The open web isn't dying. We're killing it

[Julien Genestoux]

Julien is right:

“Why did we keep outsourcing identity, distribution, and monetization to companies whose incentives were obviously misaligned with ours?

[…] It is because, collectively, we preferred the short-term consumer surplus of convenience over the long-term responsibilities of stewardship.”

We can raise the alarm about the demise of the open web all we want, but you can’t sell or promote a technology based on ideology alone. The truth is that other solutions were quicker and easier — even for many of us that held up the open web banner.

Julien’s proposal is that we should think of ourselves as netizens rather than just consumers. I actually think that this is driving a lot of the innovation in the ATproto ecosystem in particular, but also on the Fediverse. People in those spaces have intentionally moved somewhere new where they can have a credible exit, can export their data cleanly, and can feel like they’re having safer, more productive, less fascistic conversations.

But the money piece isn’t there. The running joke is that the Fediverse hates money — conversations about revenue or capitalism are very often shut down early, and people who try to fundraise are often criticized — but it’s also been an ongoing issue in ATproto land too. If people are going to build good things, they need to be able to eat and pay rent so they can keep doing it. I’d argue that, yes, you do need netizens, and I’m very excited to see a resurgence in this kind of movement across the open social web in particular. We need more netizens, and the more there are, the more likely it is that people will pay for the right kind of services.

I work for a newsroom that people often donate to out of a sense of catharsis — a gratitude that something is being done in a world where they feel powerless. I think there’s something to learn from here too. In the past, I’ve argued that highly ideological tech spaces need more product thinking so that we can more sharply identify valuable solutions to people’s problems, and there’s still truth in that — but I've learned that sometimes the product value is agency in the face of powerlessness rather than a set of features. There may well be value in leaning right in to the anti big tech angle on the open web. What might it look like to put people’s distrust of X, Google, Microsoft, et al front and center, and put a fundraising banner up like Wikipedia does?

I think we can take Julien’s point about netizens and connect it directly to the idea of citizens. People see what’s going on in the world and know that tech companies are intertwined with it. Some of them — not most of them, but a reasonable number — may want to do something about that. Not because they believe in an open web as such, or even know what that is, but because they believe in an open society. Using this kind of messaging would be overtly political in a way that tech is sometimes afraid to be, but we’ve seen similar messaging create interest in funding alternatives to US big tech in Europe, for example (and result in actual funding). I think the interest is there to move away from the tech powers-that-be globally, but engaged citizens don't always know what to concretely do about it. We can bring our message to them.

We need more netizens and citizens both, and we should be talking about this more. Rather than de-emphasizing the ideology of the open web in favor of more proximate product value, which is a thing I’ve sometimes argued for in the past, we should accept that it is a work of engaged citizenry that verges on activism. Embracing that could find us aligned people outside of our existing development circles who might be interested in broadening our impact. I’d like to see us try.

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