Poor Tim. Look what they've done to his Web.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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What are you talking about? The web was always about capitalism and centralization!
You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog. It’s good that the big corps systematically block you out so you as an individual have to use their services. Who wants privacy really? Sounds like criminal stuff, we just need to peek at your data to serve you better ads. Ignore law enforcement paying us for your data, nothing bad will come of that.
Tim’s intention with the web was information sharing. He wanted a way for academics to share their work with other academics. He identified a problem at his time at CERN, and proposed a solution.
Then corporations were quick on capitalizing on this idea.
Yes sorry I was being sarcastic.
I think it’s a tragedy we’ve lost individual websites and services, and the modern web is dying.
I think it’s a tragedy we’ve lost individual websites and services
They felt so alive. Back then like a sun and now like a candle.
Sometimes in the Web Archive or some forgotten but still running amateur hosting, or in Neocities you can see those old pages, they feel like visiting someone's home, frozen in time since 2003.
You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog.
There were many more email services than now, and not too expensive hosting for personal webpages was common.
Not erasing that for history, my irony detector is slow
Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required
That's been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.
This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.
You don't really sound like someone who'd be happy to have a payment system hard-coded into their browser. I don't think it would help, either. Just as with ads you'd be monetizing clickbait and not journalism.
One of the reasons might me that we still do not have any standard baked micropayment system for the Internet.
There were a bunch of systems, back during the dotcom bubble. You can see a list in the specs: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html#Reading
Ironic that he talks about Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation in Medium, a company that also tries to monopolize and capitalize the blog’s information
Yea I agree, it's a bit strange to me that the inventor of the web doesn't seem to have a personal blog site for his own writing.
Platforms actually have one significant advantage over personal websites, blogs, disconnected forums: You only have to go to one website (open one app) in order to read everything you find interesting. You don't have to remember to go to 5 different forums and read 15 different blogs.
Of course the disadvantage is that they are a lot easier to censor because they're a single point of failure.
ActivityPub should in theory be the best of both worlds, but I am not too optimistic; people, organizations, governments wanting to censor people they don't like will always find a way. :(
When you invent the www, you get to use w3.org as your blog... e.g.
https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Charlie.html
more:
Doesn't seem like he's used it since 2020 though
So? He stays pretty busy with Solid / Inrupt and his other advocacy (e.g., the OP article...)
Perhaps he sees the personal blog format as a bit egotistical or otherwise not fit for purpose. Or perhaps he just isn't a naturally talented writer. Its not as if he's shy about sharing his thoughts outside that.
Also worth noting that he and Bruce Schneier, who is a much more prolific writer, share many of the same views and partner together at Inrupt.
Interesting read, although I do not understand everything. It's nice to hear a fediverse shout-out.
@[email protected] my biggest worry is that his Solid POD has been coming from about 2016 in design and was funded 2021 or so, and I remember it being announced in 2022 or so. In today's world, that is pretty slow-going. It seemed to always be imminent. I even registered a POD back in 2022... and then nothing still after two years. So many other decentralised protocols have been adopted since then.
Admittedly we do have an urgent need for one's own POD identity no matter where you are on social networks, but I still don't see how we're going to get ActivityPub, Nostr, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc to all adopt it.
Yeah. It's an interesting concept, but I can't see why anyone would want to use it.
@General_[email protected] it's about retaining a single identity for yourself, and one which you control and link to where you are using it vs a unique profile at every different social network.
As far as I understand, you'd store eg tracking data in the POD. That would allow apps/services to give you better recommendations or personalized ads. The only party with any interest in writing to the POD is the end-user, but their interest is tiny. Better recommendations, so what? Advertisers prefer to keep their data private to have an edge over the competition.
Tim Berners-Lee is mad. The internet's father is mad.
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine.
That’s one proud ass dude. I wish I invented the web, so I could utter those words. Legend.
