by vkb on 6/8/17, 7:32 PM with 424 comments
What projects or companies are you working on to combat filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation, and the like, and how can the HN community help you in your goals?
[1]http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/ [2]http://veekaybee.github.io/content-is-dead/ [3] http://veekaybee.github.io/who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet/
by doke01 on 6/8/17, 9:55 PM
by aaronpk on 6/8/17, 8:23 PM
* https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting
* https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers
* https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realtime subscriptions to feeds
* More: https://indieweb.org/specs
We focus on making sure there are a plurality of implementations and approaches rather than trying to build a single software solution to solve everything.
Try commenting on my copy of this post on my website by sending me a webmention! https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb
by delegate on 6/8/17, 10:27 PM
We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone. We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely.
The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking, liking, voting, etc.
By 'expressing' themselves, they contribute to a cacophony of content, which makes it very hard to discern truth from fabrication, leading to confusion, apathy and insecurity, exactly the sweet spots that advertisers of all kinds target.
A small minority profits greatly from this system, while the users themselves are rewarded with a 'virtual self' which is slowly taking over their 'real' self, making even the idea of losing it scary. This mental trap is very powerful - just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets - people interacting with their phones there and then, disregarding others and their personal safety..
The remaining 5% who are aware of these issues get to share all the alternative technological solutions and monetary scraps left over from the big fishes.
So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large crowds.
I respect and applaud the efforts of so many who try to build distributed and anonymous systems, but I'm very bearish about any of them becoming 'mainstream' for the reasons described above plus this one: most people don't care about these things.
Those who control these systems are some of the most powerful people in the world. In time, they will get older and more conservative. Soon they will venture into politics on a global scale.
Considering the alternatives, maybe that's not the worst thing after all.
by bhhaskin on 6/8/17, 8:35 PM
The internet hasn't changed, we have, and the only way to take the internet back is if we change ourselves back.
by Arathorn on 6/8/17, 8:11 PM
The filter bubble problem is particularly relevant for us because it's critical for an open network to let users filter out abusive content (whether that's spam, stuff they find offensive, or just a topic they don't care about)... but doing that in a way which doesn't result in creating a profiling db or creating bubbles and echo chambers. The problem is one of letting users curate their own filters (including blending in others' filters), whilst keeping the data as privacy protecting as possible. It's a fun problem, but on our medium-term radar.
by sam_goody on 6/9/17, 3:03 PM
by jgaa on 6/9/17, 6:28 AM
by sillysaurus3 on 6/8/17, 10:14 PM
I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years from now. But what is there to do?
Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB. Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.
This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action, and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.
Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in admitting that.
As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok, Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?
For example, if you're really set on doing something about it, one of the most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them yourself.
by vdnkh on 6/8/17, 8:24 PM
by gobengo on 6/8/17, 8:06 PM
* ActivityStreams 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
* ActivityPub - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
* https://distbin.com - My implementation of the above. Who wants to federate?
by mbrock on 6/8/17, 9:26 PM
Another aspect of the project comes from a "house terminal" that I set up here, basically an offline Raspberry Pi running GNU/Linux and a custom chat/guestbook program that runs as a "kiosk". This terminal will morph into a kind of in-house only access to the federated network with real time communications etc.
by rglover on 6/8/17, 8:50 PM
The internet is only closed if we keep acting like it is. The protocol is the same. Go build stuff.
by pascalxus on 6/9/17, 12:13 AM
Why should the end user care about this problem?
Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem?
If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix.
And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do it.
by Tharkun on 6/8/17, 9:10 PM
I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.
by ianopolous on 6/8/17, 10:29 PM
[1] https://ipfs.io
by VvR-Ox on 6/9/17, 8:01 AM
I have a slice of hope still that we (the whole community, dev's just like users who need to use services) can "make the world a better place".
The proble I currently see is that: 1. We are too few ATM 2. Facebook, Google, Apple,... already nested into the minds of many people, even the one's who claim to "think different" 3. There has to be something: - big - useful - attractive - free of costs
to use instead of their sh*tty services and you somehow need to convince "Jenna to take here FB profile and also their friends with her to the new place in town".
