[HN Gopher] The Web's Missing Interoperability
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Web's Missing Interoperability
        
       Author : davidmckenna
       Score  : 109 points
       Date   : 2021-03-02 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
        
       | pjettter wrote:
       | It's not the web, it's computing in general that has not evolved
       | in the right direction. A grid is not a grid is not a grid. An
       | image is not an image is not an image. Etc. So rather than fixing
       | the web, fix computing. It will fix the web too. If not, the web
       | is even more in trouble.
        
         | noizejoy wrote:
         | $technology {web, computing, ...} is a mere reflection of the
         | dynamics in our species.
        
       | jacobobryant wrote:
       | Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately
       | I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a
       | (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions.
       | So each item in the feed would be something like "published this
       | blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written
       | in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that
       | person's atom feed. Then if you want to build a search
       | engine/social network/recommender system, you can get started by
       | crawling and indexing a bunch of feeds.
       | 
       | I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes
       | self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other
       | sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this
       | app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you.
       | 
       | Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it
       | could expand to a general audience too.
       | 
       | [1] https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data
        
         | mathgladiator wrote:
         | I've considered this perspective as well from a lower level.
         | I'm a huge fan of gossip-style communication, and I've wondered
         | why all my data is shredded across various databases when it
         | could be all located within a single giant JSON on my phone,
         | and then I could just gossip a version to my friends.
         | 
         | The key is privacy at the data-layer, and I have a start with
         | my programming language for board games: http://www.adama-
         | lang.org/
        
         | beardedetim wrote:
         | I've been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it's a
         | great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move.
         | 
         | The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting.
         | No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is
         | using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really
         | work, I think you need everyone hosting their own "log".
         | 
         | Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad
         | to see others feel the same as I do.
        
           | jacobobryant wrote:
           | That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can
           | self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including
           | account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-
           | hosted apps a lot.
           | 
           | Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week
           | ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
        
             | pdonis wrote:
             | I don't think the issue is hosting the app itself, it's
             | hosting each user's data. For the vast majority of users,
             | hosting their own data is not even on the radar. They
             | assume that whatever app they are using is hosting their
             | data, and the only price they will accept for doing that is
             | "free".
        
               | jacobobryant wrote:
               | The app would include a database (perhaps sqlite), so
               | that shouldn't be an issue unless I'm misunderstanding
               | you. you can host it for free on replit already (albeit
               | with sleeping/cold starts)
        
               | pdonis wrote:
               | _> The app would include a database (perhaps sqlite)_
               | 
               | Meaning an sqlite database hosted with the app's code?
               | How will "host it for free" scale when your app goes
               | viral and you have a million plus (or a billion plus)
               | users?
        
               | jacobobryant wrote:
               | It'll scale because it's self-hosted. You don't serve
               | everyone with the same app instance; everyone runs their
               | own instance.
        
               | pdonis wrote:
               | _> It 'll scale because it's self-hosted. You don't serve
               | everyone with the same app instance; everyone runs their
               | own instance._
               | 
               | So everyone has their own free hosting account with
               | repl.it and runs an app instance on it? Yes, technically
               | that's "free" as in "no cost", but it's not "free" as in
               | "no effort". The latter is the kind of "free" that
               | Facebook users expect.
        
               | jacobobryant wrote:
               | It's hardly more effort than making a Facebook account,
               | and replit is still young--it's only going to get easier.
        
               | pdonis wrote:
               | _> It 's hardly more effort than making a Facebook
               | account_
               | 
               | I'm not talking about the effort involved in opening an
               | account. I'm talking about the effort involved in
               | managing one's own instance of an app. That is not zero,
               | and nobody, not repl.it or anyone else, can magically
               | make it zero. But it is zero for Facebook users, because
               | they aren't managing anything; Facebook is.
               | 
               | If, OTOH, your idea is that repl.it does all the managing
               | (what happens if the server hosting the app goes down?
               | how is the data backed up? etc., etc.), then we're back
               | to the scaling problem: how do you scale that to a huge
               | number of users without either not being free, or
               | adopting the same business model that Facebook has (the
               | avoiding of which was supposed to be the reason for doing
               | all this in the first place)?
        
           | phkahler wrote:
           | >> The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for
           | hosting. No one wants to self host.
           | 
           | Self hosting needs to be as easy as plugging a box into your
           | router. This means some type of DNS or other way to find your
           | node given all the ISPs failure to provide fixed IPs. Also a
           | super easy management method and access controls (public,
           | private, friends).
           | 
           | I have a lot more thoughts on that.
        
