The Web’s Missing Interoperability

https://stratechery.com/2021/the-webs-missing-interoperability/

by davidmckenna • 5 years ago

142 93 5 years ago

stratechery.com

sbazerque4• 5 years ago

I'm working on it, Ben [1].

Believe me, it is no easy thing to do.

[1] https://github.com/hyperhyperspace/hyperhyperspace-core

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

How do you deal with browser tiny storage limitations for each domain?

sbazerque4• 5 years ago

We use IndexedDB, and in modern browsers the limit should be at least a few hundred megabytes (see for example this answer for Chrome limits [1], the situation is similar in Firefox).

So far this has been enough, but the apps we have are fairly simple (e.g. no media!). We'll see. Maybe media can be handled off browser.

[1] https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/#how-much

toomim2• 5 years ago

Hi santi! =)

sbazerque4• 5 years ago

Hey Mike!

Mike is working on it as well:

https://braid.news/

no_wizard• 5 years ago

This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy advocate.

Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the eye balls are, so instead of just marketing on Facebook (or Twitter, or Reddit) you want to market and convert your audience all on the same platform(s) because its increasingly difficult to do otherwise.

My counter point being of course, that this may have been inevitable anyway, since this really is increasingly the way people interact, is via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc and less and less on the open web. Of course large corporations can and should and will kicking or screaming or no, comply with the laws, but little thought has been given how much those laws don't disrupt the fundamental problem: disrupting the stranglehold these companies have on interaction. I think a good amount of the GDPR, and Apple's recent moves have good ideas and net wins, but after reading this article, I can also see how it will simply, in the long term, act as a form of regulatory capture where only the largest entrenched companies can comply and small companies, particularly non tech small businesses, will be increasingly more reliant on those platforms going forward.

The solution isn't of course, to get rid of things like the GDPR, but like all laws and regulation, it needs to be re-thought and re-shaped as it affects the marketplace, and that's the crux of the problem, most regulation is set it and forget (particularly in the US) where there is little after thought given or follow up to it and augmenting it appropriately to minimize real downsides (not perceived ones that corporations complain about, but more barriers it creates to new businesses) and asking the question of is this acceptable or do we need to re-think some aspect of this?

I know this won't play that well either, its not going to be a popular debate among my peers, but its important we consider all the facts, none the less.

[0]: I may be reducing the article a little too much here, forgive me, I really do think everyone should read it first

Aerroon2• 5 years ago

The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.

twiss3• 5 years ago

For new businesses, most support tickets will probably be handled manually. This could even include such mundane things as "could you reset my password" (if you haven't bothered to implement a "forgot my password" mechanism yet, which is perfectly reasonable). Another request could be, "could you delete my account and data". Normally, if a user asks you that, you should probably already do so anyway, GDPR just says that you must. It also says that if they ask for their data, you have to give it to them.

If you don't have many users yet, not many such requests will come in, so I don't think this is an undue burden. In the beginning, the burden will be roughly proportional to the number of users you have. If the burden becomes too high, it's easily automatable. So personally I don't think an explicit exemption for small businesses is really necessary.

bronikowski• 5 years ago

One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe

Maybe we don't need more "social media companies" of the type that GDPR is "a disaster" for.

gowld2• 5 years ago

Some people like to socialize with each other.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

Do these people also like to be tracked all the time and have their data sold to third parties who use that data to manipulate the people?

anderspitman• 5 years ago

In my opinion the way to enter the social network market is using the Slack/Discord approach. Rather than trying to make a better Facebook for the world, make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities.

I almost achieved escape velocity with Matrix/Riot in my gaming group a couple years ago. Ultimately it was too buggy for them at the time and we ended up on FB messenger, but if it had worked they'd all be primed to join a Matrix-based social network right now.

ricree• 5 years ago

make a better Facebook for people to use for their specific community or company, and then make it easy to tie your account to multiple communities, and then (maybe) start connecting communities.

Which, of course, was precisely how Facebook broke into the social network market in the first place.