The same goes for other services like WhatsApp, searching with G., buying on A. etc.
How will we be strong enough (against companies with billions of $$ and the brightest minds in tech cause they wanna earn 120k/yr) to put something up that can not only withstand them but convince all the zombies?
How will you get those zombies moving? The most of the ppl. not even reads news anymore and if they do they just believe what they see & hear. There is no discussion, if someone is pissed she/he is right. There is no science for someone who doesn't even know the value of a scientific method. We are royally screwed and there has to be A BIG UNITING OF ALL ACTIVISTS under one flag.
If we go on like this with every hackin' Joe trying to construct his own facebook clone then we will just die like the rest.
by daveid on 6/8/17, 8:56 PM
https://joinmastodon.org https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://mastodon.social
by amatus on 6/8/17, 7:52 PM
by macawfish on 6/9/17, 4:01 AM
As a matter of fact, the fact that the browser by default sends everything I type into that bar up to some 3rd party, whether I've pressed enter or not, is pretty scandalous. It's not necessary.
I want local copies of pages that are important to me, for offline viewing, and I want to be able to bookmark specific parts of them in annotated, searchable, useful ways. I want to be able to share these. I want to be able to upvote and downvote their relevance as I use them again and again. I want human readable formats for storing these things. I want them on my filesystem, but not in a bunch of jumbled, strangely named files hidden deep somewhere on the computer. And I want to be able to share them peer to peer.
Remember the good old days, when people had WWW hyperlink indices? It's 2017 and centralized search/social platforms have all but destroyed the artform of digital curation. It is an artform that deep learning will clumsily fumble again and again. This website is a perfect example of how powerful human curation can be. The articles are curated and annotated collectively by human beings. The protocols and the web standards are more or less masterfully designed. We have unlimited programming languages.
I want to subscribe to notable peoples public web-bibliographies. I want them available in formats that are interoperable with my web browsers bookmarking and annotation tools.
by gwicks56 on 6/8/17, 8:33 PM
Storj for example is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS, uses peoples spare hard drive space, encrypts everything and back it up using peer to peer tech.
I am currently pretty comfortable as an Android dev, but I am wondering if I should start learning everything I can about blockchain tech in order to help on projects such as these?
by tunesmith on 6/8/17, 11:22 PM
So I'd generally like to see more effort put into making it easier for people to engage in more thoughtful ways.
This can also be applied to advertising. I'm trying to avoid chips, but if they're in front of me I'll eat a handful. So then the internet thinks, "This guy wants more chips!" So if advertising were more about my long-term values rather than my short-term behavior, then it'd be more valuable.
Anyway, it's pretty hard on social media to share deeper analysis and arguments and thoughts. I get that medium was sort of an effort in this direction, counter to twitter, but that's really just blogging with some extra algorithms thrown in. Need something else.
by warmfuzzykitten on 6/8/17, 11:06 PM
by austenallred on 6/8/17, 11:40 PM
It's easy to trash Facebook, but clearly it provides an insane amount of utility, and people aren't willing to stop using it because of others saying that en masse that is bad for a hypothetical Internet they never really took part in anyway.
IMO the focus should be getting the government to keep its hands off of it. That's not only more possible, but infinitely more important than not letting Facebook try to show us the right ads.
by doublerebel on 6/8/17, 9:22 PM
A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data.
In this future I think it will be considered ridiculous that you had to load an entire webpage full of unrelated images and icons just to read an article or weather report.
This concept will be huge for AR. In AR extra unnecessary information and uncontrollable presentation is beyond annoying, it actually makes users angry and uncomfortable.
Look out for Optik.io .
by mundo on 6/8/17, 8:48 PM
It occurs to me that all extant social media apps have, at a high level, exactly the same requirements:
1. Allow users to upload some data to cloud storage 2. Make that data discoverable to certain other users 3. Show everyone ads
Whether FB, Twitter, etc were to be dislodged by another app that is essentially the same app is not terribly interesting. So let's look at which of these reqs are amenable to change:
a. "ads" - No one actually wants them, so get rid of them b. "Cloud storage" - Lots of people would rather own their data, so switch this to "the user's own server."
