#TIL about #Weird;

"Independent 'social sign-in' for the alt-web."

"Weird wants to be "the Google-login button of the people's web", powered by people's websites instead of totalitarian mega-platforms. By making (or connecting) your website with Weird you will soon be able to access and interact with the small, open and indie web just as easily as the regular web works today. Same conveniences, without the dark patterns, spying and data theft."

weird.one/

@djsumdog
> all of this will happen again .. but shittier

I see no reason for such cynicism. I'm sure the creators of Weird are aware of these precedents.

OpenID, like XMPP, faced the headwinds mentioned in the article; a general shift away from open standards by dominant companies. Those winds have clearly started blowing in the opposite direction since it was written in 2018. Mozilla Persona/ WebID was ahead of its time.

@Zergling_man

The shift away from open standards did not hurt these companies in the slightest, and only benefited them. StackOverflow, whose community is most developers, had less than a 2% OpenID usage. Mozilla Persona wasn't ahead of it's time, it was a regression to the mean; a project Mozilla gave up on just like they gave up on ... not being a total piece of shit company that forced resignations of a Christian because of his private religious beliefs.

Do you really think any new federation signon system will catch on, outside of truly open source distributed projects? In the 90s they might have, but today, we have way too many commies who have personal missions to push Code-of-conducts and documentation changes in projects they've never written a single line of code for. The frothing morons on Hackernews will praise such people (the ones who don't are banned) and we watch everything turn to shit under a blanket of ideological luxury beliefs.

I don't want to be negative. I want to believe. But my negative comes from what I've seen with my own eyes. It's a moral panic that is not going away. It will only grow like a cancer.
@djsumdog @strypey @Zergling_man >Do you really think any new federation signon system will catch on, outside of truly open source distributed projects? In the 90s they might have, but today, we have way too many commies who have personal missions to push Code-of-conducts and documentation changes in projects they've never written a single line of code for. The frothing morons on Hackernews will praise such people (the ones who don't are banned) and we watch everything turn to shit under a blanket of ideological luxury beliefs.

Here's an example: the problem with Big Tech single sign ons is very, very simple.

If you are banned from your Google account (like with the Jordan Peterson saga that pushed him into fame, along with many less relevant people online), you just lost access to every single website you used to sign in. You now have to contact each and every site to explain the situation and hoping they will transfer your e-mail over, because you're locked out of that single sign on feature and your gmail account (if you used that for Google and not a different one).

Now imagine something like J6 or Charlottesville happens again, or some election they don't like, and the activist employees who work in the dark are giddy at the idea of banning undesirables and making their lives hell.

They will want there to be a way to ban you. Nothing like that could happen again without this to stop "harassment" because some unfunny kids decided to keep making alts to post the same shit.
@djsumdog @Zergling_man @strypey The other problem, aside from politics in Mozilla and the like, is very simple.

Big tech companies and journalists worked to kill RSS in the mainstream (compare how everything in the late 00s had it to even 5 years later) for a very good reason; it eliminates a locus of control.

The death of RSS was talked about in Trust Me I'm Lying, and for a good reason. RSS was a firehose feed of news stories. Google News (and similar social media feeds), aside from being able to blacklist any news source that is unapproved by the employees and Google themselves, is also slanted towards whoever writes the most bombastic, clickbait, fear mongering or sensational headlines.

Sure, people like LFJ will talk about how it's your duty in big tech to nip it in the bud and do something, and Google will have documents like the Good Censor PDF file leak, yet this entire format of media is at it's core flawed.

You can't go link a CNN RSS feed anymore aside from a bitrotted XML file that is stuck with news stories from 2018, and other sites have buried away or have dead feeds. Or they'll want you to use some shit like feedly to get the feed. You're instead normally expected to use Google News or Facebook to pull the latest news feeds.

Look how often people share fake stories here or stories that are out of date as if they came out today or yesterday, the same shit goes on over in the normiesphere and this is all because what gets people pumped is scary news stories or crazy ones.

This is just one example. They will never let something like OpenID succeed, if they can have people tied into the walled gardens of Google/MSFT/FB, and when it's not about control it's about money and datamining.
@PurpCat @strypey @djsumdog rss is still pretty great, wordpress has it enabled by default so I can often get feeds from there because the admins didn't even know about it.
But like 99% of my feeds are just mangadex via my own proxy tool.
And then there's this guy: https://www.hokkaido-np.co.jp/output/7/free/index.ad.xml
@Zergling_man @djsumdog @strypey Yep outside the normiesphere it's still alive. It's just the normies tend to go to a few sites for their daily dose of slop.
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@PurpCat @djsumdog @strypey @Zergling_man Was it ever relevant with normies? I think most people never even heard of it. Even the name RSS sounds like something that only web developers or web crawlers need to worry about. I felt it should've had a better name like WebFeed, then people would actually know what it is.

· · Web · 2 · 0 · 2

All protocols are...

@xianc78
> something that only web developers or web crawlers need to worry about

To become mainstream, protocols need to become ubiquitous and invisible. Like plumbing and TCP/IP.

@PurpCat @djsumdog @Zergling_man

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