Posts about World Wide Web (RSS, JSON)

7AM — Use an RSS reader to escape the noise of the Web and experience it more like reading a newspaper, says Molly White.

While the general notion resonates, there is still a major difference between an RSS reader and a newspaper. A paper has a beginning and an end. You get one in the morning and that’s what is being published that day. Once you’ve read everything, you’re done for the day. A newspaper doesn’t update during the day. You can’t add anything during the day either.

Phil Gyford’s Guardian uses the Guardian API to generate a digital version of the Guardian’s print issue. It’s generated once a day. No pieces are added or removed until the following day. It’s enough to stay up to date, but slow enough so you’re don’t get buried under a constant barrage of news. I want a RSS reader that works the same way, one that updates only once a day that presents the yesterday’s posts in a clean and easy to navigate way.

5PM — Most of the infrastructure that powers the internet is now in the hands of a few, mostly US-based, companies. Drawing from ecology research, Maria Farrel and Robin Berjon, writing for Noēma, liken the monopolistic internet infrastructure to a struggling ecosystem that needs to be rewilded.

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

All this requires tremendous effort, first and foremost from regulators who need to put in guardrails to reign in big tech. Too bad, the incoming administration of the country where most of these companies reside will likely do the opposite and weaken, even remove, antitrust and customer-protection legislation.

The only viable lever is us customers, and were we choose to socialise and host the infrastructure for the things we build. We can vote with our feet and choose to host a website not on AWS, we can use alternative email and calendar providers, and join smaller social networks or even build our own online presence.

Will we, though, in large enough numbers to move the needle?

1PM — Katie Notopoulos, writing for MIT Technology Review, argues we have a chance to build a new Internet by moving beyond big platforms:

Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-­seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.

Are we really in a moment where change is possible? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit are still around, and we’ve got Threads now. All these platforms are for engagement and advertising dollars.

A lot of the discussions around re-building a better internet remind me of time about 20 years ago, when tech-savvy early adopters thought the Web is a space of endless opportunity to communicate and build communities. Until conservative techno-optimist bros with deep pockets rolled in to screw up everything. Early adopters moving to alternative platforms now, but why do we think it’s going to be different this time. Why do we think we can hold on to our idealistic spaces?

I’m hopeful but not confident. We’re seeing a resurgence of the personal website, of RSS, and even comments on blogs. But it’s a small group that builds this corner of the internet, many of which have been at the forefront of the blogging revolution. But what about the rest?

Personal websites are hard to maintain, writing thoughtful blog posts is time consuming. What made the likes of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook so successful, besides their addictive content curation, is that it’s easy to set up and account and it’s easy to post. Humans are lazy. The quick thought in the shower must go online now; expanding that thought into nuanced argument is too much effort. So is finding websites, maintaining a list of feeds and reading long-form writing? Why go through the effort when the dishes need to be done, and Threads serves new stuff in easily digestible junks.

Maybe the old silos are emptying at the moment. The internet of the next couple of years might be a more pleasant, more social space. But I’m sure some rich Silicon-Valley bro will step up and create the next VC-funded argument machine.

2PM — I needed to replace the carriage wheels of a sliding door in my house. There were no labels or any other information that would give away what make and model of door hinges I’m looking at. Using the Web, however, I could still find what I needed:

1. I took a photo of the part that needed replacing and uploaded in to Google’s image search.
2. In-between a million similar results, none of them quite matched my sliding door wheels, I found a nine-month old reddit thread from a user looking for exactly the same part. Another user posted the make and model name as a response to the thread.
3. Another Google search, and lo and behold, a kitchen warehouse sells that part just 10 minutes down the road from me.

The Web is still the most efficient and convenient research tool we have. There’s always someone out there who faces the same problem you’re facing, and another person has the solution. Despite all the SEO rubbish, AI content and social-media arguments, the Web still connects people.

8AM — Spot-on analysis by Alex Pareene, writing for Defector:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader.

The implosion of Twitter and recent shenanigans at Reddit are like a livestream allowing us to observe the decline of once beloved platforms unfold in real time. What we know from history helps us better anticipate the future, and it doesn’t look good:

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles.

The internet as an information wasteland is a bleak outlook, but one that isn’t off the charts; it’s likely even, given the track record of those who currently drive the development of major platforms. Just look at who’s building Twitter clones at the moment: Instagram, Substack, and I’m sure others are experimenting with similar ideas.

The alternative, as always, is to build your own place, a website, host it somewhere you control or at a least makes it easy to move, and double down on open standards and protocols.