Tag: Decentralized Web

RSS as Personal Newspaper

Over at Citation Needed, Molly White has a nice piece on how you can Curate your own newspaper with RSS. If you’re not reading Molly’s work already, you really should, especially if you care about what’s happening in the tech sector (mostly a mix of web3/crypto, and tech’s impacts on human rights and freedoms).

The basic gist is that RSS is a tried and true protocol that tons of services already have running but don’t do a great job of advertising, and it lets you read things at your pace, in an easily digestible, consistent format. I’ve been saying similar for ages, but I think she makes a more compelling argument for it, not the least of which being that it’s a lynchpin in how she gets her job done.

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Molly White

I initially saw this article as a link in Blue Sky… but when I actually had a chance to read it, it was in my RSS reader.

More on Mastodon

Over at Ars Technica, Ben Klemens has an article diving into Mastodon and federation. It’s a good explainer if you’re curious about the standards underpinning the services.

The idea of an open web where actors use common standards to communicate is as old as, well, the web. “The dreams of the ’90s are alive in the Fediverse,” Lemmer-Webber told me.

In the late ’00s, there were more than enough siloed, incompatible networking and sharing systems like Boxee, Flickr, Brightkite, Last.fm, Flux, Ma.gnolia, Windows Live, Foursquare, Facebook, and many others we loved, hated, forgot about, or wish we could forget about. Various independent efforts to standardize interoperation across silos generally coalesced into the Activity Streams v1 standard.

Both the original Activity Streams standard, and the current W3C Activity Streams 2.0 standard used by Mastodon and friends, offer a grammar for expressing things a user might do, like “create a post” or “like👍 a post with a given ID” or “request to befriend a certain user.” The vocabulary one would use with this grammar is split into its own sub-standard, the Activity Vocabulary.

Surprising no one, I’m very in favor of moving back towards decentralization, open standards, and interoperability. Getting a few more high visibility projects would be a great step in the right direction.

The Soul of the Web

Over at The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany has an article on The Battle for the Soul of the Web – a headline that may sound a little dramatic, but is touching on some important topics. The article touches on a few different topics, but a central one is about the decentralized web (DWeb), and where that both intersects and contrasts with the Web3 space. It’s an interesting topic that is worth a deeper dive if you care about online spaces at all.

Decades removed from the gonzo highs of blinging GIFs and wacky blogs, the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer.

Among this set, one solution seems to be the consensus favorite. If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power? 

Kaitlyn Tiffany

I’ve been railing against and ranting about information silos for years, so I suppose it’s no surprise that this line of thought might be a little appealing to me. I’ve had a passing interest in the potential of technologies like IPFS for years, for instance, though it remains to be seen how things pan out, and what adoption looks like – how much broad adoption is necessary for a technology or philosophy on technology to sustain itself and become independently viable?

That said, I think they’re at least asking the questions, and that’s a good start:

Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent writer on collectivism and tech, told me. “DWeb asks more,” he said, and dwells on two key questions: “What do we actually want socially, and how do we center those values in our technical designs, so the technical becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”

There’s obviously some overlap between some decentralized web efforts, and decentralized finance efforts. I hope that the former doesn’t get dragged down because of the latter (or, more specifically, the scam-filled gold-rush that congealed around DeFi in recent times). There’s lots of questions I don’t have answers to about this (perhaps others do?), like how do we make the technology useful, approachable, ubiquitous… without also making it a target for those who want to exert power and control, and exploit it? User congregation around particularly useful or interesting tools or information is inevitable, and with that, how do you prevent just making silos all over again? (Another topic that gives me a headache is how to shepherd information accuracy, and curb disinformation in a world where oversight is virtually impossible?)