Open vs. Closed: The Fight for a New Internet

in the 1990s when millions of people went online for the first time ever their experience looked something like this they plugged a telephone line into their computers installed America online from a CD or opened the pre-installed MSN Suite in their Windows version and they were generally greeted by a dashboard like this right away there are options for games a news stand personal finance travel booking Etc every user basically automatically got an email address resulting in this iconic sound you've got and they also got an instant messenger like the yellow running man of AOL or the center of my childhood Obsession MSN Messenger this OneStop shop for all of your needs seemed impossibly convenient at the time they made the internet easier than ever AOL alone quickly gained tens of millions of users and fueled by investor hype they even bought the giant publisher Time Warner which then valued the combined entity at about $360 billion for context there is more than 8 times what Elon paid for Twitter and more than 13 times what Microsoft paid for LinkedIn even ignoring inflation at their PEAK Internet portals like AOL and MSN were basically seen as the whole internet but while young Martin was happily buzzing the windows of his MSN buddies and dads around the world were ecstatic about seeing stock quotes in AOL some idealistic nerds had a really different vision for the future of the internet people like Tim burners Lee were quietly working on something called the worldwide web where any user's computer could connect to any website not just the handful of companies that AOL struck a business development deal with and where the network itself would be fully open and decentralized and to do this HTML was invented as a way to describe the contents of a website in a standardized text file HTTP was invented as a way for a server to then send this text file to a computer that wanted to view their site and programs called web browsers were invented which could then read the file and display the website to the user anyone could make a website anyone could use the protocols and anyone could even make a web browser so the whole thing was permissionless and decentralized and the people in charge of shaping these standards were not companies but instead nonprofits like the worldwide Web Consortium also known as the w3c now for many years the worldwide web was seen as a hopelessly complex and nerdy thing after all how the normal person even know how to find all these random web servers or how could we expect them to learn to use these complex text strings called uniform resource locators just to get around or perhaps just as importantly how could anyone monetize such a decentralized system and if no one could why would anyone bother with putting their valuable stuff up there surely the masses would be more drawn to the closed web portals that were so much simpler to use and yet the open web enthusiasts kept tinkering and of course as we know not too many years later they won in 1990 the first search engine launched making it easy to navigate the decentralized network in 1994 Netscape launched making web browsers really userfriendly soon after the web portals like AOL started including their own web browsers inside their portals then in 1995 Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would jump on the quote internet tidal wave sounding code red and going all in on the worldwide web soon after players like Mozilla and WordPress democratized the open web for anyone who wanted to participate and a Nimble internet native startup called Google quickly took over and built what has basically become the infrastructure of much of the modern internet an incredible search engine a powerful web browser a fantastic free email service that became the default identity for people across most of the internet and even a default way to monetize just about any website just allow them to play some ads on your blog or on your video and you to can make money on this wild thing known as the internet it turns out that the Techno optimists who were so insistent on new standards and protocols and everything else they they were right and they won Innovation and good design made this complex Network super easy to use and its permissionless nature meant that in the place of AOL and MSN we instead got millions of successful websites so the internet became technically decentralized except with time of course companies have found new tools to create wall Gardens even using this infrastructure as well and those new tools are called Network effects and ecosystems and every Tech Giant today is trying to lock you into their W garden with these ecosystems and network effects are incredibly powerful tools and once again they're starting to starve the internet of innovation again but just like back in the '90s there's a new Coalition forming that is aiming to break these wall Gardens again it's a coalition of unlikely seeming enthusiasts again who insist on using protocols like activity Pub and whose plans include building a so-called fediverse a decentralized social internet which will break the walls of the current ecosystems which they think will create a whole second massive wave of innovation and democratization the parallels are very strong with the '90s and it's not just the idealists either Mark Zuckerberg Twitter founder Jack dorsy and the heads of Wordpress Tumblr Flipboard Mozilla and more have all announced embracing some form of this future so that is potentially huge so what the hell is the ferse can it change the whole internet and should we be worried or excited about people like Mark Zuckerberg embracing it let's find out [Music] to dig deeper into this topic I interviewed the CEO of Mastadon the CEO of automatic the company that owns Tumblr and WordPress the CEO of open Vibe a client for the fediverse and also two people who run a fairly large Master on instance plus a few others too if this topic ends up fascinating you as much as it fascinated me you can see four of my interviews in full on our streaming service nebula with links in the description thanks to nebula for sponsoring this video have you ever tried to convince somebody to move from from One messaging app to another and met just almost complete insurmountable resistance well in that case you have met the power of the network effect each user already has their Network in a certain app including their past conversations files Etc and giving all of that up is just incredibly hard there's a literal