Initially not just for college students, but students at specific colleges. Then connecting students between college, then bringing in family members of those students, and so on.

EGreg4• 5 years ago

Except now it’s much more expensive and difficult to match what people want in 2021. You can’t just make a face book of ... “Profiles”.

Trust me we’ve been working on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and we only recently reached the point where people’s main complaint is the APPEARANCE hahaha

ojilles• 5 years ago

Basically be Shopify for Social Networks?

pchristensen• 5 years ago

That's what Ning tried to be back in the day. Maybe it's time for another attempt at that.

dmitriid• 5 years ago

One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe

And then goes on to

Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable data (from a business perspective, anyways) is the social graph

So what does he propose then, huh? "Oh, forget about privacy. Since Facebook sits on a trove of personal data the never asked consent for, everyone should have the same access to the same trove of data"?

gowld2• 5 years ago

Simple proposal:

The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA.

Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.

warkdarrior• 5 years ago

That is the situation under GDPR right now (at least legally). But then the problem is with moving my data to another platform, especially if my data involves other people. For example, can I take my contacts from Facebook and move them to Signal? What if you are in my contacts, do I need your permission to move your info to Signal?

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

This is sort of like arguing, "if we make it illegal to push pills on people, then the Sackler family will have a monopoly on opiate addictions".

EGreg4• 5 years ago

Yes, this describes the problems. Here is a detailed resource on what an actual solution would look like:

https://qbix.com/token

(Ignore the token part and read the rest.)

rektide• 5 years ago

a huge part of this article is about clubhouse & social networks means for virality, about how they can expand. taking contacts & pushing to them is the kind of main model that Clubhouse is doing.

I get the argument around banning contact exports; unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the wake of Clubhouse’s rise (never mind the fact that contacts have been accessible — and thus have been accessed! — in this way for years). What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition.

what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends.

where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.

some standards for social network users to be able too interlink & declare their other networks would be great, as a start. second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be looking at my associates.

we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's standardize some good base level cross-social systems.

jdminhbg• 5 years ago

what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends.
where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.

Clubhouse actually is both push and pull. Yes, you can send invites to friends to get them onto the app, but having your contacts also lets them connect you to those already there when you first log on.

Of course this isn't the open pull model you're talking about, where I can discover new things my friend is doing, or find out where he is most active. But using the phone number as an identifier for social graphs is kind of a hack around the non-existence of such a thing.

crazypython• 5 years ago

See also: Semantic web. RDF, OWL, https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol . It's the original intent of Tim-Berners Lee, the man who invented the web.

sbazerque4• 5 years ago

In my view the lack of authentication in the original semantic web concept made it a SEO gaming vector for years and years.

Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic understanding / semantics.

IggleSniggle• 5 years ago

Trust is a harder problem than basic understanding / semantics, because it requires basic understanding / semantics as a prerequisite.

You might trust your banker with your money but not your personal life, and trust your friend with your personal life but not your bank account.

Therefore, you there must be explicit and implicit degrees of trust that are specifically trust "for some intention" or at even just "for some specific purpose." And then, you must trust that the meaning of any promise or guarantee is equivalent between parties.

jacobobryant8• 5 years ago

Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you want to build a search engine/social network/recommender system, you can get started by crawling and indexing a bunch of feeds.

I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you.

Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it could expand to a general audience too.

[1] https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data

beardedetim3• 5 years ago

I’ve been noodling this idea for a few years. I think it’s a great idea and it being based on Atom/RSS is a great move.

The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host. And by no one I mean no one that is using Facebook /Twitter / Insta / etc. and for this to really work, I think you need everyone hosting their own “log”.

Interested in seeing more work done in this space and am glad to see others feel the same as I do.

jacobobryant8• 5 years ago

That's a big reason why I'm excited about repl.it. You can self-host a github repo in about 2 clicks (not including account setup). I could see it increasing the reach of self-hosted apps a lot.

Actually I made a little proof of concept for this a week ago: https://github.com/jacobobryant/Feedstuff

phkahler• 5 years ago

> The problem, I have found, is no one wants to pay for hosting. No one wants to self host.

