nascenticityNov 18, 2022
Tom Walker

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.

Nov 13, 2022 at 7:10pmMastodon for Android
Show threadCammaCNov 13, 2022
@tomw am I old for remembering MiRC?
Show threadTom WalkerNov 13, 2022
@cammac I was going to mention IRC in this but it feels like it belongs earlier! I did still use it in that time period (a decade ago) but very rarely. I learned whole chunks of the protocol in the early 2000s because Napster was basically a hacked up IRC client
Show threadCammaCNov 14, 2022
@tomw oh Napster, now there's a step in the past. How things were much simpler back then.
Show threadʞuᴉԀ ✅Nov 14, 2022

@tomw @cammac as an aside, Twitch chat is IRC, you can use an IRC client to connect to it, and some of the people I know from back in the day do.

I use an app called Chatterino that is a multichannel chat client that makes use of that fact, so when I'm on a channel that is co-streaming with others I can see/interact-with the chat from them all while just watching one video feed.

Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@PeaEyeEnnKay @cammac That's neat – I've never really used Twitch for anything yet but this may come in handy to know someday!
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenDec 8, 2022
@tomw @cammac I still use IRC daily and our 100person IRC community is still really strong. There's also things like thelounge that aim to modernize IRC https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
GitHub - thelounge/thelounge: 💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client

💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client - thelounge/thelounge

GitHub
Show threadAlexis LAMEIRE #Apero 🌈🍺🖧Dec 19, 2022
@tomw @cammac I've learned Linux with IRC, and do a lto of troll ;) It's still alive but declining !
Show threadNateNov 14, 2022
@cammac @tomw yes but in a good way
Show threadCasaperNov 15, 2022

@cammac @tomw

If I don't see you as old for remembering mIRC:
Will you not deem me old for remembering Usenet?
Deal?
🙄😆😆😆

Show threadThe Saanich DailyDec 9, 2022

@cammac @tomw

I remember the iRC days well...dialing up on Compuserve with Netscape Navigator :)

Show threadRachel GreenhamDec 9, 2022

@cammac @tomw BitchX please 😉

(this might require explanation: BitchX was a console-based IRC client of some repute, or infamy, depending who you talked to)

Also ran a hybrid-irc server until surprisingly recently - on a raspberry pi, back when they were still cool. le sigh...

Show threadrag. Gustavino BevilacquaNov 13, 2022

@tomw

«Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future»… but he told that in 2010.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/20/berners_lee_says_facebook_a_thret_to_web/

Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future

Zuckerberg rains on 20th birthday bash

The Register
Show threadTom WalkerNov 13, 2022
@GustavinoBevilacqua Yes he could see the threat to web interoperability from the beginnings of social media. It has taken this long to get to a point where enough people have experienced for themselves the negatives of being locked in to a social platform.
Show threadaustralia.etcNov 13, 2022
@tomw and here is grand! 🙃
Show threadMichael UhlNov 14, 2022

@tomw I’ve found the growth of centralized social media to be a demoralizing thing.

I wonder about the “positives” that you posit for centralized social media - ease of discovery is the only one that comes to mind… and even there, it brings other downsides: you now need to have “verification” to know if the person you found is the person that you actually wanted.

All I know is that the just the idea of decentralized social media makes me happier than I was.

Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@uhl_me I think it is generally far easier for most people to post a quick update about what they're doing than to go and eg. update their website. Especially for small local things, they feel able to post a lot more info up on social media and have it seen vs struggling to update a website that mostly isn't looked at. And the info doesn't just sit there, it is pushed out to their followers, at least in theory.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@uhl_me I wrote it that way because I think it's clear that most people experienced it as a significant upgrade in ease of use compared to the setup and maintenance of a website. Unfortunately.
Show threadMichael UhlNov 14, 2022
@tomw I do understand, and sympathize with, that point of view. It’s more than a little frustrating, however, that despite the fact that applications built on open protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP) fueled the growth of the early public Internet, the builders of “Web 2.0” chose a closed path. Nothing against a profit motive, but I’d prefer that you seek that profit by being the best at doing something - not by being the only choice.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@uhl_me Worse, they made a big song and dance at first about being "open" at least in terms of APIs, then cut all of that off after they had built a user base!
Show threadTomNov 14, 2022
@uhl_me While I support your point that you seek being best at doing something, it also can be seen that users or customers sometimes do not seek 'the' best solution - but rather the most convenient one...
Show threadskinnyrafDec 20, 2022
@uhl_me @tomw overlap of bubbles is something that was very limited with separate forums typically covering specific topics. While general forums existed, they were often complete cesspits. We had "off -topic" sections on forums and specific discussions often drifted, but this was very limited due to typically skewed demographics on each forum. Centralised and federated social media are general, have large user base and hashtags/boosts/retweets allow easy spreading of content.
Show threadLinkmeisterNov 14, 2022
@tomw Some blogs still exist.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@Linkmeister Yes, lots! But there's less of a "blogosphere" scene around it than there was. A lot of people have moved to writing on centralised platforms, first Medium and then most recently Substack
Show threadLinkmeisterNov 14, 2022
@tomw Yeah, my blogroll is probably half dead links (some literally; this summer I deleted three blogs of people who've died in the last few years).
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@Linkmeister I ran a UK political left blogroll thing for years, but yeah link rot set in badly until it wasn't really worth it any more, there were only a few blogs on it that were still active. (It had auto post to birdsite too but they banned it a few years ago)
Show threadLinkmeisterNov 14, 2022
@tomw Maybe there'll be a resurgence. I used to be an everyday blogger but over the past four years it's been more like once every six months as FB ate up blogs.
Show threadDon WatkinsNov 14, 2022
@tomw I am returning to blogging.
Show threadRaineer  🦆Nov 14, 2022

@tomw I read this and weep a bit at how some of the bigger writers have gone to #substack.

