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

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]
>
>