Self hosting needs to be as easy as plugging a box into your router. This means some type of DNS or other way to find your node given all the ISPs failure to provide fixed IPs. Also a super easy management method and access controls (public, private, friends).

I have a lot more thoughts on that.

chrisweekly• 5 years ago

I love the core idea too. Also static hosting keeps getting cheaper, free-tier can take you pretty far, and self-hosting keeps getting easier.

iamEAP• 5 years ago

This kind of thing might never hit mass-market (read Facebook-level) appeal, but I think if one branded it as an open-web network for creators (as opposed to Facebook, which is for mere “consumers”) you might reasonably avoid the hosting problem.

A “creator” will figure out how to host, be it a Wordpress.com site on the casual end, or something more specialized for the savvier creator.

bwclk2• 5 years ago

Just of out curiosity, would you consider hosting your friends and families logs if there were a low friction way to do it?

hertzrat2• 5 years ago

Interesting concept for sure. Is there a revenue model to attract top influencers? Maybe just links to a collection of Patreon-likes?

jacobobryant8• 5 years ago

hm, no idea. I haven't thought about revenue models much since I've envisioned this more as a grass-roots thing than a startup opportunity. I think the main thing would be just making it dead easy to get started. You wouldn't necessarily need to jump start a new network since the whole point of this is to be interoperable with existing networks.

A good first step might be making a personal site generator. Put in links to your twitter/youtub/substack/medium/whatever accounts, and then you get a nice looking site with all your content in one place. Maybe throw in a subscribe button so people can get email digests of all your content.

and then, almost as a side effect, anyone who uses the site generator also is publishing it all as an atom feed.

beardedetim3• 5 years ago

I think the money is in the aggregator. Everyone creates their own “log” so the noise is crazy. You follow “influencers” or go to aggregate sites that only vet info, not produce it.

You could have the aggregate behind a paywall, you could have donations or ads as well.

bluetwo• 5 years ago

Web Monetization standard. Yes. https://webmonetization.org

mathgladiator• 5 years ago

I've considered this perspective as well from a lower level. I'm a huge fan of gossip-style communication, and I've wondered why all my data is shredded across various databases when it could be all located within a single giant JSON on my phone, and then I could just gossip a version to my friends.

The key is privacy at the data-layer, and I have a start with my programming language for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/

Groxx• 5 years ago

Have you seen ActivityPub? From a very quick glance, it seems like it might fit this, and it's relatively actively used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

It's not RSS (which is a bit of a shame), but it scales better since it bakes in pushing / pulling patterns, where RSS only pulls.

jacobobryant8• 5 years ago

I have seen it but haven't looked into it too deeply. I think it's more complex/sophisticated than what I have in mind. i.e. it's meant to be a protocol for an entire social networking app, whereas I'm interested in a much smaller scope: just a raw event log. I figure if that's in place, everything else can be built on top. Heck, you could even use it as a base for an ActivityPub implementation! Write a tweet -> gets imported into your RSS event log -> gets published via ActivityPub.

Also, there is another protocol called Pubsubhubbub (yeah, I know...) which adds push on top of Atom/RSS. I know of at least one company, Superfeedr, that runs an implementation as a service (they were acquired by Medium): https://superfeedr.com/

mro_name4• 5 years ago

I'm doing paginated atom feeds as microblog targeting laypeople: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo - still quite rough.

olivermarks4• 5 years ago

Seeing Tim O'Reilly speaking at one of his web 2.0 summits around 2009 about the urgency of preventing a few companies/people monopolizing everything comes into my mind regularly when I see tech monopolist oligarchs swaggering around and being feted by a fawning media.

We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon & Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller business evolution

jefftk• 5 years ago

As the OP points out, the regulation that we are getting, so far, benefits these walled gardens by prioritizing privacy over interoperability.

olivermarks4• 5 years ago

Yes it's actually getting a lot worse!

