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-   -   What's the future of the "open web"? I think it's bright... (http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10723)

Dien Rice August 2, 2020 08:47 PM

What's the future of the "open web"? I think it's bright...
 
Many people have lamented (and still lament) the future of the "open web"...

The "open" web is everything that is not the "closed" web. The "closed" web are the walled gardens... Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and even smartphone apps...

All of these are designed to completely control what you can - and can't - do.

Their ultimate goal is for you to go to their website... and ideally, never leave.

However, just looking at Facebook numbers - I believe there's hope.

Every Facebook page looks pretty much the "same"... There's less choice for individuality. Unlike creating your own web page...

However, creating a Facebook page is very easy - and of course, there's the "social" aspect of it as well...

But... In countries where Facebook has been in existence a while, the numbers of users keep going down each year. For example, user numbers for Facebook in the USA are decreasing every year. Also, the younger crowd aren't embracing Facebook... they are going elsewhere.

That doesn't mean Facebook will disappear. But it means that it's not the inevitable future of the web...

I think that's a good thing - because with Facebook, and other similar platforms, comes control of a lot of people by the very few.

Some people believe that Mark Zuckerberg wants to be the US president one day - and they speculate he could get it, purely based on his immense influential power, due to Facebook.

I believe the future of the "open web" is bright... But we'll see. I think it's important for the open web to thrive, for our own collective enjoyment - and sanity!!!

Cheers, :)

Dien

Steve MacLellan September 15, 2020 01:27 AM

Re: What's the future of the "open web"? I think it's bright...
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Dien Rice (Post 41005)
Many people have lamented (and still lament) the future of the "open web"...

The "open" web is everything that is not the "closed" web. The "closed" web are the walled gardens... Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and even smartphone apps...

Dien


Have you heard of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterP...ry_File_System

The easiest way to explain it is: it's like living in the BitTorrent world. Imagine if you didn't have to pay web hosting fees? Your website lives because thousands of other computers have little pieces of it that get collected from an url with a special protocol. It doesn't matter if one computer is down, because there are plenty of other ones with the same piece to your site.

Then there are federated servers. Servers positioned around the world that are dedicated to hosting one program like the Discord servers. If I'm not mistaken it's what powers Mastodon and Diaspora.

If I had a dedicated computer and some extra bandwidth, I could download a copy of Mastodon, join the network and run my own server -- free of charge.

Gee, I think we're getting close to living in a Matrix...

Regards,
Steve


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