             | beardedetim wrote:
             | Do you think there needs to be the infra to support the
             | self hosting or the "killer app" first to drive the early
             | adopters?
             | 
             | I think an internet that is mostly self-hosted is a healthy
             | one and unlocks a lot of things I've been noodling with
             | over the years. I'm hopeful someone smarter than me is
             | close to getting us there.
        
         | hertzrat wrote:
         | Interesting concept for sure. Is there a revenue model to
         | attract top influencers? Maybe just links to a collection of
         | Patreon-likes?
        
           | jacobobryant wrote:
           | hm, no idea. I haven't thought about revenue models much
           | since I've envisioned this more as a grass-roots thing than a
           | startup opportunity. I think the main thing would be just
           | making it dead easy to get started. You wouldn't necessarily
           | need to jump start a new network since the whole point of
           | this is to be interoperable with existing networks.
           | 
           | A good first step might be making a personal site generator.
           | Put in links to your twitter/youtub/substack/medium/whatever
           | accounts, and then you get a nice looking site with all your
           | content in one place. Maybe throw in a subscribe button so
           | people can get email digests of all your content.
           | 
           | and then, almost as a side effect, anyone who uses the site
           | generator also is publishing it all as an atom feed.
        
             | mariushn wrote:
             | How about Facebook, which requires an account to view the
             | person posts? How would those be read? Besides maybe
             | requiring user & password and logging in with a headless
             | browser. Not sure if Instagram/Pinterest require a login
             | too.
        
               | jacobobryant wrote:
               | Entering in username + password is probably the only
               | feasible way. Suboptimal for sure, but worked for mint...
               | 
               | In practice, this would probably start out with plugins
               | for only sites that make data public. Not perfect, but
               | still useful.
        
           | beardedetim wrote:
           | I think the money is in the aggregator. Everyone creates
           | their own "log" so the noise is crazy. You follow
           | "influencers" or go to aggregate sites that only vet info,
           | not produce it.
           | 
           | You could have the aggregate behind a paywall, you could have
           | donations or ads as well.
        
       | hertzrat wrote:
       | He talks about about how privacy laws like those around contact
       | lists are bad because make it harder for new social media
       | companies to arise. Seems like a bad trade off for everyone but
       | investors and for future users of The Crystal Network that I keep
       | joking I will create: a network where you are rewarded with
       | healing crystals in the mail for soothing one another on the
       | platform, creating a veritable lattice of support
        
       | olivermarks wrote:
       | Seeing Tim O'Reilly speaking at one of his web 2.0 summits around
       | 2009 about the urgency of preventing a few companies/people
       | monopolizing everything comes into my mind regularly when I see
       | tech monopolist oligarchs swaggering around and being feted by a
       | fawning media.
       | 
       | We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and
       | interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size
       | to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon &
       | Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller
       | business evolution
        
         | jefftk wrote:
         | As the OP points out, the regulation that we are getting, so
         | far, benefits these walled gardens by prioritizing privacy over
         | interoperability.
        
           | olivermarks wrote:
           | Yes it's actually getting a lot worse!
           | 
           | Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we
           | went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have
           | been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist
           | businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete
           | with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have
           | been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting
           | supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is
           | incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by
           | small businesses. Now we have a pandemic where the big box
           | stores and online retailers remain open while the mom & pops
           | are closed and going bust. It's a slow moving economic
           | disaster IMO
        
             | lotsofpulp wrote:
             | >Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom
             | & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting
             | them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as
             | most taxes are paid by small businesses.
             | 
             | It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay
             | extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is
             | insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
        
               | olivermarks wrote:
               | raise taxes on who? If 'unnecessary middle men' are out
               | of business that leaves a few wealthy consumers and a few
               | centralized suppliers. The rest of the population will be
               | unemployed supported by the state if they are lucky
        
               | lotsofpulp wrote:
               | Taxes on the wealthy. It is wealth redistribution one way
               | or another, but a more efficient one than keeping
               | middlemen around for no reason.
        
               | olivermarks wrote:
               | Most wealthy people are multi passport stateless and keep
               | their money offshore, paying little or no tax. The bigger
               | the global corporation the more likely they are to be
               | registered in Ireland or other tax free havens. There is
               | no trickle down in taxes when a few have won the Monopoly
               | game
        
               | luplex wrote:
               | Middlemen still do have benefits. They provide
               | resiliency. If Amazon commits serious fraud and is shut
               | down, there is no one left. We should not have privately
               | owned systems that are too big to fail.
        
       | mbgerring wrote:
       | Social media apps made it impossible to export your social graph
       | many years before GDPR. The only thing that would make them do it
       | now is if they were legally required to.
        