Had a long discussion the other day about Amazon and where we went wrong as a society. Short version, Amazon should have been regulated to facilitate existing small specialist businesses supply chain and delivery, not directly compete with them and force them out of business. Amazon should have been fulfilling orders on behalf of mom & pop's knitting supply, not undercutting them and cutting them out. This is incredibly damaging to the tax base as most taxes are paid by small businesses. Now we have a pandemic where the big box stores and online retailers remain open while the mom & pops are closed and going bust. It's a slow moving economic disaster IMO

mbgerring• 5 years ago

Social media apps made it impossible to export your social graph many years before GDPR. The only thing that would make them do it now is if they were legally required to.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively

Can anyone explain this? I'm not sure what they are referring to.

tguedes• 5 years ago

He means Shopify. Shopify merchants (and other DTC companies) heavily use Facebook/Instagram to target the specific audience they are targeting. Shopify has since announced that there will be a tighter integration with Facebook Shops

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

What does that have to do with "apple's approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively"?

twiss3• 5 years ago

Previously, cookies could be used to track users across websites (e.g. multiple websites using the Shopify platform, by making a request to shopify.com), but also to provide useful functionality (e.g. remembering their contact details). Now, this is not possible anymore, due to first-party isolation being implemented in Safari and now Firefox.

Personally, I think this is not such a big deal, as the browser can remember your contact details for you anyway, and you can fill them out on any website. So I think it's a win for privacy and for users, but it's true that there are some downsides as well.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

It goes without saying to his audience that you can't "monetize a platform-based storefront" without tracking users across websites?

Maybe I don't understand what "monetize a platform-based storefront" means exactly. He's talking about the particular store on shopify making money, not shopify itself getting customers, right?

thombles• 5 years ago

The author explains one of their main concerns:

its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in one place and convert them in another

Somehow I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for business models affected by this.

hertzrat2• 5 years ago

He talks about about how privacy laws like those around contact lists are bad because make it harder for new social media companies to arise. Seems like a bad trade off for everyone but investors and for future users of The Crystal Network that I keep joking I will create: a network where you are rewarded with healing crystals in the mail for soothing one another on the platform, creating a veritable lattice of support

pjettter2• 5 years ago

It's not the web, it's computing in general that has not evolved in the right direction. A grid is not a grid is not a grid. An image is not an image is not an image. Etc. So rather than fixing the web, fix computing. It will fix the web too. If not, the web is even more in trouble.

noizejoy• 5 years ago

$technology {web, computing, ...} is a mere reflection of the dynamics in our species.

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Maybe you would be better providing examples instead of mysterious aphorisms, hard to tell if you are being serious or not.

pjettter2• 5 years ago

I suppose what I mean is that there are many idioms that we have learned and gotten used to. For example, actions like copy and paste, or click and drag (touch gestures). Formats, like a table, grid, matrix, cells. Text is also universal and with editors we have a cursor, backspace, select, cut, but also, pagination, margins, fonts, boxes, etc., when we render. Drawings are represented in various ways. We have paths, but then there are a multitude of serialization formats.

None of these are really first class citizens in computing. They are all application level concepts/implementations. Some are hardware dependent (margins, when we choose a printer with settings).

My point is that we would benefit if these "human needs" were met at a lower level. If a grid was a grid, an image was an image, a drawing a drawing, etc. At the application level, there could be enrichment, but the essence of a thing could be universal. Like a protocol. Once these things are protocols, everything would start functioning more alike and be able to interoperate in a better way. Including the web.

Some of these things (idioms, actions) appear to work across the board, but they are fragile, unpredictable, and often fail just when you need them the most. That's because every application solves these problems for itself. (Please don't say Windows Clipboard).

MatekCopatek2• 5 years ago

An unlikely outcome that I'd like to see is the following:

1. Legislation makes current models impossible - I'm imagining something like Section 230 being repealed, Twitter and Facebook being on the hook for anything anyone posts, which means they can't moderate and are forced to change their business model/effectively close shop.

