Flutterby™! : Some Hope

Brent Simmons: 2018: Some Hope, a call to rebuild the blogosphere and social web that we once had. I'm skeptical that the new thing can be built on the web. I think JavaScript and Google have killed it.

The unruly web — unregulated and uncontrolled — is, perhaps paradoxically, the easiest place to limit hate. Not because we can stop people from publishing, but because we don’t have to live by Dorsey’s and Zuckerberg’s rules and designs.

I remember when TC used referrer back-linking to make a Flutterby entry the second Google result for French Military Victories, and the idiocy and trolls that descended on the comment thread there. It's not just that we're at the whim of Twitter and Facebook's algorithms of what to amplify, but Google's too. And in integrating the mainstream media, we've amplified trolling: Unlike the old days of Usenet, with tools for filtering and killfiling, we have to reinvent the wheel for every place we publish or read.

Some of the new concepts for commenting with backlinks, as we used to do when we all read each other anyway, need a good aggregator, and I'm not sure HTTP is the right protocol to do that under. I've been pondering the tuits to do such a thing for ipfs or dat or something else that's distributed, that uses simple public keys for identity, and that means that it's likely that we have collective back-ups of family photographs and such.