That sounds pretty compelling. I don't hate FB, but I'd sure rather switch to something that allows me to own my own data, and share pics of the kids with Nana without having to run them through Facegoog's billion-dollar snooping engine. However, there are two big hurdles:
i. Most people don't have a server on which to host it ii. Most people won't pay for it, so someone would have to write it and make it really easy to use, for free
...and by a lucky cooincidence, both of those objections have the same answer: Amazon. Most people don't have a server? Amazon will rent you one. Who would develop a self-hosted FB clone for free? Amazon, to get people to rent servers.
Just a thought...
by thejohnhenry on 6/9/17, 2:36 AM
We live in the land of Startups. All good technology innovation we're used to over the last 20 years has come from the Startup/VC world, when the internet was fresh and nobody knew what would work. Over the coming decades, we'll need vehicles for technology innovation that go beyond the "take over the world & prayer" model, assuming that silicon valley's vehicle of ultragrowth monoliths will eventually align with civic values. They won't.
To illustrate this, let's say you want to improve some problem with Facebook/Google/etc. To even begin, you need $50 million and a minimum of 3-5 years building a userbase. By then, you have payroll, growth obligations, & investor pressure & are forced to monetize, usually in a way that compromises longer-term values.
We can solve this with smarter internet infrastructure. If you could share social graphs between applications, for instance, you eliminate an incredible amount of overhead in developing and experimenting with new social applications. There's a number of great initiatives trying versions of this (IPFS, Urbit, Blockstack -- I'm tracking a number of popular ones over at http://decentralize.tech).
The community needs more organization and more funding around these problems, especially in the field of developing new business models that work for software that don't involve selling out user priorities to global ad networks. I'm in San Francisco and working on this problem full-time if anyone wants to meet up and discuss solutions; Email's in profile.
by a1exyz on 6/8/17, 11:27 PM
What am I doing about this? Nothing yet, but I have been thinking about this recently.
by beefman on 6/8/17, 11:56 PM
It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of affairs "eternal October".
by turblety on 6/8/17, 8:01 PM
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
by stretchwithme on 6/9/17, 4:14 AM
If, instead, I had no freedom to build a house at all or the rules were dictated to me by others, I would be less free. And poorer.
by SeaDude on 6/8/17, 10:09 PM
Where are the specs for the Outernet Protocol: a NAT to NAT DNS system that doesnt rely on gatekeepers/ISP access. Use the 198.162.xxx.xxx addresses on all of our existing routers for neighborhood scale networking. Build trust by proximity by allowing only known neighbors to connect. Could be very interesting. Especially when Joe mirrors Wikipedia and Samantha mirrors Archive.org and Jan has a realtime mirror of some good Reddit feeds.
Automate the mirroring the internet. Scrape every last bit, in real time, without the ads and crap. Make it available to those trusted folks in your proximity.
by teekert on 6/9/17, 8:37 AM
by dmschulman on 6/8/17, 8:16 PM
by mikegerwitz on 6/9/17, 1:10 PM
Speak at events/conferences. Speaking generally to a broad audience with broad information and hard-hitting references not only gets the message out, but also makes it more difficult to make someone feel targeted, like you might one-on-one or in a small group.
I target two groups: technical people who can actually do something about it and teach others (but might not care or be aware of the issues), and average users and groups who might know or not care. Talking to your family and friends (and spouse) helps gain great insight on what people are thinking without quickly ending the conversation if it makes them uncomfortable. As does HN. ;)
Talk to groups you _know_ will be hostile to you. Learn common rebuttals. Learn how to respond to them. And harden yourself with relentless attacks on your facts and opinions.
