Busy week coding -- but there was one delightful article that led me down a small rabbit hole of Richard P Gabriel's writing about "worse is better" from 1989/90. The hub for this idea is here: Richard P. Gabriel: "Worse Is Better", https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html And I found it via: Christine Lemmer-Webber: "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", 2024-11-22, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ The idea of "worse is better" got connected to Gall's Law, and loosely relates to why idealistic, big software rewrites fail so often. And why things that are imperfect but provide value proliferate.

The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

the decentralised and open source nature of these systems, where anyone can host an instance, may protect their communities from the kinds of losses experienced by users of the many commercial platforms that have gone out of business over the last decades (e.g. Geocities, Wikispaces or Google + to name just a few).

A former FB executive and long-standing friend of Zuckerberg emailed him in 2012 (page 31) to say “The number one threat to Facebook is not another scaled social network, it is the fracturing of information / death by a thousand small vertical apps which are loosely integrated together.”

And it’s tempting for engineers to think decentralising the Web can be achieved with technology. But really, it’s people who will make it happen. Rather than staying put in our little filter bubbles, we can burst out of them — and be radically sociable, delinquent, and make a scene.

This library is part of a general project at the Internet Archive (archive.org) to support the decentralized web.

these platforms aim to provide experiences “that people want to use that works as much as possible as they expect, but which is backed up by better values and technology.”

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

I imagine that the first part of this project will focus on how it got to be this way, what got missed or ignored in some of the early warnings about what was happening online and how those warnings were swamped by the hype depicting the Internet as a space of radical democratization.

As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS. Everything old is new again. RSS was an essential part of Web 1.0 before surveillance capitalism (Web 2.0) took over.

Only people with nothing to fear see the idea of a completely connected world as unequivocally good

The future we're fighting for has no analog in mainstream tech, and so it's hard to articulate our strategy using their words. I know that we can feel it, though-- when a new person suddenly gets what we are attempting to do, it is like two instruments slowly coming into tune.

The philosophy of the modern web has saturated our world so thoroughly that corporate goals have the appearance of common sense

The hurdle we face today is not lack of skill, it's depression

stop waiting for these companies to get better

Avant-Pop artists welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals who we can communicate and collaborate with

Soon the Data Superhighway will finally once and for all do away with the high-priced middlemen, and artists will reap the benefits of their own hard-earned labor. The distribution formula will radically change from Author - Agent - Publisher - Printer - Distributor - Retailer - Consumer to a more simplified and direct Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver)

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience. One way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche communities. Niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent electronic environments, virtual communities. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively-generated electronic publications, individually- designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi- media interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist- author creates their beautifully-crafted, original works of art to be consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business- cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is not.

something else is starting to take hold in the cultural imagination

My dream is to have people inspired to make webpages again about whatever they'd like, and share them in ways that don't promote competitive, addictive 'engagement stats'. And to have cyber-regional zine libraries that are collecting and supporting different scenes' work

to visit a dat site, much like reading a zine, requires that you ask for it from the creator of it (or be a part of a culture that is supporting and sharing them)

There is no implicit way to discover dat sites--instead you have to share your link with friends and hope they support, seed, and share the link too. A dat site spreads, then, through classic, social and 'underground' channels

Work with what you have, to support the people around you and together you'll create a community that has a defined shape and form only in hindsight. Instead of worrying about having enough onboarding ramps, I say we make a future space that is so exciting, so fun, that is such a cool party with lights so bright that everyone wants to build their own methods to get here and join in. And I thought: what's the coolest, most party thing in the world? Reading.

The future I want is decentralized, consensual, anarchist, feminist, and cool

We need to learn to see the cumulative impact of a multitude of efforts, while simultaneously keeping all those efforts visible on their own. There exist so many initiatives I think that are great examples of how distributed digitalisation leads to transformation, but they are largely invisible outside their own context, and also not widely networked and connected enough to reach their own full potential. They are valuable on their own, but would be even more valuable to themselves and others when federated, but the federation part is mostly missing. We need to find a better way to see the big picture, while also seeing all pixels it consists of. A macroscope, a distributed digital transformation macroscope.

This summer, Web activists plan to convene at the second Decentralized Web Summit, in San Francisco.