Re: centralized vs decentralized extensibility

If you are pointing to centralised proprietary silos such as
schema.org and facebook OGP as examples of decentralisation I really
don't understand what you mean by the term.

Just because they are using markup that if you don't look too closely
you can claim as RDF does not make them decentralised. This is
duckspeak.

On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 3:06 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sandro recently made a point in favor of centralized extensibility.
>
> I would like to argue that this kind of centralization does not scale on the
> social web.
>
>> Personally, I feel like decentralized extensibility is a moral and
>> psychological issue, but I'm well aware that the case for decentralized
>> extensibility is weak.
>
> I strongly disagree that the case for decentralized extensibility is weak.
>
> Centralized standards have been tried a number or times on the social web
> and they have almost all failed.  My reasoning is that the whole social web
> is too vast for some central authority to please everyone.  You can only
> please a small group, and that leads to balkanization, which is what we see
> today.
>
> I do agree it is moral and psychological because it is top down decision
> making vs bottom up grass roots self organization.
>
>
>> The vision is of a wonderfully free and open yet interoperable ecosystem,
>> but in practice that doesn't seem to happen.
>
> Why do you think this?  The facebook open graph has proliferated.
> Schema.org has proliferated.  JSON LD has proliferated.  These are all
> largely interoperable standards all along the same lines.
>
>> By far the greatest adoption of RDF happened when it was coupled with
>> schema.org, with only centralized extensibility.
>
> I think it's worth pointing out that facebook open graph is a significant
> adopter of linked data / RDF.  Indeed last time I checked all of their user
> profiles and graph are available as RDF.  There have also been other
> adopters of RDF orders of magnitude bigger than the usage I see of
> webmention.  I'd welcome numbers, but from what I can tell webmention
> adoption numbers are statistically insignificant when compared with even
> minor RDF deployments
>
> I think the arguments that are being made for centralization are just not
> accurate.  We've been down this path before in the social web.  Hint: it
> doesnt work.

Received on Tuesday, 7 June 2016 15:03:51 UTC