       | adamc wrote:
       | I hate all of these attempts to monetize communication. The
       | government should strictly regulate them.
        
       | kmeisthax wrote:
       | This is sort of like arguing, "if we make it illegal to push
       | pills on people, then the Sackler family will have a monopoly on
       | opiate addictions".
        
       | anderspitman wrote:
       | In my opinion the way to enter the social network market is using
       | the Slack/Discord approach. Rather than trying to make a better
       | Facebook for the world, make a better Facebook for people to use
       | for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to
       | tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start
       | connecting communities.
       | 
       | I _almost_ achieved escape velocity with Matrix /Riot in my
       | gaming group a couple years ago. Ultimately it was too buggy for
       | them at the time and we ended up on FB messenger, but if it had
       | worked they'd all be primed to join a Matrix-based social network
       | right now.
        
         | ricree wrote:
         | >make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific
         | community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account
         | to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting
         | communities.
         | 
         | Which, of course, was precisely how Facebook broke into the
         | social network market in the first place.
         | 
         | Initially not just for college students, but students at
         | specific colleges. Then connecting students between college,
         | then bringing in family members of those students, and so on.
        
           | EGreg wrote:
           | Except now it's much more expensive and difficult to match
           | what people want in 2021. You can't just make a face book of
           | ... "Profiles".
           | 
           | Trust me we've been working on
           | https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached
           | the point where people's main complaint is the APPEARANCE
           | hahaha
        
             | amiga-workbench wrote:
             | I can sort of see what they mean by appearance, but its not
             | far off looking tidy. The issues are mostly around padding
             | and UI element proportions.
             | 
             | Some of your icons are too large for the elements they are
             | inside of, the scaling of form elements within your filter
             | interface is somewhat inconsistent too.
             | 
             | If I wasn't completely slammed at work I'd be open to
             | submitting a PR.
        
               | EGreg wrote:
               | Definitely would highly appreciate it!
               | 
               | (Even happy to compensate you if you email me, see links
               | in my profile.)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ojilles wrote:
         | Basically be Shopify for Social Networks?
        
       | no_wizard wrote:
       | This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective
       | society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even
       | thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy
       | advocate.
       | 
       | Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR
       | and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives
       | I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is
       | drive people to where the eye balls are, so instead of just
       | _marketing_ on Facebook (or Twitter, or Reddit) you want to
       | _market and convert_ your audience all on the same platform(s)
       | because its increasingly difficult to do otherwise.
       | 
       | My counter point being of course, that this may have been
       | inevitable anyway, since this really is increasingly the way
       | people interact, is via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,
       | Reddit etc and less and less on the open web. Of course large
       | corporations can and should and will kicking or screaming or no,
       | comply with the laws, but little thought has been given how much
       | those laws don't disrupt the fundamental problem: disrupting the
       | stranglehold these companies have on interaction. I think a good
       | amount of the GDPR, and Apple's recent moves have good ideas and
       | net wins, but after reading this article, I can also see how it
       | will simply, in the long term, act as a form of regulatory
       | capture where only the largest entrenched companies can comply
       | and small companies, particularly non tech small businesses, will
       | be increasingly more reliant on those platforms going forward.
       | 
       | The solution isn't of course, to get rid of things like the GDPR,
       | but like all laws and regulation, it needs to be re-thought and
       | re-shaped as it affects the marketplace, and that's the crux of
       | the problem, most regulation is _set it and forget_ (particularly
       | in the US) where there is little after thought given or follow up
       | to it and augmenting it appropriately to minimize _real_
       | downsides (not perceived ones that corporations complain about,
       | but more barriers it creates to new businesses) and asking the
       | question of _is this acceptable or do we need to re-think some
       | aspect of this?_
       | 
       | I know this won't play that well either, its not going to be a
       | popular debate among my peers, but its important we consider all
       | the facts, none the less.
       | 
       | [0]: I may be reducing the article a little too much here,
       | forgive me, I really do think everyone should read it first
        
         | Aerroon wrote:
         | The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable
         | exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single
         | person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously
         | there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to
         | comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a
         | lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have
         | given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.
        
