Protocol Bickering is Going to Wreck the Open Web

Sigh.

I saw a chain of posts by Evan of thoughts he had on BlueSky. I was wondering how soon it'd take for it to make it to BlueSky. It's very interesting to see how replies on BlueSky and in the Fediverse both work to comfort whomever posts on top. For example, and I'm not going to link to either, on BlueSky, folks expressed disappointment in Evan's seemingly beratement of BlueSky's evolving around ATProto. On Mastodon, folks felt more comfortable expressing their support for what they saw as a very vibrant future with ActivityPub. It was rare (if not non-present) to see any cross support of either protocol in each space. This is something that I'm growing more fearful of because it's the beginning of fuel for something that I do not want as someone who enjoys using the Internet despite loathing how it was created and turned against people.

My fear is that we will refuse to avoid the mistakes of the Web 2.0 era and work to develop networks and systems that are evolving to be inherently incapable of communicating with one another. Not because of technical difficulty but because the authors and architects of these spaces loathe one another. There's folks who remember how Twitter began preventing you from seeing the previews of Instagram posts natively on their platform — now we have Instagram being the sign-in mechanism to the Twitter alternative/clone. This is expected for two companies warring for the attention spans of millions. This is not the kind of behavior I'd want to see develop in a space that aims to call itself "for people" or it being of the "open Web".

This post is a short one asking folks to do what GNOME and KDE are doing: learn from each other and work to help each other grow. Collectively, we can make a better world — no one singular solution will bring that and it's not possible for it to do so: we need to shake the logics of neoliberalism if we want this to work. We have to remember that we're building things that effectively create spectales: despite people existing behind them, they will never encompass the breadth of our identities, our experiences, our lives — as much as capitalism wants us to believe in the idea of the digitizing of one's self.