🔗 The Present Migration from Computer Networks to Person Networks | Jared White:

Back in the 2000s, the blogosphere almost became a true social network. person-a.com could “talk” to person-b.com by linking to them from a blog post, and person-b.com could link back in response. We even had technologies like Trackbacks so blogs (people) could get notified of all these mentions. Unfortunately blogs eventually got overrun by spammers and bad actors, and thus everyone disabled trackbacks. And with that, the dream of the blogosphere as a social network died.

My initial response to reading this post was loud cheering.

As I thought about it more, though, I’m not so sure. All of this stuff is a pain in the ass to set up and maintain, and many of the people building it did little to nothing to make that easier.

Meanwhile, big for-profit enterprises saw the opportunity to swoop in and vacuum up all the people who just wanted to post their stuff without having to worry about the technical bits. Moreover, they offered their stuff for free because they could afford to and so that they could rapidly expand their user bases and collect their data.

If we really want to foster an independent web, it needs to be a lot easier than it is now to run and manage your own stuff, and there needs to be more options for people who are tech amateurs that are not corporate- or VC-backed advertising farms.

There seems to be no money in that, though, so once again we find ourselves back around to the fact that the problem is capitalism.