He talks about about how privacy laws like those around contact lists are bad because make it harder for new social media companies to arise. Seems like a bad trade off for everyone but investors and for future users of The Crystal Network that I keep joking I will create: a network where you are rewarded with healing crystals in the mail for soothing one another on the platform, creating a veritable lattice of support
The Web’s Missing Interoperability
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#32Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you…
I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move.
The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”.
Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad to see others feel the same as I do.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#33Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you…
Interesting concept for sure. Is there a revenue model to attract top influencers? Maybe just links to a collection of Patreon-likes?
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#34> The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.
Previously, cookies could be used to track users across websites (e.g. multiple websites using the Shopify platform, by making a request to shopify.com), but also to provide useful functionality (e.g. remembering their contact details). Now, this is not possible anymore, due to first-party isolation being implemented in Safari and now Firefox.
Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as well.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#35Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you…
I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move. The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”. Interested in seeing more work done in this space and a…
That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-hosted apps a lot.
Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#36It's not the web, it's computing in general that has not evolved in the right direction. A grid is not a grid is not a grid. An image is not an image is not an image. Etc.
So rather than fixing the web, fix computing. It will fix the web too. If not, the web is even more in trouble.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#37Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you…
Interesting concept for sure. Is there a revenue model to attract top influencers? Maybe just links to a collection of Patreon-likes?
hm, no idea. I haven't thought about revenue models much since I've envisioned this more as a grass-roots thing than a startup opportunity. I think the main thing would be just making it dead easy to get started. You wouldn't necessarily need to jump start a new network since the whole point of this is to be interoperable with existing networks.
A good first step might be making a personal site generator. Put in links to your twitter/youtub/substack/medium/whatever accounts, and then you get a nice looking site with all your content in one place. Maybe throw in a subscribe button so people can get email digests of all your content.
and then, almost as a side effect, anyone who uses the site generator also is publishing it all as an atom feed.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move. The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”. Interested in seeing more work done in this space and a…
That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-hosted apps a lot. Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff
I don't think the issue is hosting the app itself, it's hosting each user's data. For the vast majority of users, hosting their own data is not even on the radar. They assume that whatever app they are using is hosting their data, and the only price they will accept for doing that is "free".
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#39This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy advocate. Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the ey…
The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.
For new businesses, most support tickets will probably be handled manually. This could even include such mundane things as "could you reset my password" (if you haven't bothered to implement a "forgot my password" mechanism yet, which is perfectly reasonable). Another request could be, "could you delete my account and data". Normally, if a user asks you that, you should probably already do so anyway, GDPR just says that you must. It also says that if they ask for their data, you have to give it to them.
If you don't have many users yet, not many such requests will come in, so I don't think this is an undue burden. In the beginning, the burden will be roughly proportional to the number of users you have. If the burden becomes too high, it's easily automatable. So personally I don't think an explicit exemption for small businesses is really necessary.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#40In my opinion the way to enter the social network market is using the Slack/Discord approach. Rather than trying to make a better Facebook for the world, make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities. I almost achieved escape velocity with Matrix/Riot in my gaming group…
Basically be Shopify for Social Networks?