Think global, act localhost

Links from one page to another are so fundamental to the web that without them it simply would not exist. HyperText — the H and the T in HTML — is defined by the W3C as text which contains links to other texts. And there, by linking to a page on the W3C website, I have created hypertext and added to the web. The web is the links.

So it’s worth looking into why most social media silos don’t really like you sharing outgoing links (tl;dr - the word “silo” is probably a spoiler here).

URLs in text shared on Instagram posts are unclickable (although you can embed a clickable link in a Story). In October last year Twitter/X removed article headlines on links shared to the platform, and now users can only see the image and the link domain which makes them less likely to be clicked. I’ve heard that TikTok actively discourages link sharing, but I’m far too old to be a user of that platform so I can’t confirm this first-hand.

And then there’s the algorithms: there seems to be general agreement amongst users that social media posts that contain outgoing links perform worse than other types of post on any social media platform that uses an algorithm to choose what to show to its users rather than a strictly reverse-chronological feed. And no, I don’t have any hard evidence for that because these algorithms tend to be confidential proprietary information.

In my own experience I’ve certainly noticed a feedback loop being created from these policies that users tend to share unlinked pictures, video, and text posts rather than links. I think that this is a deliberate behavioural “nudge” by the social media silos.

Disfavouring the sharing of outgoing links is part of what Cory Doctorow has called the enshittification of the web - it makes it much harder for a user to switch platforms because the content of their feed — shared photos, videos, and text — is siloed and hosted on the platform rather than being in the form outgoing links to other web pages that contain those same photos, videos, or text (usually with a lot more added context) which could then be bookmarked in a browser.

The social media silo effectively owns your content and the content of the people you follow. And this is why the IndieWeb community has developed the concept of POSSE — Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — which I touched on in a blog post last month.

I obviously already have a blog (since you’re reading it now!) and this year it’ll be sixteen years old. I’m currently working on building a similar system for short-form content more akin to social media posts, based on all the expertise and information on the IndieWeb site.

The basic implementation is already running on this site, but I’ve still got to add the syndication part that will send my notes, replies, and likes off to the various social media silos, and retrieve replies and likes from users on those silos. But already in its very basic form it’s starting to build a publicly-accessible list of bookmarks to pages on other sites, with the added advantage of having browse-by-subject-tag functionality (yes, that’s an old-fashioned tag cloud!).

I’m manually including a quote from the linked/liked pages and adding some hashtags to add some context — both for curious visitors and for myself! — and I may also implement link preview functionality to display an image and other metadata from the web page in question at some point in the future.

[For the web developers/engineers amongst you, each post in that section of the site has a permalink, and each permalink page is marked up with Microfomats2 and schema.org structured metadata, and when published will send notifications to any linked URL via Webmention or the older XML-RPC pingback, depending on the capabilities of the linked URL, and retrieve any similar notifications sent via the same methods.]

This is obviously not a viable solution for the wholesale enshittification of the web. Even if every web developer in the world implemented something similar then it would only free up an infinitesimally small fraction of the content of the web from social media silos.

However it is, at least, a tiny step in the right direction, in the spirit of what I’m calling “think global, act localhost” — and honestly I can’t quite believe that the search engines are currently telling me that no one has ever coined that particular pun/phrase before.

Think global, act localhost: website owners and web developers should consider the global health of the web and its ongoing enshittification and, while knowing that they do not individually have the power to change the world, they should at least take a tiny bit of action on their own website.