The lack of support for #rss within paid #substack blogs is shifty at best. If you’re going to charge money for writing on your platform, creating an authenticated feed with full content should be table stakes.

Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@raineer Yeah Substack is annoying. I can see why writers go for it (easier to get paid than eg a Patreon) but it's effectively an extension of newspaper-style paywalls to even smaller/'indie' writers
Show threadGovernor SNov 14, 2022
@tomw Matrix is part of that dream. I've have often said something about how podcasting is no longer what it used to be because it is closed off now.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@kf4yfa I haven't really tried Matrix yet – I've recently used Discord, which kinda worked, and Slack, which really didn't. I think the issue is that it's whoever sets up the group (not me in those cases!) that ends up deciding it
Show threadGovernor SNov 14, 2022
@tomw Makes sense.
Show threadErik McCormickNov 14, 2022
@tomw USENET with a GUI?
Show threadR SaravananNov 18, 2022
@emccormickva @tomw Indeed! I joined Mastodon a couple of weeks ago, and it has a USENET vibe (which may not last!)
Show threadmandelbrot57 🐿️ 🧶Jun 23, 2023
@RSarava
For me it has a forum vibe.And that´s exactly, why I like the fediverse.
@emccormickva @tomw
Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022

@tomw Back in the day, we owned our own data and maintained it on our own servers. Now, that data is hosted on a Mastodon instance. We can export our own data to preserve it. But does this preserve the conversations?

If we want to braise the sea level, and get the mainstream decentralized, how do we make this easy enough for general adoption while remaining sustainable and decentralized?

Seems we need to make the mental overhead required to own and operate trivial.

Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022
@tomw cc @thegibson
Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022
@tomw lol "raise". Let's not braise, please.
Show threadNateNov 14, 2022

@elight @tomw

I've thought for a while now that every house should have a home server. A social media host, an IOT app hub, schedule, whiteboard, timeline, all of the stuff we give over to Google and Facebook... It's weird to me that a desktop could handle all that but we don't use them like that, and instead we give all that info to other people's database.

Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022
@renegade_nate @tomw Agreed. And we need to make that easy to own and operate. If only businesses would stop obsessing about having our personal data and simply sell us products and services!
Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022
@renegade_nate @tomw I'd love to move away from capitalism. But we need another system that works at scale.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@elight Yes I think there is a need for more "mini" instances, single user or small group, so we're not all relying on volunteer admins to take care of hundreds of thousands of accounts
Show threadEvan LightNov 14, 2022

@tomw And that's just for Mastodon. MSFT tried to sell home servers, a couple of decades ago. No one bought them.

If we aspire to change the world, we need to take the east of the world with us.

Show threadSasha Kotlyar 🌻 Nov 14, 2022
@tomw Messenger apps rarely interoperated. (Yahoo and MSN did for a bit, I think?) But we did have cool apps like Trillian and Pidgin that reimplemented proprietary messenger apps' protocols.
Show threadCeceliaNov 14, 2022
@arktronic I really miss using Adium (Mac client using the libpurple library from Pidgin). I recall adding Facebook Messenger for a bit when it supported XMPP.
Show threadGhost0x0Nov 14, 2022

@tomw

Very true it’s weird how things come around. RSS, irc, email still exists

Show threadSeedy! #SwedenNov 14, 2022
@tomw And it's only taken a self-entitled money-grabbing nut job purchasing a massive social media corporation and ad network for us to realize that decentralization was what the internet should've been about all along.
Show threadJessie Ann (she/they)Nov 14, 2022

@tomw

Google reading this:

Show threadAndrewNov 14, 2022
@tomw gosh, I do miss rss feed readers. I know we can still use them, but it's not the same. Here's hoping they make a return.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@TheCurbau Yeah, the huge scale of #wordpress use is the main thing keeping RSS (just about) going - a lot of sites that don't mention support anywhere do still support it, probably without knowing in a lot of cases
Show threadKristian (inactive/moved)Nov 14, 2022
@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". 😁️
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
Show threadRich (RJ)Nov 14, 2022
@tomw but aren't blogs still centralised? They generally sit on one server and if that fails or the provider goes away, so does your blog and all your post history, comments etc.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@rj In a certain way... especially if you use wordpress.com, Blogger etc. But if you download the software and put it on a web server yourself then it is arguably more decentralised than this system of multi-user instances
Show threadGa SchuNov 14, 2022
@tomw
I love this turn of the milennium feeling here on Mastodon.
I thought Wikipedia was the only site that had survived the general commercialisation, but now this appears.
Show threadTom WalkerNov 14, 2022
@schuga Yeah - there are some other corners but not much. Even Wikipedia is centralised of course, it has just managed to continue as a non-profit, but a bad leadership could change that at some future point (which would presumably lead to attempted forks)
Show threadTechSquidTVNov 14, 2022
@tomw I dream of it. I want it back badly. I hope we can figure out how to make mastodon run a little leaner though because self hosting this is way more complicated and resource intensive than an RSS feed. Fingers crossed for some Rust based fork lol