Stuck at sea? Come fly with me
I grew up on the open web. I want it back.
The open web is like a town square, open to everyone, people streaming by as you walk along. Maybe you sit down at an outdoor café with a friend and you enjoy the scene together. Maybe you want a bit more quiet, so you move inside the café at a window table, so you can look out the window while talking with your friends. Maybe you are having a private date, so you move little further into the café in a private booth. Other people do similar things at the next door café, but if you call them, they can come over, or you can come to them.
The scenario above is NOT POSSIBLE on Facebook, nor on most other "social" media built to be monetized by a single company alone, or by hobbyists who create similar centralized services behind a login. The currently popular solutions are NOT like a town square with different stores and coffee shops. They are like a cruise at sea, and when you have been around the ship once, you have seen all it has to offer. NOTHING new will come onboard as long as the ship is at sea. This is why cruises are for RETIRED people. Centralized social media is dying so slowly, you just think it is still alive.
"Social media" is NOT what the web was about, it was about democratizing publishing ANY kind of data or service. When "social media" came along, e.g. Facebook, what happened was the platform allowed friends to connect to each other. However, rather than making this functionality into a common protocol allowing all kinds of services to do the same thing and interoperate, they chose to keep it inside, and they got LUCKY and got BILLIONS of people inside, tapping into our friends-of-friends-of-friends network, our social graph. In the beginning, Facebook was actually usable, but today it is not. Expressing complex ideas is almost impossible to write, because the platform has chosen to limit publishing to SMS-style tweets. This makes it impossible to discuss anything properly, people have GIVEN UP, and post the next short joke or meme.
DECENTRALIZED PUBLISHING with built-in privacy and social ability for nomadic identities IS AVAILABLE, and allows Alice to post a picture on her service and allow Bob at another service to see it, while Carol at a third service is blocked from seeing Alice's picture. This is similar to the town square with its different coffee shops.
Alice, who lives and works in the United States, works on climate change issues for a government site which produce PUBLIC DATA, but the current administration thinks climate change is FAKE NEWS and demands these data to be removed from the site. However, Alice has published her data on Zap and Hubzilla, which allows her nomadic identity to be in two places at once and automatically clones any data between the site in the United States and in Canada. Alice does as she is told in the USA and removes the PUBLIC DATA - she has not stolen anything, then relocates to Canada in frustration and keeps right on working.
DECENTRALIZED PUBLISHING with built-in privacy and social ability for nomadic identities is NOT LIMITED TO TWEETS. Any kind of service, any kind of app can allow this to work together. Wikipedia like services with long articles, games, chats, stock market information, newspapers with subscribers, shops - not just Amazon, Apple Appstore or Google Play - any kind, from any one YOU choose to trust.
This why I LEFT.
However, due to ACTIVE INERTIA (look it up), people think SOMEBODY ELSE can fix their current social media so they do not have to do anything, but this is NOT TRUE, because the INITIAL MODEL had a design flaw of being CLOSED, and their owners strengthened this flaw, adding suggestive algorithms to keep you and feed you what they told you was most important to you. The centralized social media is like a cruise ship at sea, playing "Hotel California" on repeat - "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
This is why I have to come back, my family is STUCK at sea on that Facebook-boat. I have a helicopter and can come and go as I please, but I do not have a rescue chopper with room for everyone doped up on Alcorythms.
I am off in my chopper to Zap and Hubzilla.
