Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it's actually getting a lot worse! Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting the…
>Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
The Web’s Missing Interoperability
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It'll scale because it's self-hosted. You don't serve everyone with the same app instance; everyone runs their own instance. So everyone has their own free hosting account with repl.it and runs an app instance on it? Yes, technically that's "free" as in "no cost", but it's not "free" as in "no effort". The latter is the kind of "free" that Facebook users expect.
It's hardly more effort than making a Facebook account, and replit is still young--it's only going to get easier.
I'm not talking about the effort involved in opening an account. I'm talking about the effort involved in managing one's own instance of an app. That is not zero, and nobody, not repl.it or anyone else, can magically make it zero. But it is zero for Facebook users, because they aren't managing anything; Facebook is.
If, OTOH, your idea is that repl.it does all the managing (what happens if the server hosting the app goes down? how is the data backed up? etc., etc.), then we're back to the scaling problem: how do you scale that to a huge number of users without either not being free, or adopting the same business model that Facebook has (the avoiding of which was supposed to be the reason for doing all this in the first place)?
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#63Earlier 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…
>> The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. Self hosting needs to be as easy as plugging a box into your router. This means some type of DNS or other way to find your node given all the ISPs failure to provide fixed IPs. Also a super easy management method and access controls (public, private, friends). I have a lot more thoughts on that.
I think an internet that is mostly self-hosted is a healthy one and unlocks a lot of things I’ve been noodling with over the years. I’m hopeful someone smarter than me is close to getting us there.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#64A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person.
As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization, and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility and you and I as readers.
What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit of a formal social anti-pattern.
Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of your posts on your "feed".
That's not to say what social media sites have done with those user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a lot of people. I'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories.
Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized concepts.
It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media users.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#65How do you create a software application that exists and runs independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned decentralized consensus system?
Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. It's benefiting to me, and I think society, to not pay extra for unnecessary middlemen. If the problem is insufficient taxes, then raise taxes.
raise taxes on who? If 'unnecessary middle men' are out of business that leaves a few wealthy consumers and a few centralized suppliers. The rest of the population will be unemployed supported by the state if they are lucky
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except now it’s much more expensive and difficult to match what people want in 2021. You can’t just make a face book of ... “Profiles”. Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha
I can sort of see what they mean by appearance, but its not far off looking tidy. The issues are mostly around padding and UI element proportions. Some of your icons are too large for the elements they are inside of, the scaling of form elements within your filter interface is somewhat inconsistent too. If I wasn't completely slammed at work I'd be open to submitting a PR.
(Even happy to compensate you if you email me, see links in my profile.)
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#68Heh, 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…
The key is privacy at the data-layer, and I have a start with my programming language for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
raise taxes on who? If 'unnecessary middle men' are out of business that leaves a few wealthy consumers and a few centralized suppliers. The rest of the population will be unemployed supported by the state if they are lucky
Taxes on the wealthy. It is wealth redistribution one way or another, but a more efficient one than keeping middlemen around for no reason.
Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
raise taxes on who? If 'unnecessary middle men' are out of business that leaves a few wealthy consumers and a few centralized suppliers. The rest of the population will be unemployed supported by the state if they are lucky
Taxes on the wealthy. It is wealth redistribution one way or another, but a more efficient one than keeping middlemen around for no reason.