mathematical formula attached to something called the mattal law that states that a network becomes exponentially more valuable as more people join and get connected to it this means that large networks tend to just keep getting larger and that moving people over to a competitor becomes incredibly hard even if that competitor is objectively better for everyone involved which allows big networks to either entify their platform and cram it full of ads or to extort a sort of tax on all the participants or both because good luck moving all of your networks somewhere else even worse if you're stuck with one network a company can then try to use that to force or at least nudge you to use the rest of their ecosystem to creating an Ever stronger dependence for you and gigantic World Gardens that become basically impossible to compete with from the outside think IM message slowly bringing people into the Apple ecosystem whether they want to use an iPhone or not think left leaning Twitter users struggling to leave the platform even if they disagree with Elon musk's decisions think right leaning Twitter users struggling to establish a competing platform after Trump and Alex Jones and a bunch of other people were booted off Etc Network effects are one of the biggest reasons for why people are stuck in their walled Gardens and breaking the effects is one of the main goals of the fediverse and their tool in particular is basically the same thing that it was back in the open web days protocols most prominently a protocol named activity pup and here's how this one works every social media platform if you think about it basically has the same elements like profile names pictures and posts and the same interactions too like likes boosts Etc just displayed a little bit differently so under activity Pub all social media platforms agreed to a shared standard for how to to handle these elements which suddenly makes these systems interoperable and activity Pub is actually a proper standard that is defined and maintained by the same w3c as HTTP and you can see it in action already today its first users were services like Mastadon pixel fan peer tube Etc these are somewhat Niche and nerdy things with a limited appeal at least for now which mostly act as activity PP based clones or at least versions of one of the existing big platforms but since they're all using activity pop they actually have two really important character characteristics first they are decentralized instead of a single company owning Twitter Instagram Etc these new platforms have basically no owners anyone can run an instance on them in the same way that anyone can host their email server and these instances can then just talk to each other to form a shared network in fact you can see in a user's name what instance they are from in the same way that you can see whether somebody uses Gmail or Outlook or whatever else as their email provider and it's not uncommon for large organizations like the BBC to actually host their own instances for their employees too just like with email users can more or less move their accounts between instances and even move their followers along if they don't like how their instance is run and also anyone can build a client to access this shared network just like anyone can build an email client too there are dozens of different apps like this with my personal favorite being Megalodon on Android and there also over 10,000 instances just for madon already too and the second unique characteristic is that anything on activity Pub is actually operable tool a Mastadon post a pixel fat post or a peer to video are all equivalent objects using the activity pop standard so each of these can be accessed from either of the apps so here's me in Mastadon seeing a pixel fed image for example which I can like and comment on using my masteron account which will also show up when viewed in pixel fat 2 and similarly here is a peer tube video including its full comment section viewed in the masteron app which I can fully interact with too now interoperability can become a little bit weird between very different types of apps and content but overall what this shared standard creates is one giant shared network between all the different apps which is what people call the fediverse well that is a terribly nerdy name and it also just seems like a really complex system but I guess the open internet seemed really complex as well until we got used to it and just like the open internet the commercial players are starting to pay attention to the fediverse now too meta has explicitly committed to adopting activity pop for Threads in the future and Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly personally pushing for Federation Flipboard has already rolled out experimental activity pop support so you can see masteron posts in the Flipboard app for example and the other way around too and the Flipboard CEO has a whole podcast dedicated to the fediverse now too then Jack dorsy was working on having all of Twitter become Federated before Elon took over although since then he has moved his project over to his new platform called to Blue Sky Mozilla Vivaldi medium and more are all hosting their own masteron instances Mozilla has invested into Mammoth an activity Pub client that wants to make using the fediverse more userfriendly and automatic has embraced activity Pub as well they have already rolled out experimental support for WordPress the CEO Matt muan wake has confirmed to me that they are still working on getting Tumblr support as well and when I asked if the podcast player pocketcasts which they also own could add support as well Matt said that it was definitely possible later on so there's definitely a lot of interest Beyond just the early adopter techno idealists here already now notably missing from this for now of course are the really big platforms Facebook Instagram Tik Tok YouTube Etc and the current Integrations are actually still pretty limited Blue Sky the new project of Jack dorsy uses something called the at protocol which is competing with activity Pub and not really compatible with it for now for Threads the tests have just started and for now only a few individual thread posts are actually visible through Mastadon in WordPress blog owners have to get an extra plugin and turn Federation on manually and this then allows them their blocks to be viewed through apps like Mastadon in full and CEO Matt millwick tells me that only a few thousand people have used this so far and from what I hear tumbller and threads