Offering practical alternatives is difficult. Even if you can, people want to socialize where others socialize---I'm not going to get my friends all on GNU Social or Mastodon (or the fediverse in general) for example. Work security and privacy into their current practices the best you can understanding that compromise is _essential_. Maybe they can transition further in the long-term as they get used to certain ideas.
I encounter similar issues (and get a lot of practice with it) with free software activism---getting people to care about and understand software freedom is far more of a difficult battle than getting someone to care and understand about privacy and security issues.
For those looking for some resources to get them started:
https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/sapsf/plain/sapsf.bib https://mikegerwitz.com/talks/sapsf.pdf
And this is an _excellent_ resource:
by NotUsingLinux on 6/9/17, 8:20 AM
Matrix.org is a start.
On a much much broader scale the Web 3.0 will be build on Blockchains, the so called Fat protocols will surpass the Web 2.0 or eventually merge.
https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols
Ethereum will build up a considerable part of the ecosystem, with Dapps like status.im
by elihu on 6/9/17, 11:56 PM
We need it to be easier to write secure applications. We need to eradicate undefined behavior from our software stacks. Rust is a good step in this direction. We need well-thought-out APIs that are hard to misuse.
I think we also need a better search engine, and tools to filter news. Tools that detect clickbait, overzealous advertisements, and other forms of low-quality content and push them to the bottom of the rankings, and also punish sites that link to low-quality content.
We need email to be more user-friendly than it is; maybe we need a new protocol that's simpler and consistent with how email (and Facebook/linkedIn mail) is used in 2017. Setting up an email server should be easy, and the settings should be secure by default.
We need tools to identify credible information sources, possibly by analyzing if a given information source is vouched for by someone we already trust. Flooding comment sections and forums with fake comments is an easy way to manipulate the public and create an illusion of consensus or a made-up controversy, but it's a little harder to be fooled if you have automated tools to filter out people that aren't connected to anyone you know by some kind of chain of recommendations.
by nolanl on 6/9/17, 1:12 AM
by svilen_dobrev on 6/9/17, 2:33 PM
A (personal) system that keeps your own notions (and versions of) and crosslinks them to each another, with translators to/from other persons/entity notions (and subsets - think i/o facades/faces).
Like the tags u put on your images. And how u would explain them to somebody else. And take some of their images (i.e. of same event) with their tags. And tag them yourself. maybe in time.
http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/ http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/1.html
it's rough sketch, may live on top of any p2p technology. Back then noone could be bothered about "why would i put another layer around myself". Now maybe the awareness is better, i don't know. (contacts in profile or that site) have fun
by lalalander on 6/9/17, 7:17 AM
by spenrose on 6/8/17, 11:36 PM
http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs-technology/
There is just civilization, which the Internet used to be meaningfully separate from but is no longer.
by mythrwy on 6/9/17, 3:05 AM
Google (however big they are) provides a lot of value to my world at least. Just for search alone. Sure, there are other search engines but none nearly as good. Making it easy to find relevant information is of huge benefit and really does "change the world". I consider this enhancing.
Facebook is like the owner of a seedy bar. Preying on people's need to socialize and serving rotgut. Profiting from degradation rather than enhancement. (IMOP).
People should stop drinking rotgut. That's the way to stop Facebook. Rotgut is cheap anyway. You can even make your own in the basement. But if you want to stop Google you need to build a better search engine. Best of luck with that (seriously, I'd use it, no loyalty but so far Google has some truly useful products).
by lallysingh on 6/8/17, 8:05 PM
by NoGravitas on 6/9/17, 12:06 PM
1. I have quit Facebook, minimizing Twitter use, and am using Mastodon[0] for my social networking fix. My existing Facebook friends aren't on it, but the people I'm "meeting" are very nice. Will be blogging about it soon.
2. I am re-launching my long-idle blog, but this time supporting indieweb[1] standards for identity. This way, I have a central identity on the web across social networking sites, that I control.
by quelsolaar on 6/9/17, 1:23 AM
by unityByFreedom on 6/9/17, 2:02 AM
I'm specifically objecting to the phrase "closed internet". It sounds like the opposite of net neutrality, but in reality, any privacy options within Facebook and Google have been user-driven.
