You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. It’s not perfect. It leaves an enormous amount of signal unheard. It requires more work to find things, and to be found.
But you can do it. And I hope you do, in some way.
Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.
The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.
But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.
10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.
We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.
The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.
Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?
It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him.
Paul Ford jots down his thoughts on that report on Ev’s blog:
The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It’s a paradox and very thorny. I’m writing this on a centralized platform called Medium. Clap!
I like his geeky idea for mini self-contained social networks:
What I want is like, 5 of these little computers and whenever I see a truly trusted friend, I just give them one. And they take it home, and plug it in somewhere, and now we’re on the same, secure network together. Sharing files and with a little messageboard. Maybe after 5 computers the network can’t get any bigger. And if you unplug one your whole archive goes down. I don’t know. I’m riffing here.
The new style guide and pattern library for Buzzfeed.
It all looks pretty reasonable on the surface but if you poke around in the CSS, you’ll find 1157 uses of !important. Yikes!
The whole point of having an agreed-upon codebase in a pattern library is so that developers need never reach for nuclear options like !important, so I’m afraid, for me, this is a demonstration of what not to do (in terms of CSS—the output of the HTML in the styleguide looks perfectly fine).
Solid uses immutable, atomic CSS classes…
CSS is “mutable”. By design. I don’t think we should be working against that.
Try Plaxo's identity consolidator for yourself. Give it a URL that includes rel="me".
Identity consolidation with the XFN rel="me" value. RTFM on sharing information across social networks.