Advancing Web standards to empower individuals and groups.
Curious what others think of this? This was linked in Tim Berners-Lee’s open letter on the state of the web at 35yrs.
Some interesting points, and some things I disagree with.
Firstly it’s annoying he keeps calling it his idea and trying to enforce this concept that the current internet needs to align with his original goals. That’s stupid and ignores that things will go where they go, he can’t control them.
So his first point about centralisation being an issue isn’t that big a grievance. But his second point rings true - the issues around our data and advertising have grown significantly and the Web is getting much worse as a result.
I actually think the solution is just government needs to step in and regulate it, along the lines of what the EU is doing. Realistically I think that’s the only solution that’ll help. Doing some grassroots movement and hoping it picks up steam is just unrealistic. Like looking at Lemmy and Mastadon - they’re great but at this pace they’ll never take over the other giants in the space. You need someone to step in and force the change.
I agree with most of your comment so I’ll focus on details that I disagree with.
Centralisation is an issue because it enables enshittification. A centralised system is always controlled by someone; and once that someone is at odds with the users, the users need to choose between 1) ditching the system completely, or 2) sucking it up. Decentralisation gives you a third option, to ditch only the parts of the system controlled by that someone.
Decentralisation does introduce additional complexity; I think that’s why Mastodon and Lemmy have such slow adoption. However I also believe that this resistance against enshittification should allow the Fediverse as a whole to retain users better.
I fully agree that governments need to regulate the issues around our data and advertisement. But it won’t be enough, because corporations (and people, in general) are damn great at finding loopholes at legislation, or newer exploits.
Centralisation is something we see in other facets of our society and it fails there too. Look for instance at the grass roots movement to have a third party in the US government. The numbers aren’t there even though people agree the 2 party system is broken. So you’re correct that centralisation is an issue, but I think op is also correct that grass roots movements don’t have any teeth in the internet space, and an equally large or larger power has to step in and in this case legislate. Not that it seems you were arguing the other point exactly. Just that I think the two points are kind of entwined together.
I agree that relying solely on grassroots is bad; larger groups of people are specially hard to coordinate towards common goals. However, as @higgsboson@dubvee.org mentioned there’s more than grassroots backing Solid up. And, even for the Fediverse, it seems that Mastodon caught some positive attention of government entities, like Switzerland.
So, perhaps that’s a bit of wishful thinking, but the teeth might eventually grow, even if they aren’t there from the start.
Regarding your example: it’s tricky for me to talk about USA’s government because I’m not from USA. For me the main issue seems to be the use of winner-take-all representation perpetuating the two-parties system; if that’s correct you’d need more than just a social movement to have a third party, you’d need structural changes. [Don’t trust what I said here, please. From the outside, details are always lost.]
