Technology

The web is the way it is because TBL put out a feeler and looked at the sorts of things people were playing with around him and managed to assemble enough of them into the solid core that everybody else glommed stuff onto, and then was able to serve as a reasonable steward for enough of it for a long enough time period that it solidified into something reasonable useful.

But not perfect. [shrugs in fediverse]

Part of why it's not perfect is because TBL was an academic person of privilege and so he's never had to actually viscerally feel the sorts of struggle that most of the world feels. And he's spent the past 35 years being fawned over.

For whatever reason, TBL has smacked face-first into "linked data" formerly known as RDF repeatedly for decades now. I mostly understand what's going on there and it kinda makes sense and I've even written some code that uses linked data and I've been generally following along as it goes.

There was RDF and a version of RSS that was based on it, but then a more approachable thing ended up actually being the real RSS and instead of RDF-styled tagging, the formerly influential startup Technorati and the still vaguely popular photo site Flickr got everybody tagging because that was something people could grasp.

If you think back to the dream of a "What would a Semantic Google look like" that folks were going on about a bunch of years ago and fast-forward to today with all of the AI-generated search result abuses and whatnot, you realize that if they had succeeded at it, the web might actually been a worse place.

These days, ActivityPub is actually a proper constrained system that fits into the RDF thing that TBL has been face-smaking into. It's actually got arcs in ways that Technorati/Flickr/et al tags don't. So I guess we can call this progress, but I don't know what percentage of people, even folks who care deeply about the Fediverse, actually grok the complete concept. Either way, the fediverse has pushed forward the "linked data" dream more than anything TBL has done. And part of this is that the successful fediverse apps have been grounded in being practical forward steps for people looking to jump off of a train moving in the wrong direction.

So, dono, I guess you could see a Fediverse refactor such that the data, which is already linked data anyways, ends up getting stored using Solid mechanisms with a decentralized concept of identity and Pods, et al. And if they were actually practical people, showing up with patches would be a great way to get people onboarded because there's at least a few things there that might be useful.

But, in the end, it's not that they are failing at being practical people who can deliver a useful solution, it's that I don't think they can really conceive of the important bits well enough to spend a lot of energy thinking they are making a better world when they are actually paving the way to make it even worse than had they sat around having fancy cocktails and bemoaning the state of the world and not tried to make Solid happen.