Abstract
For over a decade, standards bodies like the IETF and W3C have attempted to prevent the centralization of the Web via the use of open standards for ‘permission-less innovation.’ Yet today, these standards, from OAuth to RSS, seem to have failed to prevent the massive centralization of the Web at the hands of a few major corporations like Google and Facebook. We’ll delve deep into the lessons of failed attempts to replace DNS like XRIs, identity systems like OpenID, and metadata formats like the Semantic Web, all of which were re-cuperated by centralized platforms like Facebook as Facebook Connect and the “Like” Button. Learning from the past, a new generation of blockchain standards and governance mechanisms may be our last, best chance to save the Web.
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Notes
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Let us not forget that the first versions of Twitter actually offered the support of decentralized XMPP, and this decentralized Twitter was turned off not by the programmers, but by the management who could see no demand to support decentralization. At the time, users didn’t understand decentralization, much less want it (personal communications with Blaine Cook, founding engineer at Twitter).
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For a detailed metaphysical and cognitive treatment of identity, Brian Cantwell Smith’s On the Origin of Objects presents a metaphysics where objects are “carved” via registration from the underlying metaphysical flux [2].
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http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/. Also see the article Open Social Networks: Bring Back Iran by Dan Brickley, inventor of FOAF: http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/07/249.
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It should be noted that the first social networking sites can be considered AOL Messenger and SixDegrees, which were founded in 1996, before FOAF but also before well-known social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook.
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While there were entire books published and billions of euros spent in European Commission project grants, there is to date no working Semantic Web Services. For the details of perhaps the largest failed research attempt of the Web, see Dieter Fensel et al. [3].
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RSS-dev Working Group RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 2000. http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec.
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RSS 0.2 (2002) http://backend.userland.com/rss092.
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RSS 2.0 (2003) https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html.
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The vast majority using RSS 2.0, followed by Atom, and then previous RSS versions in 2018.
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XMPP also was the backbone for the ill-fated and confusing Google Wave, which was dropped by Google in 2010 although idealistic software developers such as Kune and SwellRT are working on trying to build a decentralized social web on top of XMPP.
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The W3C Social Activity’s scope is https://www.w3.org/Social/. Note that I organized the strategy and wrote the W3C Social Web Working Group charter.
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As founder of the W3C Working Group, I stepped down when it became clear the W3C started to force RDF on the Working Group against the will of developers.
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IBM seemed interested primarily in placing any patents related to the OpenSocial into W3C’s Royalty-Free patent policy.
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Called “Solid,” see https://solid.mit.edu/.
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Halpin, H. (2019). Decentralizing the Social Web. In: Bodrunova, S., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_16
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