Re: Thoughtful piece on the costs of the siloing of social media

[ I remember seeing that article somewhere other than the Guardian quite a few months ago, but forget where; anyone? ]

Personally, I'm very interested, but the Web as currently designed and implemented heavily encourages centralisation, and changing it is likely harder than just starting something new.

Some related thoughts here:
  https://www.mnot.net/blog/2015/08/18/distributed_http

Cheers,


> On 8 Jan 2016, at 11:55 am, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 5 January 2016 at 20:51, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web
> 
> This is a really interesting piece, thanks for sharing.
> 
> The web does seem to have become more centralized in the last few years.  I dont know how much of this is architectural, and how much behavioral.
> 
> The architectural foundations of the web as a cross origin document (and data) space, are I think, quite strong, leading to a good degree of decentralization.  I dont know why the web may be becoming more centralized, I once heard someone say "no matter how decentralized you design a system, centralization creeps in through the back door".  
> 
> My personal preference would be to see a healthy centralized and healthy decentralized element of the web competing with each other and offering greater user choice.  But we dont seem to live in that world, right now, at least.  
> 
> One factor, imho, is that there are probably orders of magnitude more people working on centralized solutions, than on decentralized.  Also decentralized solutions are fragmented, due to design decisions that get in the way of interop (tho interop is hard at the best of times).
> 
> Im not sure what the TAG can do about this, or even how many on the TAG list still are interested in a decentralized web (tho I know TIm is).  One thing that may be valuable is guidelines to developers building decentralized solutions on how to prevent fragmentation, and how to encourage interop.  It's a difficult problem to talk about, let alone to solve!
>  
> 
> 
> ht
> --
>        Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
>       10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>                 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
>                        URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
>  [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]
> 
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/

Received on Friday, 8 January 2016 03:10:19 UTC