Centralisation is Dooming the Web, RSS is One Workaround (But Not "Planets")
ARE we getting any closer to decentralisation? Is that going to be easier to accomplish if social control media collapses? Or if blogs 'displace' mainstream (corporate) media? One can dream, one can hope...
We were once more or less there... a very long time ago, about 30 years ago (or a little less than that).
Gemini Protocol is turning 5.5 next month and it hasn't been ruined... yet... or ever. The adoption of Let's Encrypt in Gemini Protocol is down some more today (or yesterday morning). Certificates that are tied to Let's Encrypt are now down to 16 (capsules), based on what Lupa is seeing (it's incomplete but still rather extensive). To quote: "This page presents some statistics on the current state of the Gemini space. It has been updated on 2024-11-16 04:04:00Z. [...] 2630 (90.7 %) capsules are self-signed, 16 (0.6 %) use the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt, 254 (8.8 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one)."
Let's Encrypt is down from several hundreds to 16. It is good news for decentralisation.
Gemini Protocol is good for text, but it still has many limitations (by intention). At least Gemini Protocol rejects centralisation.
We recently discussed in IRC how to take advantage of the Twitter (X) exodus and make the Net more community-like, unlike the modern Web, which is dominated by very few companies (Google even 'hijacked' the word "Gemini").
Our observation is that many bloggers see diminishing returns (visit(s)-wise) for their hard work and their blogs gradually ebb away. Those who came to rely on social control media instead of something like RSS feeds have consigned or attached their fate to performance of companies like Twitter. Not wise. Not wise at all... they didn't see it coming, did they?
They kept saying stuff like "follow us in Twitter"... sometimes along with "follow us in Facebook"...
As if having multiple masters is somehow "safer"...
FSF folks? Well, they said don't follow us at (or in) Facebook, but did they say follow us at FSF.org/rss (or whatever)? Not really...
Almost 20 years ago someone published "What we need is a great metaphor for RSS" (this article is now weak, in my humble opinion, as it predates the cautionary tales: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc.) and we cannot quite think of any "old age" analogy/metaphor for this status quo; what we have now really sucks.
We've looked for an analogy regarding social control media, as in "follow us on/at/in..."
The closest thing might be writers (authors) and publishing houses, but writers' guilds were always dependent on (if not subservient to) the "printing press"... so it's just an issue that never really got resolved, not even with the Web, especially due to the above centralisation aspects. The "printing press" is expensive (material cost); it takes a lot of capital to print and distribute, so typically oligarchy controls literature. The same is true for ISPs with backbones like underwater cables, including their upgrade and maintenance.
The main question is (and has long been, even among creative writers and artists), how do we eliminate the middlemen? Patreon is just another middleman; what Apple (GAFAM) does to Patreon right now serves as a reminder of this. Patreon is basically a middleman between audiences and creators, with an extra middleman on people's skinnerboxes.
"There have been more than a few posts in [Daily] Links over the last months expounding on the benefits of or even necessity of RSS / Atom," an associate said, and many are in Daily Links of this past week. An analogy would strengthen our argument if the goal is to successfully convince people to alter reading habits.
In relation to the above article, which is almost 20 years old, the associate said: "That which has changed between now and when the above article was written warrants attention and the changes cause a greater need or utility for feeds than in their start..."
Well, companies like Mozilla turned from boosters of RSS to companies that work to suppress the use of RSS and instead shill all sorts of platforms like Twitter. Mozilla even brought onboard (as its top managers) people who had worked for Twitter and Facebook. Mozilla was funded by Google, which itself worked to hide or abolish RSS feeds. They're not good at pushing ads (or spying on readers to "target" ads), which is Google's core business.
Now there seems to be a "perfect storm"; well, it's anything but perfect, but it's something...
Many who proudly say they quit Twitter (or "X"), however, are jumping from the pot to the frying pan. They fail to see what makes social control media (as a whole) bad. They need something like RSS instead. Don't let some middlemen meddle in your reading (what's visible, what's less visible, what's banned).
Even if we can convince only 1% of people fed up with (and leaving (some of)) social control media to adopt RSS, that's many millions of new users of RSS. Let's do this. We can at least try.
"Yes," the associate said, "re-decentralization is essential."
As always, we note that "planets" (with RSS) are also a form of centralisation. It's better to get OPML files from "planets" than to subscribe to "planets" and rely on somebody else's curation activities.
RSS feeds come and go. Some "planets" censor some sites. It happens all the time and almost nobody notices. Some sites also break themselves. For instance, the RSS feed of SUSE Blogs has been broken/deprecated for many months now. They don't want visitors. Maybe they think Elon Musk ("X") will send them some. Or maybe the people managing their Web site don't know what they're doing. The number of "views" on their posts may seem incredibly low. How do they expect people to find their writings? Social control media? The article below has more words than views. It was picked at random. █
