Post #4353143

2026-08-01 11:43 UTC

@akareilly@hachyderm.io I'm currently working on various ways to describe the essence of what the Social Web (fediverse) is, without all the "protocol" junk in it. And what I've come up with is something along the lines of: """The Social Web was designed like this because it prevents enshittification. How? Because it has escape bridges built in. If one of the websites "goes bad", you can jump ship without leaving your friends. When Instagram went bad, there were no bridges, so we're all still stuck there. The Social Web can never go bad, because there will always be a new place to escape to; a new better option."""" People get to obsessed with ActivityPub or AT Protocol, XMPP or Matrix, or whatever the hell else, when the important thing is just this: "Does the system have escape bridges?" Literally all of the rest of the details only matter in *very* technical discussions, and should not be spoken of in front of a regular audience. It's like some of these tech people forget that people are listening to them when they talk about stuff. So yeah, obsessing over a protocol while failing to implement the practical usefulness of it is really disappointing.

Replies (2)

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-08-03 11:32

@riverpunk@defcon.social @akareilly@hachyderm.io It's worth remembering how 'open source' became successful. A programmer who hears the phrase thinks about it as something related to source code and source code being open to {something}. But a business person doesn't hear that. They know what a second source is: it's an alternative supplier that you can easily switch to if you have problems with your primary supplier. And they hear 'open source' in this context: not just one second source, but an open market of second *source*s. And that's something that they immediately understand.

Open ##4353142
@giacomo@snac.tesio.it 2026-08-03 12:29

@riverpunk@defcon.social I'm afraid it's a bit naive, as a description: replace the "Social Web" with the "Market" and you get something Adam Smith might have wrote to describe classical model of market economy: The Market was designed like this because it prevents degradation. How? Because it has escape bridges built in. If one of the seller "goes bad", you can jump ship without loosing access to your favorite product. When the last monopolist went bad, there were no bridges, so we're all still stuck there. The Market can never go bad, because there will always be a new seller to escape to; a new better option And to be fair, within the small markets defined by the limits imposed by the slow production and products distribution of his age, the Smith's model provided a pretty good framework to describe "the wealth of nations". However the steam engine and the industrial revolution changed the dynamics, turning its simple model into a propaganda tool, instead of a valid economical one. In the same way, your description might be useful as a marketing/propaganda tool (and indeed it's actively used by #BlueSky to pretend an decentralization it doesn't really provide), but not to describe or understand truly distributed social systems, such as #XMPP, the #Fediverse and (maybe) #Matrix. @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

Open ##4403282