Should a single company control the Social Web?

Evan Prodromou

Emelia 👸🏻

@evan I don't even understand how you could think this is a good question to ask.

Emelia 👸🏻

@evan oooh, I understand now, this is another petty stab at bluesky & AT Protocol, who's next? Velid? SecureScuttleButt? Solid? (yes, solid may be a "standard" but it's dominated by one company)

Khleedril

@evan You've done some daft polls, but for crying out loud....

hallenbeck

@evan An interesting follow-up might be: should the Social Web be built on a single protocol?

@evan I can’t believe there are people who vote for “strong yes”, not on the Fedi which is built on ideas of decentralization and no one controlling the whole network

Evan Prodromou

@hallenbeck did you know that we have ways for everyone to use a single protocol that isn't controlled by any one company?

Evan Prodromou

@hallenbeck and that, in fact, most of the Internet works that way?

Özkan Pakdil 🦖

@evan why no Government option ? 🥳 more the marrier

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@thisismissem @evan
Also Threads and mainly Twitter and Facebook. Remember that this was the concept on which ActivityPub itself was built. He's probably just trying to remind people of that.

Evan Prodromou

@thejvmbender That's an interesting question and should probably be a different poll. Are you thinking that there'd be a single government entity that ran the whole Fediverse?

Raccoon at TechHub :mastodon:

@evan @hallenbeck
And it doesn't necessarily have to be a single protocol, but the servers need to be interoperable, not this thing where someone makes a new protocol and we have to do all this stuff to make bridges that don't effectively connect each other. BlueSky has made this really hyped pitch for this complex system of relay servers, but it's never even come to fruition, let alone been used to seamlessly integrate the two networks.

hallenbeck

@evan Does that invalidate my question? I'm not an expert on AP or AT, I'm just trying to understand the debate, but from what I've read, there are pros/cons/strengths/weaknesses with both. Are you suggesting that AP can do everything AT can do equally well and that AT is merely a competing standard and a cynical, commercial land-grab rather than an honest alternative?

Emelia 👸🏻

@Raccoon @evan Threads is (slowly) doing ActivityPub.

j0̷

@Raccoon @evan @hallenbeck nobody wants to interop with fedi because every time they try you all endlessly shout at them until they give up

Evan Prodromou

@hallenbeck I'm saying that protocols are a social agreement and not a technical one. If there are things in AT that we need to do in AP, we can add them, as part of an open standard. On the Internet, we collaborate on protocols and we compete on products.

Evan Prodromou

@hallenbeck

This isn't just about BS, either, although it's the latest startup to try to take over the social web. Farcaster raised $150M in May.

Farcaster, a crypto-based social network, raised $150M with just 80K daily users | TechCrunch

Farcaster, a blockchain-based social protocol founded by two Coinbase alumni, announced on Tuesday that it closed a $150 million fundraise. Led by

TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Özkan Pakdil 🦖

@evan it was a joke, you take it seriously thanks for that, I do not believe any company should control social web, but I voted `strong yes` because I think this question is wrong.

If we start controlling social web, then it should go to ethics and government and education. Why a company control any area on web, I do not understand.

Btw I took company as in capitalism company a firm. If we are talking about as in group of people then again this question I do not understand, why a group of people should control over social web.

Evan Prodromou

@hallenbeck if you can think of some good examples of venture-funded startups that created open protocols that we all use today, please let me know. The best example I can come up with is Ethernet, but there are probably others.

Ethernet - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

hallenbeck

@evan Is there any appetite within the community to work with AT to bring those things it does over to AP as part of an open standardisation process? Or if not that then appetite to make AT a W3C standard alongside and in collaboration with AP, acknowledging they serve somewhat different needs? The subtext I am picking up is a fear that Bluesky is leveraging VC funding to rapidly divide and conquer the social web. A sort of zero-sum protocol war funded by a company with a product.