An Erosion of my trust in the Web

I've deactivated my accounts on more platforms today. I looked at the amount of time I spend on all of these platforms and it doesn't seem to matter if they're open or closed; I still burn so much time that doesn't allow me to justify it. When I was looking for work, it filled up the space that I might have spent wondering how I might have wasted the last four years of my life^[1]. That means I've been doing a lot of journaling and thinking — including developing thoughts about the "open social Web".

This choice was indirectly prompted as I was watching a talk from XOXO 2024 about the need to heal the networks we exist on. I appreciate the forms of optimism that came up during this talk — the excerpt from the letter really got to me. I'd love to see these networks flourish, these spaces grow.

I'm afraid that I don't have enough faith to see it through anymore. I've personally attempted and failed multiple times to what I've come to understand a dream of utopia — a means of allowing people to design, inform and communicate consent on the Internet. I've spent time reading specifications in attempts of finding some guidance. I got more concerned that no matter where I looked, everything demands it to operate as if we're all sitting at CERN sharing research papers. Notice the "I" statements. I don't have faith — but I do think someone out there will manage to make something happen. My resistance or lack of faith comes from the focus on the push to make something new and not take any of the lessons that have come up in the development and evolution of these platforms.

Education does not fix much here — you can suggest developers to read any book that's highlighted how some of the features will crush the kind of experiences that they're aiming to develop^[2] for people who have no idea what WebFinger or JSON-LD is. I catch myself doing things I feel nasty doing after the fact — making cheeky threads about the false banner of alignment, the thin curiosity of tech and the reincarnation of American manifest destiny made global and digital under the banner of "innovation". That has done nothing. There's no Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to operate with consent-centric communication, the Social Web working group is very eager to allow employees from a violence-enabling company to participate in the development of "the future of the Social Web" nor is there anyone who breaks away from the conventional mold of Western technological development at the nascent ActivityPub-centric(?) Social Web Foundation^[3].

This sounds like a rant at this point. If it's taken as such then it's not going to introduce anything I haven't already written or posted. I'm largely disappointed in the toilet-bowl swirling of the same nature of green-field behaviors that planted the same seeds over and over. This is where my lack of hope and faith comes in. This probably will discourage anyone else who doesn't fit the mold from joining — which means that the people who do spearhead this needs to put more effort into the people part and not into the protocol.

My "anger" is in the knowledge that it is fully possible to build out a safer, more community-centric and consent-optimized Web and that instead there's a hunger to make that as unviable as possible. It's coming from multiple sides of the table and it makes me want to walk away from the table altogether. I don't plan to but I will keep as much distance from the parts of the table that I don't want to engage with until there's a better way to go about this.

I'm going to expand on this in a less rant-centric way in November, but for now, I'm logging off.