Does my computer get involved when person A sends something illicit to person B? As a normal user on the internet, no. That's between them, and the law only deals with them. With certain decentralised anonymous systems, the answer is different. Now there are legal liability issues, at least.
Not to downplay my personal importance (=make an ostentatious display of humility, lol) I can work on art and projects to express the importance of other things in the world that aren't myself.
But it's still your expression, or put another way an expression of you.
Imagine art critics studying your art - they would be asking what was your history, context, what happened to you and what was going through your head that made you do this. It's always about you, even - maybe especially, considering that defeating one's ego is still noteworthy - if you don't want it to be about you.
Making art that's not about the artist is reserved to LLM... At least for now.
I think by "proxy the requests", they mean, these are usually on a static site and the browser is directly pulling in the Mastodon content client-side. They want to be good citizens and add a caching layer that they run.
A good question. Perhaps a rule like this: the top 10 tech companies should be put to a worldwide referendum on whether they should be allowed to exist. If "no" is the majority, they should be dismantled into smaller companies or turned into public utilities.
Where are you seeing signs of a web replacer? Native apps? Or big social media platforms built on the web, that replace the need (for mose users) to 'touch' the base web layers directly?
It would be sad if those bury the web and bury our rich, free open platform paradigm.
If a good decentralised open thing replaced it instead, cool.
It's like tragedy of the commons. Open platforms are always susceptible to EEE (embrace extend extinguish) by design (would like to be proven wrong). And there will always be businesses (people) who when platform is popular enough would like to take over that for profit.
A commons is indeed vulnerable to collapse though bad management. So it won't take care of itself, but needs deliberate effort and coordination to maintain. If we want to keep the open web, can't we put the necessary work in?
One challenge for web-enjoyers is it's not obvious in a consensus-making way where 'weak points' that need help are, and what's an acceptable loss (say: video on the web. We can post raw video on a webhost. It's expensive, so no one does. And most video content is crap, so who cares - let the platforms have that?)
I disagree that open platforms are always susceptible to EEE. In my mind, their openness (or more precisely, the true openness of their protocol(s)) prevents that.
Sure, there's a lot of DRM crap on the WWW now, but there's also still plenty of plaintext. The mainstream going with the EEE crowd is a given (being money people, they have the motive, means, and opportunity to streamline onboarding in a way the openness true believers don't), but the WWW platform remains fundamentally open despite everything thanks to the openness of the protocols it's built on.
A classic example of EEE closer to a protocol takeover is how Google handled XMPP. Yet people still use XMPP. It's just not huge. But open != huge or mainstream. Usually quite the opposite (see above about money people herding the mainstream to their platforms).
A rather more blatant takeover is the more recent hostile takeover of Freenode IRC. In that case the community revolted against the takeover and relocated (some to another IRC server and IIRC some to Matrix)
Ted Nelson's critiques are good. Tech/Culture needs critics. Ted also tried being a culture-tech builder, and Xanadu just didn't work out. Despite several attempts, lots of resources spent...
Its ideas probably influenced Twitter. Because they were good ideas. Could've been independently discovered in the Platonic space of ideal tech-powered media too...
Yes, great social collaboration happens on Twitter. A bunch of inane squabbling and criminal threats too.
Forums should have separate layers for the object-level discussion, and meta-discussion. Then people can zoom into a peculiar grammatical detail that takes their fancy, but the main thread of a topic can keep going uninterrupted.
Then if a grammar discussion comes to a conclusion (as decided by the forum owner/editor-in-chief) it gets enforced on main threads thenceforth.
Trademarks are there to protect consumers from dishonestly represented goods. If I buy some display tech marketed as "HDMI-compatible" but unlicensed, and it works with my other HDMI equipment (say, its maker reverse-engineered the HDMI spec), no one has been defrauded.
