There’s a road back to the old web, and I think it’s great
A couple of weeks ago as I was recapping 2022, I also touched on the sudden change in the social media landscape a bit. Today, I’ll explore that topic a bit more after a nostalgic diversion.
My history on the web goes quite far, from which I also have to admit I perhaps shouldn’t consider myself a young man any more. I found the online world back in the days of dial-up modems and neighborhood BBSes, some of which had the magical ability to reach out to people on the other side of the world thanks to FidoNet, which relayed both topical forums as well as a kind of email between sometimes-connected hobbyist systems. I’m not sure which made it more magical: that it worked at all, or that you couldn’t really predict how well or fast it worked, due to that dialup nature, but it sparked the imagination of nerdy teenager who as more curious about what was behind the curtains, making it all tick.
Fast-forward a few years, and those systems were replaced by an Internet connection, which replaced that unpredictable nature with a seemingly unending source of wonders like documented protocols, code you could learn from, and people you could ask for advise when you got stuck, as I frequently did.
So I ended up immersing into protocols, data exchange, privacy technology and encryption at a time when hardly anyone besides Philip Zimmerman and Bruce Schneier seemed to be interested in that. I applied that interest into writing an email app which I believe to have been the first GUI to implement PGP/MIME. Soon thereafter however I abandoned the Amiga systems I had written it for, so that piece of history is lost, at least for myself. I don’t even have a backup of the source code any more, which is kind of sad, but *shrug*.
All that was a rambling way of noting that by the time Cluetrain Manifesto came out in 1999, talking about how businesses must find an authentic voice with which to speak with, not to their customers, I felt like I’d been thinking about networks for a while already — and that thinking was very much guiding what I did for most of the first decade of this millenium — including a lot of my work which went into co-creating the experience of one of that early social web’s services, Habbo (which is still going — sometimes these things last a long time).
And then Facebook and Twitter came along, and things started to change as megasites begun to repurpose, and then wall off, what had been an open web — sometimes chaotic, but under no one’s singular control. To survive in the new attention economy commercially, we needed to start to play by the often arbitrary rules set by an executive in some glass cubicle halfway around the world, and a lot of that early wonder was replaced by daily frustration, anxiety and rage tweeting. Sure, there have been several other reasons for for frustrations and anxiety in that past decade and a half, but I believe it does all play together.
And now we’re at a turning point, perhaps accidentally instigated by what happened to Twitter in October. I think it speaks to the power of open systems that even though Twitter always was many times smaller than any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or several others, its Elon-plosion has managed to shake so many rocks loose. Twitter always did feel like it had at least been trying to play by the Web rules, allowing much more integration with the open web than other services, but we can now see that it, too is a single, centrally controlled entity with all the one-size-fits-all policy risks that entails.
In contrast, the web I grew up with allowed for diversity in both authority and accountability to set and enforce the rules of what is permissible content and behavior. That was not a technological accident, by the way — closed systems did precede it (CompuServe, for example). I think a lot of that early web ethos reflected not only on its academic roots, but also on the 400-year history of news and book publishing, where each publisher got to decide what their policies were, local laws permitting. And I’m rooting for some of that to return to our social technology.
I am of course talking about Mastodon, but not only that— rather the entirety of the federated network it is part of. In fact, I believe Mastodon will ultimately end up being a niche of the Fediverse, though influential today in setting some of the direction of development.
Don’t be scared of the federation, it’s not really all that hard to understand, and this is really about the social conventions, not the technology.
Email, where I started with, is a federated platform. Ignoring Gmail for a second, nearly every business, institution, and even many smaller consumer services have their own address domain, their own servers (self-hosted or with a managed subscription), and their own policies of who gets to have an address — or what those addresses are OK to be used for. Yet every email address is able to reach every other email address — spam filtering notwithstanding.
Blogs (you know, those things that were here before Medium?) are a federated platform. They’re not just websites — there’s actually a set of protocols, including the RSS fundamentals, which were designed to enable blogs to connect their content to the world at large.
Phones are a federated platform. No matter who your operator is, you can call other phone numbers and not care who operates the network for that number.
And why shouldn’t the same be true for direct messaging, microblogging and online conversations? Why shouldn’t institutions be allowed and enabled to communicate under a name that is verified to be them, according to policies they have themselves determined? Why shouldn’t consumers be able to interact with those institutions using their own identities, or, when applicable, with their pseudonyms? Why shouldn’t we take control back from the digital overlords, who never had any interest to protect us from the trolls, anyway?
Well, we should, of course. And that’s why I think both that our recent curiosity with Mastodon is great, yet nearly all of the thousands of today’s “dot-social” sites will turn out to be short-lived experiments. Instead, the protocols which today power the ability of all those sites to connect to each other, will become as much of a standard, expected feature as an email address or a web site are today. In fact, I believe they should all become just aspecects of the same identity, allowing us to present ourselves.
Which is why I’m now considering also my move off of Medium back to my own blog domain. Unlike that 1990s email program, I do still have valid backup of my blog from that time before Facebook and Twitter, and I can grab my archive from here and Twitter, too. But for now, I’m writing here, and conversing at mas.to/@osma. Reach out if you liked this.
