decentralization matters to the regular user: it is very much exhausting to keep several identities and keep them synced. on this site for these people and on that site for those friends. like we aren’t on a one global network, but several not connected worlds.
we had to underestimate what may internet become, and invent rss/openid much earlier, this had to be the foundation of internet, just like smtp was. may be rss/openid is not enough.
even if one chooses photo hosting service, she could choose one, and follow friends on the other services, because all services would provide generic interfaces to exchange the data. and that would lead us to the real competition - where every service has equal opportunities, but must work hard on be a better service.
because otherwise the user will get it’s data and move to other service! and this is what i call a true competition.
now we already lost this. :/ may be something new, in addition or instead of rss/openid will make a change. some new technology, which will define interfaces for data exchange.
#internet #decentralization #web #openid #rss #identity #competition
The most important open and standard technologies to decentralize the web are openid and rss / atom feeds.
Let’s see how far social networks went in supporting these technologies.
It turned out, gplus provides openid, and works as rss reader (they killed reader for that).
That means we cannot follow google users from here(gplus is not federated), while they actually can follow us by subscribing to our atom feeds.
I remember there were discussions and bugs opened.
Just want to say - these features may deserve more attention.
#diaspora #development #web #decentralization #rss #atom #openid #technologies #freedom