will both at least initially require users to opt in to having their posts Federated meta and automatic in particular are really large companies under a lot of scrutiny so they are really careful with exposing user data to outside platforms and letting outside data come into their platform especially from people who haven't actually signed their terms of service agreements so there's a whole lot of work to be figured out still not long ago Facebook got lots of backlash around things like Cambridge analytica when they exposed a lot of user data through the Facebook API and so they're likely extra cautious in this new world of the Federated internet all of this will take time but when people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack dorsy and more are openly saying that this kind of looks like at least some part of the future of social media going forward I think we have to pay a lot of attention and specifically we have to answer two main questions first why would people like this support a new standard a new opening up of the internet that might break their very own walled Gardens and second will all of this work let's start with the why reason number one for why people like Mark Zuckerberg might support such an opening up is that they feel like they might be forced to Regulators around the world are increasingly focused on forcing interoperability the European Union's digital markets act explicitly says that large platforms that they call Gatekeepers have to allow third parties to interoperate with the gatekeeper's own services and meanwhile antitrust laws and regulations are gaining Steam from the likes of the United States Japan Korea Etc we've seen governments attacking everything from Chargers to App Store payments and iMessage monopolies and there's a good chance that if an open standard for social media exists that might soon become kind of mandatory in parts of the world too so adopting interoperability for a relatively new platform like threads might let meta learn experiment and also potentially influence the standard before they're actually forced to do so with their bigger platforms now reason number two for this acceptance is that companies like meta and Twitter actually kind of hate all their moderation options right now moderating A centralized platform is actually not only insanely expensive with tens of thousands of moderators needed but it also comes with an infinite number of controversial decisions that have to be made should Alex Jones or Donald Trump or whoever else be banned it's literally up to you dear Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and no matter how you choose politicians will drag you to court users and advertisers will hate you Etc but in the Federated system a platform could kick out a user that was bad for business because the people who got kicked out could still just go to another server or start their own and they could even move their followers over if they wanted to it's kind of hard to be angry at that and reason number three is that the network effect that until now worked against Innovation is starting to work for the fediverse too and it's kind of creates a Snowball Effect when the fediverse consisted of just a few Mastadon instances it was basically irrelevant now now that it has over 10 million registered accounts and tens of thousands of instances across many apps it's actually kind of a thing and if even a few of these medium-sized platforms like Tumblr and threads join it will start to rival even the large platforms I mean by now well over 40% of websites on the Internet run on WordPress and pocketcasts could open up basically the entire podcasting industry to the fediverse 2o so while things could happen pretty soon now I have no idea how far away we are from the fediverse becoming a really big thing maybe it will never happened but basically every time a new platform joins the fediverse that shared network grows bigger that makes it more attractive for the next platform to join and so on and so forth so this could spiral into something where a user might think hey why wouldn't I want to join that the shared network instead of one of the W Gardens masteron CEO confirmed to me that this was one of his big hopes and I bet that people like Zuckerberg at least realized this Dynamic too okay reason number four for this interest is that the feder is currently being a little a little bit too technical a little bit too complex and hard to navigate well it's actually not just a bad thing but also an opportunity just like Google and companies like it built the easy to ouse tools and services that made using the open web really userfriendly Zuckerberg might think that they could do the same for the fediverse the most userfriendly app some Central spam filter Discovery algorithms monetization Etc these are all things that meta knows how to build so why not build it for everyone in the same way that Google ads for example work across website and the entire internet users from other fediverse platforms could start using the Technologies and solutions of meta as well meaning that meta could at least attempt to shape social media Beyond just its own wall Gardens too okay and reason number five and this is kind of the Sinister one is that meta might be trying to torpedo this whole thing before it gets big many Open Standards like xmpp or RSS were first embraced by Tech giants like meta and Google just to then be sabotaged from the inside out and then let to die so they might do the same here too maybe meta will do what Apple does with imassage they adopt activity Pub as a standard but then they become its biggest player and they make it so everyone else outside of threads becomes kind of a green bubble a second class citizen to threads so people just end up moving their accounts to threads anyway and the open Alternatives basically just slowly die so these are the five reasons I could come up with for why a company like meta would want to adopt activity pop and regardless of which one ends up being correct like maybe it's a combination of the five as well anyway I actually think there's good reason to believe that the activity PP protocol and the fediverse will succeed regardless the fediverse allows for permissionless innovation in the same way that the early open web did as well for the first time ever a college kid right now can build the next big social app and start with a total addressable user base of at least a few million accounts and indeed the Indie developers are already coming up with creative