Tim Berners-Lee: Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter

Poor Tim. Look what they've done to his Web.

What are you talking about? The web was always about capitalism and centralization!

You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog. It’s good that the big corps systematically block you out so you as an individual have to use their services. Who wants privacy really? Sounds like criminal stuff, we just need to peek at your data to serve you better ads. Ignore law enforcement paying us for your data, nothing bad will come of that.
- Tim’s intention with the web was information sharing. He wanted a way for academics to share their work with other academics. He identified a problem at his time at CERN, and proposed a solution.
  
  Then corporations were quick on capitalizing on this idea.
- You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog.
  
  There were many more email services than now, and not too expensive hosting for personal webpages was common.
  
  Not erasing that for history, my irony detector is slow
I would feel more sympathetic to him if not for that time he betrayed us on DRM.
Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required

That's been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.
- This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.
- One of the reasons might me that we still do not have any standard baked micropayment system for the Internet.

Ironic that he talks about Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation in Medium, a company that also tries to monopolize and capitalize the blog’s information

Yea I agree, it's a bit strange to me that the inventor of the web doesn't seem to have a personal blog site for his own writing.
- Platforms actually have one significant advantage over personal websites, blogs, disconnected forums: You only have to go to one website (open one app) in order to read everything you find interesting. You don't have to remember to go to 5 different forums and read 15 different blogs.
  
  Of course the disadvantage is that they are a lot easier to censor because they're a single point of failure.
  
  ActivityPub should in theory be the best of both worlds, but I am not too optimistic; people, organizations, governments wanting to censor people they don't like will always find a way. :(
- When you invent the www, you get to use w3.org as your blog... e.g.
  
  https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Charlie.html
  
  more:
  
  https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Interesting read, although I do not understand everything. It's nice to hear a fediverse shout-out.

@SorteKanin@feddit.dk my biggest worry is that his Solid POD has been coming from about 2016 in design and was funded 2021 or so, and I remember it being announced in 2022 or so. In today's world, that is pretty slow-going. It seemed to always be imminent. I even registered a POD back in 2022... and then nothing still after two years. So many other decentralised protocols have been adopted since then.

Admittedly we do have an urgent need for one's own POD identity no matter where you are on social networks, but I still don't see how we're going to get ActivityPub, Nostr, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc to all adopt it.

Yeah. It's an interesting concept, but I can't see why anyone would want to use it.
- @General_Effort@lemmy.world it's about retaining a single identity for yourself, and one which you control and link to where you are using it vs a unique profile at every different social network.

Tim Berners-Lee is mad. The internet's father is mad.

Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine.

That’s one proud ass dude. I wish I invented the web, so I could utter those words. Legend.

Why does this guy think he invented the web? I don't know enough to say he didn't, but why does he think so?

Wasn't it a multi-person/org effort? Isn't that why everyone laughed at Al Gore when he implied the same? After going on about the need to decentralize, this guy wants to take the credit himself?

I mean... He made www, HTML, URLs and HTTP. Literally everything you used to write your comment he was involved in. I'm sure he didn't do it entirely alone, we always build on what came before us. But it's not inaccurate to call him the inventor of the Web.

Also remember the Web is not the same as the Internet.
- What's the difference between the two?
Tim's name is the only one on the original html rfc. He is also a contributor on the httpd rfcs.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866

So as far as content creation is concerned, yes he invented it. Html markup made it very easy for non-technical people to easily create their own web pages. That we no longer do that as individuals is the main point he is making. The original intent of the tool has been taken over by marketing and capitalism.

Before his work we communicated and shared via ftp, telnet, usenet, gopher, smtp, and irc.
He developed HTML, HTTP, URL, the first browser and the first Webserver...
Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.

Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web. He did this through the creation of technologies foundational to web browsers, including the URL, HTTP, and HTML. That he invented them isn’t controversial.
- Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
  
  Al Gore claimed to be involved in approving the funding which resulted in the creation of the Internet.
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/internet-of-lies/
Well, if you trust Wikipedia as a source, the second paragraph of the article on the World Wide Web starts out:

"The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee..."
You are confusing the Internet and the web. You should look it up.
Dunning Kruger in the house .
He made the web as we know it. There were a few other projects that were reaching similar goals and were considered part of the "world wide web" at the time but have been largely forgotten. Gopher was the most popular for a time, and there were a few others that were barely more than research projects. Going by peak deployment numbers, Gemini might now be the second most popular web technology ever (maybe; I haven't seen a credible breakdown or anything, just guessing).

In any case, Tim Berners-Lee made HTTP and HTML, and that combination is the basis for the modern web. So much so that we tend to talk about it as the web.