The focus should be on removing Pai. Regarding Facebook and Google, you can simply choose to not use them if you wish.
You only have one choice for broadband, and Pai wants to extend ISPs' monopolies. Let's not let that happen without a fight.
by jewbacca on 6/8/17, 10:36 PM
I recently discovered that, on Reddit, anything beyond your more recent 1000 posts/comments/upvotes is totally irrecoverable to you, even via scraping.
by shea256 on 6/8/17, 10:01 PM
by pascalxus on 6/8/17, 7:53 PM
I hope I'm wrong about this.
by bounded on 6/8/17, 8:11 PM
by dontchooseanick on 6/10/17, 9:53 AM
1. I don't talk to Google and Facebook - I mean, really, litteraly http://sling.migniot.com/index.html?filter=no_.*sh
2. A decade without Google Search and DuckDuckgo instead - sometimes I have to use !g at work
3. I have rooted phones without a Google account - but I know no single other person who does it
And the corrolaries :
- I get a lot less ads for free
- I have to talk again to Google from time to time, for captcha purposes
- I have real-life friends who call me - like in "phone-call", they know I have no Fb, no Insta', no Pinter', no Google, no Snap'
- From Google and Fb's standpoints I'm like a blackhole: I don't leave intentional traces, opinions, preferences but I'm as traceable as a dead pixel on a uniform background.
I left this comment because I feel like a Unicorn : I do this nearly as a hobby and to prove that "It's still possible" - but it takes a BC in computer science and constant fighting :
Nobody does that
by jeeshan on 6/8/17, 11:50 PM
Instead of using open standards, most of our medical data is trapped in proprietary vendor systems that are at best antiquated.
Patients are unable to move their data easily, doctors and hospitals have to pay huge sums to access their own data. The vendors extract massive rents but were all left in the dark and our health suffers
by c_r_w on 6/8/17, 9:31 PM
by Raphmedia on 6/8/17, 9:27 PM
I walled it myself by making a small social network for close friends.
Sure, it's probably a big bubble but at least I don't emotionally manipulate my friends by showing them ads or changing the order of their posts.
by fusion_cow on 6/9/17, 3:27 PM
www.hellolyra.com
by lifebeyondfife on 6/9/17, 2:19 PM
by dkarapetyan on 6/8/17, 8:44 PM
Most walled gardens are built for convenience of consumption whereas most federated networks seem to assume a more active and informed participant. The kinds of features you'd build for one group are at odds with what you'd build for the other one.
Then again Brave seems to be tackling the problem from the right angle. I hope their model takes off and people start incorporating similar ideas into other open networks that respects the network participants instead of just treating them as passive consumers.
by hedora on 6/9/17, 2:52 PM
http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
Increasingly, I get my news from non-profits that do original research, or technolgists that are the primary source of the stories I read. They don't use advertising to fund their work, which eliminates the moral dilemmas around stealing content vs supporting our corporate surveillance state.
Also, RSS is the opposite of a walled garden.
by marcosdumay on 6/9/17, 1:11 PM
I'm currently waiting for our supreme court to decide if judges have that power before I spend more time on it (or not). Maybe I'll have my answer next week.
by pdfernhout on 6/9/17, 12:09 AM
Related concept video from a few years ago: "Twirlip Civic Sensemaking Project Overview" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRy4sGK7xk
Wish I had more time to work on it.
by zitterbewegung on 6/9/17, 3:25 AM
by adamnemecek on 6/8/17, 10:33 PM
Why do both Facebook and Google exist? They exist to manage servers. Why do we need servers? Because your personal computer/phone might not be able to handle all that much traffic and might not have dem five nines. How much traffic does it need to handle? What if your phone could handle all the traffic the entirety of humanity could generate? The need for these companies would go away.
by EGreg on 6/9/17, 1:47 PM
A wordpress-like open source platform that communities can install and have their own facebook.
A platform that allows developers to release apps that communties can install. Or turn their existing app into one.
