Mike Masnick

Protocols and platforms

September 27, 2023

Love ’em or hate ’em, big platforms with big collections of people and information about said people are currently ever-present. This deep dive from Masnick has a bias—one which I wholeheartedly endorse—but it is also an excellent description of what does “protocols versus platforms” really mean? What’s a protocol, and what’s a platform? How are they different, and why do they seem to have such different effects on the late-game situation? If you’ve so far avoided this topic, this is a good place to try spending a half an hour to see if it makes more sense.

After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically—now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred. Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints. And that’s not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect.

~ Mike Masnick from, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech

slip:4ukico1.

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The open internet lives on

December 12, 2022

But, there are always tradeoffs. Relying on someone else’s platform is often just much easier. It doesn’t involve having to maintain your own site, and it’s also often where the audience is. The issue with blogs is that you had to attract — and then keep — an audience. Tools like RSS acted as a method for keeping people coming back, but… then Google became the de facto provider of RSS reading tools, and then killed it. To this day, that move is still considered one of the defining moments in the shift from a more distributed, independent web to one that is controlled by a few large companies.

~ Mike Masnick from, https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/03/the-internet-can-still-be-small-and-nice-but-its-on-all-of-us-to-make-that-work/

slip:4utete1.

My pull quote is really just a small side trail in the article. But I’m quoting it because it reinforces my point (possibly on purpose by the author, possibly by coincidence). Even a maneuver by the giant Google hasn’t killed blogging. Blogging continues. (Hey thanks for reading my blog!) And the same is true for everything else.

Because it all runs on the internet. The walled gardens referred to as social media? …they actually run atop the internet. The current darling-child that is Mastodon? …it uses a protocol called ActivityPub which was invented to enable federated networking of social activity. And ActivityPub runs atop the good ‘ol web… which of course runs on the internet. The true gift is the open internet.

Also: I’m on Mastodon :) just look for @craig@constantine.name to follow this blog, or you can even look for @craig@moversmindset.com to follow the Movers Mindset project.

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