Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation from any possible format to any other format using AI.
You don't need to manage a server or store anything in any particular way in any particular place.
Instead, you expose whatever you want in any way you want, whether that's uploading a video to some big tech host, or exposing a bunch of XML over FTP, or a RESTful endpoint that serves binary encoding pictures of cats.
My user agent scoops up everything and presents it to me in a way that I like.
There would need to be some creative ideas involved for, say, "replying" (hashes? webmentions?)
In other words, maybe innovation on the demand side is where the fun is.
'''My user agent scoops up everything and presents it to me in a way that I like.'''
I think this is close to what the future looks like.
For example, it rattles me that no matter what app I am watching 'videos' on I have different options. Some I can watch 2x speed. Some I can tap the sides to go quicker through. Some if I tap it mutes. Some if I tap it stops the video.
All of this for the same type of content.
Insanity.
Not to mention even within certain apps like Instagram is just brutal. For the same content type - videos - they have like 3 (?) different ways to view it.
I wish the trend wasn't for social network companies to rewrite web apps from scratch in javascript when they could simply in this case just hand me the video and my preferred local application would play it.
I get that they can display suggestions for what you should watch next and keep data on how much you watch or how often you pause it or whatever. But if we're going to create a decentralized social network, then maybe we could junk all the metrics that a centralized social network keeps on their users. Let it evolve organically, rather than in a way that best suits one particular small group of people, and give people back their privacy as well as their autonomy.
> Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation from any possible format to any other format using AI.
Easier said than done. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Co. like to gatekeep their data and don't allow third party clients access. So you don't just need an AI smart enough to capture the data and reshape it, but also one smart enough to pass whatever CAPTCHA they throw at you, which will likely get progressively more difficult the more popular your tool gets. And of course they'll lock your account when you try, so this is at best a read-only participation in the social network.
The problem has shifted over the last decade, it's no longer about fixing a broken Web, but about a large part of the content no longer even being a part of the Web. Everything is either moving to Apps or getting gated behind login screens and ToS.
CAPTCHA is a big problem but not impossible to overcome. It's an arms race.
That said, CAPTCHA can be defeated by changing the landscape of incentives in favor of giving the consumers what they want.
The consumers will use these user agents when they get so good that they're better than the alternative and/or it's easy enough to "dual boot".
Once one of the above happens, then there is a greater incentive for everyone to make their content available e.g. by uploading to public Google Drive folders.
What I'm trying to get at is that the dream of decentralization can happen perhaps sooner if we focus on building the client side of it as a layer over the existing structure, instead of trying to supplant the current server side structure.
Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation from any possible format to any other format using AI.
You don't need to manage a server or store anything in any particular way in any particular place.
Instead, you expose whatever you want in any way you want, whether that's uploading a video to some big tech host, or exposing a bunch of XML over FTP, or a RESTful endpoint that serves binary encoding pictures of cats.
My user agent scoops up everything and presents it to me in a way that I like.
There would need to be some creative ideas involved for, say, "replying" (hashes? webmentions?)
In other words, maybe innovation on the demand side is where the fun is.
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