An auth protocol that works with everything else out there and lets people manage their identities across the web, and link up with their friends from their private address books.
And more.
by realcr on 6/9/17, 9:54 AM
- Distributed and secure routing, specifically in mesh networks.
- Creation of scalable economy of digital goods (Storage, computation power and networking) between computers.
I believe that these will provide a foundation to build things like distributed email.
Currently freedomlayer contains mostly research documents, though I plan to implement some of it in the near future.
by pvnick on 6/9/17, 2:10 AM
"filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation" are things I no longer think about
by p1k on 6/8/17, 11:51 PM
by amelius on 6/9/17, 10:07 AM
The role that big companies can play (we still need them) is supply hardware, and perhaps subordinate software libraries, also like in the old days.
by Kiro on 6/9/17, 6:59 AM
by amelius on 6/9/17, 9:37 AM
One way to do this could be for open source authors to introduce a section in the README file expressing the wish that the software will not be used in ways the user is not aware of, such as user-tracking.
by motiw on 6/9/17, 4:37 PM
by krausejj on 6/9/17, 3:01 PM
by jamesmishra on 6/8/17, 10:58 PM
I don't really believe social media filter bubbles exist, relative to the bubbles of the past. Even the most isolated Facebook user is more enlightened than my parents were during their childhoods in India.
Emotional manipulation was probably worse when the United States only had 3 TV networks. Before that, "yellow journalism" helped lead the US into the Spanish-American war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Spanish.E2.8...
Of course, we should still work to do better than the status quo, but I enjoy being able to develop a following on social media and/or purchase ads for whatever distributed Internet ideal I want to create.
by grizzles on 6/8/17, 10:05 PM
by perfunctory on 6/9/17, 6:58 AM
by throw2bit on 6/8/17, 10:26 PM
by foxhop on 6/8/17, 10:43 PM
Also bootstrapping https://www.remarkbox.com
by bluetwo on 6/8/17, 10:46 PM
by slyzmud on 6/8/17, 10:03 PM
One thing is creating websites where they control the content users can see. But the web is still "open", even if facebook bans my content I can still create another website and share it with everybody (probably nobody will ever see it, but that's another problem). The real problem is the new tendency of app stores (Apple Store, Google play, Alexa skills...) If Google/Facebook/Amazon decide to block my content, I have no way to reach other users.
by awinter-py on 6/9/17, 2:59 PM
Web ads are working less well than in the past, but they still work. The companies that have a high-visibility 'start page' (news orgs in 1990, yahoo in 1997, G & FB today) are going to have a lot of power.
Create a compelling start page, get 30% of the world to use it once a day, and your problem will have been solved.
by asselinpaul on 6/8/17, 10:00 PM
by z3t4 on 6/9/17, 3:14 PM
by toomim on 6/9/17, 2:02 AM
Statebus makes web programming wayyyy easier, and opens up the insides of websites -- you can go to any page, hit a hotkey, and edit the code live to add a feature, or incorporate state from a different site, or re-use the state or code from somewhere else, just as easily as you use your own site's state and code! Because it puts the insides of sites onto the web protocol itself. In Statebus, every piece of state has a URL! And you can synchronize with it as easily as <a href="state://..."> today!
This breaks up walled gardens like Facebook! Today, we have monopolies at the level of websites, because each different website is implemented with a different proprietary stack of web gunk -- MVC server frameworks, reactive view frameworks, networking frameworks, babel, webpack, and -- YUCK! Statebus replaces all this gunk with the web protocol itself -- the statebus protocol -- which opens the state, and itself automatically synchronizes all this state together!
Statebus transforms HTTP from State Transfer to Synchronization:
HTTP: Hypertext *Transfer* Protocol
REST: REpresentational State *Transfer*
Statebus: State *Synchronization* Protocol
Statebus makes websites wayyy easier to program, and this means that the easiest way to program websites is now the most open way. This changes the economics of the web, and is going to break up the walled garden monopolies that have arisen around websites -- just like the web itself broke up the AOL walled garden in 1995!
