Back when I was a student there was a lot of hype about this 'Web 2.0' thing (I too got a little carried away by it at first). But what did that actually mean? JavaScript? So-called 'Ajax'? Nobody even uses that term anymore...
"When it comes to software, waves come and go very, very fast (unlike other disciplines)."At the time of typing, Lupa says: "There are 2135 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1739 of them."
Even if it triples every year, it'll be 6 years before we reach a million or more capsules. There's meanwhile justified concern/doubt about the fate of social control media as a whole. In fact, see the article "Social Media Giants Face Uncertain Future" where Variety asserts: "Macroeconomic factors usually impact major social media companies in similar ways. But in Q4, the three social giants — Meta, Snap and Twitter — all outlined different narratives and mixed messaging for the future of their businesses."
"...Later came the social control media wave and some people already yearned for the days of RSS feeds, hoping for a revival of simple syndication..."It's a bubble, as we noted a week ago, "and JoinDiaspora Might be the Next Casualty" (earlier today in the relevant thread Dennis Schubert wrote: "It’s Sunday! And it’s February 20! What a surprise! As everyone would have guessed based on nobody else posting any update, we’re still communicating and planning. Nothing to update. And with that, I’ll be gone again, and I’ll see y’all when we have something to update, or on February 27th, whichever comes earlier.")
The fate of JoinDiaspora isn't yet known, but for the sake of keeping the momentum of Diaspora* going there's will and intent to keep the data and the platform rolling. We shall know more by next weekend.
All that hype about 'Web 3' was rightly mocked by Aral Balkan, who jokingly coined 'Web 0' (like Alex Oliva with '0G').
"There's meanwhile justified concern/doubt about the fate of social control media as a whole."Predicting the future of connected communities is hard, but it's certainly not VR rebranded as "metaverse" (whatever that even means! Facebook was just desperate to change the news cycle and distract from scandals by rebranding as "Meta" with a ridiculous logo). For us here in Techrights, for the time being it's IPFS, Gemini, HTML/HTTP, and lots of plain text, including IRC. Rushing to change by embracing hype and gimmicks can be a bit foolish; it's akin to Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), wrongly believing that if you reject or miss out on something new/modern you'll be left behind. As if not having a 'smart' 'phone' (spyphone) and a Facebook account somehow worsens your life...
In December 2020 we started making a lot more videos and it was a decision that has paid off; with automation in the pipeline videos can be produced very fast and contain a lot of information. Sure, they would be worthless without some text to accompany them and cover the main points.
"In almost its entire lifetime/existence Twitter rarely made any profits; it accumulated billions in losses and it wasn't about money but about filtering/censorship."Video isn't a 'Web' thing. Videos can be shared over IPFS, (S)FTP(S), torrents, and even Gemini to some extent (provided the videos aren't very long, due to the protocol's limitations). So we're not too worried about the Web's impending demise, which seems assured albeit rather slow. We have almost 100 GB of videos in Techrights, they can be shifted to other (newer) formats if needed, and they're already accessible from Gemini.
Going back to the article from Variety, it says "given that social media companies make the bulk of their revenue from ads, this warning [from Facebook] was extremely worrisome. Snap and Twitter stocks fell in sympathy, and many were worried they could face the same fate."
In almost its entire lifetime/existence Twitter rarely made any profits; it accumulated billions in losses* and it wasn't about money but about filtering/censorship. It was about manipulation. It was about power and control. We know who by...
"It's hard to say what will come after the Web, but what's certain is that it won't survive forever (the existence of it contributes to the discord and conflict, which also threatens the very survival of the human species)."Our guess is that of utmost priority is data preservation. Make sure you can export your work and 'format-shift' it. When we made the Gemini capsule one very neat 'side effect' was, finally we had a full static "site" (capsule) of Techrights, which is highly portable (we can even offer a 200MB compressed archive of the entire site). It's hard to say what will come after the Web, but what's certain is that it won't survive forever (the existence of it contributes to the discord and conflict, which also threatens the very survival of the human species).
In the meantime we hope that JoinDiaspora can endure these difficult times; the work (or profile) of more than 310,000 users is still in there. We don't want it to become Another Identi.ca. In theory, converting JoinDiaspora into a static site or even a capsule should be feasible, reducing a great deal the computational costs and making preservation vastly cheaper. But maybe better to wait until we know what replaces the Web, if anything that exists already... ⬆
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* Twitter is still losing money, but it fakes its worth. "Stock buyback/share repurchasing," an associate reminds us, is basically "legal embezzlement..."
This was true last year and the year prior to that. So they pretend to be big while they're mostly burning money or living on debt.
