Tom WalkerNov 13, 2022

There was once a dream of a decentralised web.

As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate.

Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens.

Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here.

Show threadKristian (inactive/moved)
@tomw Problem's, though: The centralized solutions and walled gardens started out by trying to solve problems (mostly related to usability, "accessibility" for less tech-savvy people, ...) the decentralized crowd either wasn't aware of or didn't care about or actively didn't want to solve because it would hurt one of the various technical freedoms. Just remembering RSS which always was great for _reading_ stuff coming from some blog but got you into a mess of different accounts on different blog systems if you ever dared to think about commenting a post you saw. Or messengers - XMPP always was cool, technically, but still for quite a while it was impossible to reliably send even images to other contacts and be sure they'd be able to receive and display them in a meaningful manner, even in days when such a thing was a basic feature on most of the "established" messengers on smartphones. Not even talking about all the technical mess e-mail is if you want to transport anything else but plain text. Really hope that this time we'll be able to do decentralized systems better or even "right". 😁️
Nov 14, 2022 at 6:13amWeb
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@z428 I think the rise of mobile doesn't get talked about enough here – that was a big moment when the centralised platforms had an easier experience just at the moment when decentralised platforms not designed for mobile stopped working well. And of course the whole app store model severely pushes the centralised over the decentralised
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@z428 So the current crop of decentralised networks represent more of a reinvention than a continuation, because it really has to work quite differently to work well on mobile
Show threadKristian (inactive/moved)Nov 14, 2022
@tomw True. But more than that, I guess the rise of the mobile caused something completely else to happen: It was about providing virtually "fool-proof" technology to a crowd of people that never before had any contact, experience with the internet, computers and everything related. It was about providing technology to people who were massively used to interacting with contacts via text messages based on phone numbers (that's what got WhatsApp big and messengers in general, as opposed to e-mail and all). And, frankly, the open/decentralized crowd has handled this rather poorly (remembering early responses to Android and iPhone in my environment mostly were like "this will never persist" or "who needs an internet device without a real keyboard anyway" - we know pretty much how wrong this was, by now.😑️).
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@z428 Oh yeah – open source people really can't stand (and mostly refuse to implement) phone-number-as-identity, but it does make any signup process ten times easier for the average person