           | twiss wrote:
           | For new businesses, most support tickets will probably be
           | handled manually. This could even include such mundane things
           | as "could you reset my password" (if you haven't bothered to
           | implement a "forgot my password" mechanism yet, which is
           | perfectly reasonable). Another request could be, "could you
           | delete my account and data". Normally, if a user asks you
           | that, you should probably already do so anyway, GDPR just
           | says that you must. It also says that if they ask for their
           | data, you have to give it to them.
           | 
           | If you don't have many users yet, not many such requests will
           | come in, so I don't think this is an undue burden. In the
           | beginning, the burden will be roughly proportional to the
           | number of users you have. If the burden becomes too high,
           | it's easily automatable. So personally I don't think an
           | explicit exemption for small businesses is really necessary.
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | a huge part of this article is about clubhouse & social networks
       | means for virality, about how they can expand. taking contacts &
       | pushing to them is the kind of main model that Clubhouse is
       | doing.
       | 
       | > I get the argument around banning contact exports;
       | unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the
       | wake of Clubhouse's rise (never mind the fact that contacts have
       | been accessible -- and thus have been accessed! -- in this way
       | for years). What people making these calls -- and these laws --
       | need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing
       | competition.
       | 
       | what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality
       | systems are push model. each would be social network has to
       | bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of
       | invites out to their friends.
       | 
       | where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's
       | activity, see what networks he is most social on these days?
       | Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but
       | that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part
       | possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.
       | 
       | some standards for social network users to be able too interlink
       | & declare their other networks would be great, as a start.
       | second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can
       | get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be
       | looking at my associates.
       | 
       | we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and
       | social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to
       | explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of
       | cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's
       | standardize some good base level cross-social systems.
        
         | jdminhbg wrote:
         | > what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality
         | systems are push model. each would be social network has to
         | bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of
         | invites out to their friends.
         | 
         | > where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's
         | activity, see what networks he is most social on these days?
         | Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but
         | that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in
         | part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of
         | twitter.
         | 
         | Clubhouse actually is both push and pull. Yes, you can send
         | invites to friends to get them onto the app, but having your
         | contacts also lets them connect you to those already there when
         | you first log on.
         | 
         | Of course this isn't the open pull model you're talking about,
         | where I can discover new things my friend is doing, or find out
         | where he is most active. But using the phone number as an
         | identifier for social graphs is kind of a hack around the non-
         | existence of such a thing.
        
       | jrochkind1 wrote:
       | > The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-
       | based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize
       | effectively
       | 
       | Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.
        
         | twiss wrote:
         | Previously, cookies could be used to track users across
         | websites (e.g. multiple websites using the Shopify platform, by
         | making a request to shopify.com), but also to provide useful
         | functionality (e.g. remembering their contact details). Now,
         | this is not possible anymore, due to first-party isolation
         | being implemented in Safari and now Firefox.
         | 
         | Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser
         | can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can
         | fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy
         | and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as
         | well.
        
           | thombles wrote:
           | The author explains one of their main concerns:
           | 
           | > its attack on "tracking" -- which goes far beyond the IDFA
           | -- makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in one
           | place and convert them in another
           | 
           | Somehow I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for business
           | models affected by this.
        
           | jrochkind1 wrote:
           | It goes without saying to his audience that you can't
           | "monetize a platform-based storefront" without tracking users
           | across websites?
           | 
           | Maybe I don't understand what "monetize a platform-based
           | storefront" means exactly. He's talking about the particular
           | store on shopify making money, not shopify itself getting
           | customers, right?
        
         | tguedes wrote:
         | He means Shopify. Shopify merchants (and other DTC companies)
         | heavily use Facebook/Instagram to target the specific audience
         | they are targeting. Shopify has since announced that there will
         | be a tighter integration with Facebook Shops
        
           | jrochkind1 wrote:
           | What does that have to do with "apple's approach to cookies
           | makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult
           | to monetize effectively"?
        
       | crazypython wrote:
       | See also: Semantic web. RDF, OWL,
       | https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol . It's the original intent
       | of Tim-Berners Lee, the man who invented the web.
        
         | sbazerque wrote:
         | In my view the lack of authentication in the original semantic
         | web concept made it a SEO gaming vector for years and years.
         | 
         | Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic
         | understanding / semantics.
        
           | IggleSniggle wrote:
           | Trust is a harder problem than basic understanding /
           | semantics, because it requires basic understanding /
           | semantics as a prerequisite.
           | 
           | You might trust your banker with your money but not your
           | personal life, and trust your friend with your personal life
           | but not your bank account.
           | 
           | Therefore, you there must be explicit and implicit degrees of
           | trust that are specifically trust "for some intention" or at
           | even just "for some specific purpose." And then, you must
           | trust that the meaning of any promise or guarantee is
           | equivalent between parties.
        
