centralized vs decentralized extensibility

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.