[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse
Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful o…
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The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.
See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.
And those 5000 pages were probably automatically generated from ... something.
Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren't a lot of third party clients available.
Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.
true, but at least they have been working on modularizing it for a few years, and making it so that even unsupported message types can be displayed to some level
That's chromium right now. Google has effectively monopolized web browser standards. The browser engine is impossibly complex at this point. Google dictates whatever they want with it.
I think that this is the reason that the rust programming language exists: to make learning the skill too hard for a regular person.
My favorate quote about the language is, "it feels like rust was made by people who hate uncertan behavor." Languages with manual memory management are harder. On top of that, Rust demands you prove your memory management is 'correct'.
Programming is already too hard for a regular person
Yes, most humans have trouble putting what they want into logical step-by-step instructions.
much easier than C/C++. no more random bugs that make no sense and basically untraceable segfault crashes