Would it help if more people would have a personal website? Or would that just put the power into the hands of whoever runs the DNS system
People do have their own personal websites. Brought to you by SquareSpace.
Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
111–120 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#112With regards to advertising, what are you doing to offer a realistic alternative to getting content creators paid online? Paywalls work, but people hate them (go into the comments of any article from the WSJ or such on here). The automatic tipping things offer very little friction, but hardly anyone uses them. So what's your answer?
I think automatic tipping is the way to go. If blog posts and online content feature flattr (or any) widgets prominently, people will naturally be curious about it and contribute.
People also fund patreons, donate to charity etc to show off and get recognition - maybe some integration into one's social media to show which content creators you enjoy (support).
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#113I am a member of the W3C Social Web Working Group ( https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg ), and have been organizing IndieWebCamp ( https://indieweb.org/ ) conferences in this space for the last 7 years. We've been making a lot of progress: * https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting * https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers * https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realt…
Who is implementing these? I saw there was an Apache project as a reference implementation a while ago but it was now abandoned. Is there a new reference implementation or are there plans for creating one?
Micropub clients: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Clients
Micropub servers: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers
Webmention implementations: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
More details: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to read about urbit [ https://www.urbit.org/ ]. I think it might be similar to your thinking.
I'm familiar with Urbit, and intrigued by it, and a big company deciding to try a project inside it is inarguably the best thing that could happen to Urbit; but I'm not very bullish on that happening, for a variety of reasons.
Urbit is designed in theory so that proportionate incentives exist at each stage of adoption. Initially it will be curios only, like the interwebs in 1995. If it gains value then applications will be built on it.
Even if urbit fails, the theory is sound. It turns out economics is really effective. And advocacy (99% of the other solutions proposed in this thread) is as limp as it was in 2000.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#115Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…
>Don't let others own you by taking that from you. Others doesn't include whoever provides your MX records.
I don't generate my own power either, the line has to be drawn somewhere.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#116At least Google and Twitter have data takeout. I recently discovered that, on Reddit, anything beyond your more recent 1000 posts/comments/upvotes is totally irrecoverable to you, even via scraping.
Wait, really?
Yeah. This was pretty upsetting to discover. I had been blindly using my reddit upvote history as a supplementary personal log of sorts, for many years. And most of that's now just gone.
Thank god I haven't made over 1000 comments or posts with any one account.
The data's all still in the database, but due to their caching setup, only the last 1000 of anything is publicly indexed. While everything's technically reachable, it's all deep web. To recover something private like upvoted or saved posts, we're talking heat-death-of-the-universe, through a full-table-scan squeezed through brute-forcing a search box, while authenticated, with rate limits.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#117There is no going back, this 'battle' was lost a long time ago. We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone . We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely. The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving…
Forgive me if I exaggerate, but you sound a chef who is appalled by the lack of variety in fruits and vegetables distributed at a shelter.
Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#118I'm betting on (and contributing to) IPFS [1]. Some friends and I are working on Peergos [2], which is built on top of IPFS to replace dropbox, email and facebook with a P2P secure and private alternative. [1] https://ipfs.io [2] https://peergos.org
How do you feel about where keybase has been going with some of this (related to peergos)
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#119Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…
>Don't let others own you by taking that from you. Others doesn't include whoever provides your MX records.
If whoever provides your MX records decides they no longer want to serve you it is no problem to change that with your DNS provider. If Facebook decides to close your business page you have no alternative to maintain those connections with customers or for advertising.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#120The rest of the Internet didn't disappear. If anything, Facebook and Google are tools to drive traffic to your own corner of the Internet.
I don't really believe social media filter bubbles exist, relative to the bubbles of the past. Even the most isolated Facebook user is more enlightened than my parents were during their childhoods in India.
Emotional manipulation was probably worse when the United States only had 3 TV networks. Before that, "yellow journalism" helped lead the US into the Spanish-American war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Spanish.E2.8...
Of course, we should still work to do better than the status quo, but I enjoy being able to develop a following on social media and/or purchase ads for whatever distributed Internet ideal I want to create.