such a system would be fairly straightforward for any nerd to setup on
their server (just like phpBB and friends who just require copying/pasting a
folder on a server with mod_php, that is pretty much any server), and then
their friends/family could sign up and join there. There have been attempts at
this (eg. Diaspora), but nothing really ever made anything compelling.

I think there's something nice about relative stability. For example, some
phpBB forums out there have had active members for more than a decade, with
very little functionality added. Similarly, I like that IRC is the same now
than it was 20 years ago.

There's something to be done here, and it probably won't come out of silicon
valley.