       | dmitriid wrote:
       | > One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes
       | it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be
       | started in Europe
       | 
       | And then goes on to
       | 
       | > Moreover, it's a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook
       | didn't give permission for their information to be given to
       | Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more
       | difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable
       | data (from a business perspective, anyways) is the social graph
       | 
       | So what does he propose then, huh? "Oh, forget about privacy.
       | Since Facebook sits on a trove of personal data the never asked
       | consent for, everyone should have the same access to the same
       | trove of data"?
        
         | gowld wrote:
         | Simple proposal:
         | 
         | The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA.
         | 
         | Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell
         | other people's data.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | warkdarrior wrote:
           | That is the situation under GDPR right now (at least
           | legally). But then the problem is with moving my data to
           | another platform, especially if my data involves other
           | people. For example, can I take my contacts from Facebook and
           | move them to Signal? What if you are in my contacts, do I
           | need your permission to move your info to Signal?
        
       | giantrobot wrote:
       | The web had interoperability but it was largely ignored and then
       | replaced by silos and walled gardens. The Web 2.0 cognoscenti
       | made a lot of the same mistakes as the Web 1.0 cognoscenti about
       | how systems would be used and received by "normal" people.
       | 
       | A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a
       | real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even
       | back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person.
       | 
       | As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is
       | a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They
       | were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on
       | similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization,
       | and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate
       | those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility
       | and you and I as readers.
       | 
       | What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form
       | informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple
       | link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed
       | with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the
       | format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit
       | of a formal social anti-pattern.
       | 
       | Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to
       | MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI
       | basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a
       | post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of
       | your posts on your "feed".
       | 
       | That's not to say what social media sites have done with those
       | user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement
       | manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a _lot_ of people.
       | I 'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make
       | long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories.
       | 
       | Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because
       | their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web
       | 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being
       | focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing
       | social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start
       | to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal
       | social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized
       | concepts.
       | 
       | It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a
       | critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a
       | huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to
       | host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization
       | and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media
       | users.
        
       | MatekCopatek wrote:
       | An unlikely outcome that I'd like to see is the following:
       | 
       | 1. Legislation makes current models impossible - I'm imagining
       | something like Section 230 being repealed, Twitter and Facebook
       | being on the hook for anything anyone posts, which means they
       | can't moderate and are forced to change their business
       | model/effectively close shop.
       | 
       | 2. People still want to blog/share/like.
       | 
       | 3. Federated networks become a thing again because small
       | communities are way easier to moderate. Nerds self host, regular
       | people get accounts as part of their ISP subscription or pay a
       | few bucks for some SaaS offering. Maybe a forward looking country
       | gives you an e-identity on the official Mastodon instance where
       | the ToS equals local law so we don't have to have that whole
       | Twitter censorship discussion ever again.
       | 
       | 4. Everyone lives happily ever after.
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | For 3 to happen we would need better software. Do you have any
         | suggestions that are the best in class?
        
       | lazzlazzlazz wrote:
       | The HN community will agree that there is a deep issue with
       | interoperability and platform risk in Web 2.0, but will again
       | have a knee-jerk response that the rapidly growing Web 3.0
       | community is awful, there's no point, etc. -- because it's
       | crypto.
       | 
       | How do you create a software application that exists and runs
       | independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it
       | exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned
       | decentralized consensus system?
       | 
       | Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.
        
       | sbazerque wrote:
       | I'm working on it, Ben [1].
       | 
       | Believe me, it is no easy thing to do.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | BiteCode_dev wrote:
         | How do you deal with browser tiny storage limitations for each
         | domain?
        
           | sbazerque wrote:
           | We use IndexedDB, and in modern browsers the limit should be
           | at least a few hundred megabytes (see for example this answer
           | for Chrome limits [1], the situation is similar in Firefox).
           | 
           | So far this has been enough, but the apps we have are fairly
           | simple (e.g. no media!). We'll see. Maybe media can be
           | handled off browser.
           | 
           | [1] https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | Yes, this describes the problems. Here is a detailed resource on
       | what an actual solution would look like:
       | 
       | https://qbix.com/token
       | 
       | (Ignore the token part and read the rest.)
        
       | bronikowski wrote:
       | > One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes
       | it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be
       | started in Europe
       | 
       | Maybe we don't need more "social media companies" of the type
       | that GDPR is "a disaster" for.
        
         | gowld wrote:
         | Some people like to socialize with each other.
        
           | bryanrasmussen wrote:
           | Do these people also like to be tracked all the time and have
           | their data sold to third parties who use that data to
           | manipulate the people?
        
       | ericflo wrote:
       | > Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but
       | by then it was too late.
       | 
       | It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down
       | Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.
        
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