Remember AOL? It provided a lot of the same features as the web -- shopping, chat rooms, forums -- but then was outcompeted by the open web around 1995! Why? Because programmers found it was easier to put their content online with HTTP and HTML than by convincing CEO Steve Case to add their content to AOL's garden! In the same way, Statebus is going to make it easier to build social content than by going through Facebook's walled garden! The future will be a diverse, realtime, synchronous symphony of social state!
You can find technical docs here: https://github.com/invisible-college/statebus/ And a demo video here: https://stateb.us
by dcow on 6/8/17, 8:51 PM
by american-desi on 6/9/17, 2:10 AM
by pmoriarty on 6/9/17, 6:23 PM
by hxn on 6/8/17, 8:52 PM
Or would that just put the power into the hands of whoever runs the DNS system
by tripu on 6/22/17, 4:03 PM
by jgon on 6/8/17, 10:34 PM
I liken it to the attitude people are starting to take with regard to other aspects of their lives, such as food and materialism. When I go to the store I know that I can save a few dollars by buying the absolute bargain basement produce, flown in from south america, taken from high intensity factory farms, or packaged up and made mostly out of HFCS. Or I could see what I can buy from local producers and from farms that prioritize ethically raising animals. It means my eggs cost 3 bucks more, and I can't have kiwi fruits in February. But wanting kiwi fruits right this minute, even though it is February in a northern latitude is the exact sort of attitude I am speaking of.
So how can you put this into practice? Well a few people have already made similar suggestions so some of this will be duplicating their suggestions, but I still think it is worth saying.
1) Use your own email. I personally like Fastmail. For $50CAD/year I get a great service. I know that I am paying for a service and am not the product. They are doing good work with the open email protocols that exist, and working to produce new open standards for the future.
2) Use Firefox. Do we really want to give a dominant majority marketshare in the browser market to a browser made by a company that makes 90% of its money through advertising to you? This isn't even some sort of rant about google being "evil", it's just a common sense decision. It wasn't a good idea back in the day to give dominant marketshare to a company who incentives were aligned against the web and towards desktop single platform applications, and it won't be a good idea to give that sort of power to company that is beholden to shareholders and makes it money through tracking and gathering data on users.
3) Delete your facebook account. I don't have a fallback here, but honestly I don't think you need one. Between messenging apps, smartphones, email and other communication tools, you will be able to stay in touch with people you care about. Facebook is not irreplaceable and I say that as someone who was in University when Facebook blew up. I am still happily communicating with all of those people.
4) In general, think about your purchasing decisions and who they empower and what the long term gain is. Shopping at the new walmart in your town may save you money for a year or two until they have devastated the local economy and have no incentive to keep prices low. Even if they do, your local area is made worse by the unemployment they cause, and the underemployment they provide. Same thing with Amazon. Are you saving yourself a dollar today to wonder where the retail jobs that helped underpin your community went in a few years? Are you doing all your searches through google when you could maybe do them through Duck Duck Go, or Bing, or just anything that slightly breaks the monopoly that Google has on search?
All of this is stuff that Richard Stallman has been saying for years, and people keep being surprised that he is "correct", but it's usually pretty easy to see that he is just taking a longer term view of things, and understanding that just because an organization acts decently when they are not in a position of power doesn't mean anything about how they will act once they are on top.
In summary, try to think longer term about your decisions, instead of prioritizing immediate convenience, and paltry economic savings, especially when we, as privileged engineers and developers, have the ability and monetary flexibility to do so.
by metaphorm on 6/9/17, 2:36 PM
by cyberpip on 6/14/17, 11:25 PM
by intended on 6/9/17, 11:45 AM
by a_imho on 6/9/17, 11:02 AM
by bellajbadr on 6/9/17, 9:28 AM
by daraosn on 6/9/17, 2:22 AM
It's a token for advertisement that rewards the user, to be used at Brave browser: https://brave.com https://github.com/brave
by s73ver on 6/8/17, 10:18 PM