Comment by erulabs
2 days ago
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
All of the downsides you listed started with Jack Dorsey, and were significantly improved once Musk took over. X/Twitter still has its issues, though.
I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised. And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).
You can read the talk page yourself. Wikipedia's editors are annoying and impossible to work with, but their obsessions are weighted towards the truth. And while some editors have acted in bad faith for smaller articles; articles like that are generally treated with as much good faith as possible.
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> significantly improved once Musk took over
At a certain point it's just words; what makes those meaningful? Musk bans and limits distribution for people he dislikes or who criticize him, intentionally directs hate mobs, promotes hate and disinformation, ...
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> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
What does the even mean if you can host your own
Hosting your own doesn't really matter if it just means you're on a social network with one user.
Lots of people run single-user instances.
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Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
the problem here is, that a large large group of people do want something "to do with them" (and "them" not just being "maga losers"), but that for NORMAL users that sign up and use bluesky, there are others who choose that they must not socialize with them.
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
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Don't reinvent the wheel PHPBB, MyBB and others are still updated.
I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.
> IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago
And it’s still having critical security vulns after 26 years
Can’t get a CVE if every anonymously generated slop forum is different
They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.
> "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
Musk boots off and/or limits distribution of people he disagrees with. I can't fathom how you think that's 'free speech' - it's the opposite.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
> I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
Which servers are these fun ones? I would like to explore a bit.
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What does a site stealing content has to do with open web?