ideas or a big company like Google who has desperately tried to have its own social media app can soon try again too that is just an incredibly powerful place to be okay so those are all the reasons why I believe this could work but let me throw some cold water on all of these hopes and actually also say why I think it also could fail first all of this ferse thing might just be too Technical and too complex for regular users I mean I personally think that you can get used to this pretty easily but today's world Gardens are very slick and very easy to use so a Federated solution will have a harder time than ever second regular people clearly don't care about Federation until can actually solve a problem of theirs and many people might not want Federation at all I've actually talked to Tumblr users for example who thought that it was quote awful and a terrible idea to let people from outside of Tumblr in as that would break the place's unique culture while masteron die hards often want to block threads on a domain level from federating with their instance altogether because they just don't like the company Matt Milan Wick as a head of Tumblr said that he thought that protocols should support talking to basically anyone and that the users should then be given a choice whether they want to Federate or not which is basically what I think as well but many people clearly just don't want some services to be connected and next moderation could become a problem as the overall Network scales so right now each instance moderates itself they can either block individual accounts or they can also block entire instances this works great right now because you can choose to have for example a very left leaning instance or a very right leaning one or anything else in between or outside where you can even start your own anyway while there are shared block lists and people are working on improving the automation systems and while in my experience masteron content is actually extremely high quality and very wholesome I'm not actually sure how it will scale I had a very good conversation with some people who run a medium-sized masteron instance with four volunteer moderators and a legal counselor and these people sounded very well prepared and just genuinely lovely but I cannot imagine that the average random person hosting an instance would get this detailed and would be this well prepared to handle I don't know large spam attacks or dmca takedown requests or any other number of things so that could become a problem and on the related note one final reason for why I think the activity pop system will be bit challenging in the future is that it does really weird things to content ownership and control see in a centralized platform like for example YouTube the creator of a piece of content can choose what happens with that content I can delete or unlist the video I can block others from re-uploading it Etc similarly abusive content should at least theoretically be removable from the central Authority tool now people can of course misuse these systems and they can break the terms of service agreements but this is still a system that generally does work but in the ferse things get really complicated every post and also the media attached to it generally gets copied to every instance a server that it gets viewed from meaning that a piece of content is often on thousands of servers at the same time now a user can ask for a post to be deleted which by default sends out a delete request to the other servers I'm sure that the vast majority of those servers then honor the requests but there's no guarantee that they do now technically of course you still have rights like the copyrights of your videos for example which still belong to you and I haven't actually encountered anything problematic on Mastodon so far so maybe this crowdsourced approach actually works but yeah I could see it becoming a problem long term so for now I personally don't mind posting basically the equivalent of tweets to the ferse I mean those are basically public but I definitely would not put my videos up there especially given that maston's CEO told me that for now these there basically no plans for Native monetization either as a content creator I of course have to have monetization I mean I spent over a month on this video alone and also thousands of Euros on equipment rent people editing the videos etc etc and so until the fediverse figures out monetization you can support my work by watching my stuff over on nebula as I said I uploaded the four most interesting interviews from my research to nebula that offered me a completely new perspective on the future of what the internet might look like if you enjoy enjoyed this video I think you would love to hear what the really thoughtful people that are running Mastadon Tumblr WordPress and so on think about activity pump or you'd want to hear the actual day-to-day challenges and activities of someone running a mastodon incense for example or you might be interested in hearing what entrepreneurs think about innovating in an open social media environment right now these videos join over a dozen other bonus videos and the whole nebula original series of mine that are exclusive to nebula as well Plus I even have a class that I've published on the nebula classes platform and there are also hundreds of other Fant fantastic originals from easily the best group of educational creators on the internet nebula is a video streaming service that we've built as a home for ourselves it helps us Finance new and more ambitious work there are no ads no Shady trackers just really highquality content and signing up is a way to directly support us with my link which you can find in the description or you can scan the QR code for on screen right now you can also get an annual subscription for just 30 bucks for a full year which is $20 off from just using a regular link so be sure to use one of my links when you sign up all right I hope you enjoyed that be sure to follow me on the fediverse as well I am Tech alar mass.to and I'll see you in the next [Music] video

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 164,113

Keywords: Techaltar, tech altar, friday checkout, the friday checkout, activitypub, activity pub, internet, AOL, america online, MSN, web, open web, world wide web, protocols, protocol, open, open source, fediverse, federated internet, social web, Flipboard, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube

Id: R3ptZ1W-FRA

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024