2. People still want to blog/share/like.

3. Federated networks become a thing again because small communities are way easier to moderate. Nerds self host, regular people get accounts as part of their ISP subscription or pay a few bucks for some SaaS offering. Maybe a forward looking country gives you an e-identity on the official Mastodon instance where the ToS equals local law so we don't have to have that whole Twitter censorship discussion ever again.

4. Everyone lives happily ever after.

EGreg4• 5 years ago

For 3 to happen we would need better software. Do you have any suggestions that are the best in class?

themacguffinman• 5 years ago

The repeal of Section 230 would mean more aggressive and large scale moderation, not less. Remember that the copyright liability incurred by DMCA and other copyright laws didn't kill YouTube, instead it directly led to the creation of ContentID.

MatekCopatek2• 5 years ago

I know, my assumption was it would be so much more moderation that they couldn't handle it without completely ruining the user experience.

ericflo• 5 years ago

Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but by then it was too late.

It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.

giantrobot• 5 years ago

The web had interoperability but it was largely ignored and then replaced by silos and walled gardens. The Web 2.0 cognoscenti made a lot of the same mistakes as the Web 1.0 cognoscenti about how systems would be used and received by "normal" people.

A lot of good ideas had terrible usability and didn't get to a real tipping point. Contrast that with social media sites (even back to MySpace) that were far more usable to the average person.

As as an example, look at RSS (any version including Atom). It is a great technological solution for the Web 2.0 proponents. They were interested in long form postings and had a lot of posts on similar subjects. Their posts had titles, some categorization, and maybe even semantic elements. Making a "feed" to syndicate those posts was a pretty useful thing both for their visibility and you and I as readers.

What RSS doesn't offer is a good way to express short form informal posts on mixed subject matter. Even posting a simple link to an interesting page or just an image isn't well expressed with most RSS generating software and not handled well by the format or feed readers. Even the word "subscribe" implies a bit of a formal social anti-pattern.

Compare that to most social media sites, even going back to MySpace. The presented users with a single content field. The UI basically asked "What's up?". There's no implied formality of a post title or categorization. It just plops on top of a stack of your posts on your "feed".

That's not to say what social media sites have done with those user feeds is necessarily good (echo chambers, engagement manipulation, etc) but they served a desire of a lot of people. I'd venture that most people don't want to sit down and make long form posts with cognitive load like titles and categories.

Large social media sites have no use for interoperability because their money is made on engagement with their site/app. The Web 2.0 visionaries spent a lot of time navel gazing and being focused on their areas of interest so they missed a lot of thing social media has implemented. We're seeing interoperability start to happen again (Fediverse etc) with people taking the informal social media models and applying Web 2.0's decentralized concepts.

It's not clear is the decentralized social media can hit a critical mass of users because multimedia, especially video, is a huge draw for social media users and is hideously expensive to host and distribute. There's also effectively zero monetization and a lot of people are trying to be professional social media users.

lazzlazzlazz• 5 years ago

The HN community will agree that there is a deep issue with interoperability and platform risk in Web 2.0, but will again have a knee-jerk response that the rapidly growing Web 3.0 community is awful, there's no point, etc. — because it's crypto.

How do you create a software application that exists and runs independently of the platform (and even hardware) on which it exists? How do you create a robust, unified, incentive-aligned decentralized consensus system?

Those working on crypto projects today already understand this.

enos_feedler• 5 years ago

Who decided that web 3.0 is built on crypto? I know some in the crypto community like to call it web 3.0, but I am still thinking web 3.0 is something different and built more on web 2.0

ehnto• 5 years ago

It's all nebulous. No one even agreed on what Web 2.0 meant, it's only in retrospect that we think we know.

If we were really sticking to versions being meaningful we probably should have bumped a version when frontend UI frameworks and javascript began dominating web application development, since best I could tell at the time Web 2.0 was just the addition of flat design and ajax calls.

adamc• 5 years ago

I hate all of these attempts to monetize communication. The government should strictly regulate them.

The Web’s Missing Interoperability

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