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Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation. Even FINGER

Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation. Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people. But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation? It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web. Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ). Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it. That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.

bigfishrunning 21d ago
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required. Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech) All this to say: bring back webrings.
- akoboldfrying 21d ago
  Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. (Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
  - bigfishrunning 21d ago
    > In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
    - mgbmtl 21d ago
      Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
    - akoboldfrying 21d ago
      Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.) But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?
- trompetenaccoun 21d ago
  There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech. In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time. It's Eternal September.
  - strenholme 21d ago
    To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace). As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account. [1] I detail how this is a lie at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html
    - trompetenaccoun 21d ago
      True, that's definitely an issue. As far as I can tell X/Twitter has less political censorship these days (as Musk promised), but they fired most of the human censors and largely replaced them with an automated system that makes a lot of mistakes. So in the end perfectly harmless users still get censored unfairly, for simply expressing opinions that trigger others into abusing the report button. The X leadership has done nothing to address this so far.
  - echelon 21d ago
    I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario where only images and video from approved software and devices (with deep tracking claws) will be allowed to be posted. I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro". Because somehow it's only used to "filter out AI garbage". As if the AI companies with distribution platforms and intents and government contracts weren't the ones designing it. The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open threads I posted in, and my posts have "disappeared". Shadow banned. To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction. No one will ever be silly or afraid to make mistakes again if it can be rebroadcast for the internet to laugh at. I hate this internet. It was cooler when it was anti-censorship hackers who wanted to embrace libertarianism and freedom. There were pockets of hate, but there was far more acceptance and positivity. I want everyone in the world online and connected. But I blame the algorithm for encouraging people to act so mean to each other. And addictive teenage social media for getting the next generation used to being surveilled and having no expectation or appreciation of privacy.
- cestith 21d ago
  You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread. Telnet 1969, standardized 1983 FTP 1971 UUCP 1979 SMTP 1981 RSH 1983 TCP/IP v4 1984 NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups) IRC 1988 Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites) Gopher 1991 WWW 1989 first published 1991 Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites) SSH 1995
  - ahknight 21d ago
    And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.
    - cestith 21d ago
      Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.
anal_reactor 21d ago
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
1vuio0pswjnm7 21d ago
"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation." Does centralization actually result in moderation How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising) Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation" Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation It did not Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business" Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model" They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree That's fine but we have to account for bias Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance

bigfishrunning 21d ago

The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required. Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech) All this to say: bring back webrings.

akoboldfrying 21d ago
Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. (Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
- bigfishrunning 21d ago
  > In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
  - mgbmtl 21d ago
    Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
  - akoboldfrying 21d ago
    Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.) But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?
trompetenaccoun 21d ago
There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech. In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time. It's Eternal September.
- strenholme 21d ago
  To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace). As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account. [1] I detail how this is a lie at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html
  - trompetenaccoun 21d ago
    True, that's definitely an issue. As far as I can tell X/Twitter has less political censorship these days (as Musk promised), but they fired most of the human censors and largely replaced them with an automated system that makes a lot of mistakes. So in the end perfectly harmless users still get censored unfairly, for simply expressing opinions that trigger others into abusing the report button. The X leadership has done nothing to address this so far.
- echelon 21d ago
  I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario where only images and video from approved software and devices (with deep tracking claws) will be allowed to be posted. I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro". Because somehow it's only used to "filter out AI garbage". As if the AI companies with distribution platforms and intents and government contracts weren't the ones designing it. The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open threads I posted in, and my posts have "disappeared". Shadow banned. To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction. No one will ever be silly or afraid to make mistakes again if it can be rebroadcast for the internet to laugh at. I hate this internet. It was cooler when it was anti-censorship hackers who wanted to embrace libertarianism and freedom. There were pockets of hate, but there was far more acceptance and positivity. I want everyone in the world online and connected. But I blame the algorithm for encouraging people to act so mean to each other. And addictive teenage social media for getting the next generation used to being surveilled and having no expectation or appreciation of privacy.
cestith 21d ago
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread. Telnet 1969, standardized 1983 FTP 1971 UUCP 1979 SMTP 1981 RSH 1983 TCP/IP v4 1984 NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups) IRC 1988 Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites) Gopher 1991 WWW 1989 first published 1991 Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites) SSH 1995
- ahknight 21d ago
  And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.
  - cestith 21d ago
    Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.

anal_reactor 21d ago

Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.

1vuio0pswjnm7 21d ago

"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation." Does centralization actually result in moderation How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising) Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation" Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation It did not Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business" Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model" They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree That's fine but we have to account for bias Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance