When such an AMP search result is opened from the aforementioned Google Search source, it will open in a Google Search-wrapped frame reader, such that the outside is Google Search -- although this is not visually obvious to the user -- while the inside the AMP article. The browser-level URL for this endpoint begins with 'google.com/amp/'. While it's now possible to get the article's original link from this viewer, this was not present at launch, and it was a frequent source of criticism.

This is a brief restatement of a more in-depth description I gave in a different thread [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385122

In the former case, AMP caches are a reasonable compromise since it's really just a free CDN. In the latter case, that cache is annoying because of how it needs to fit in the design of the contemporary web. See the last paragraph of https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... for some ideas on how to improve the platform so the caches wouldn't be necessary for much of AMP.

If speed is the answer, then sure offer AMP, but also offer a lightning bolt next to pages that load within 'x' milliseconds. Reward speed regardless of implementation

It's only going to get worse with voice interfaces, see what Echo now does (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXEu8RcneZQ).

A vibrant ecosystem is key to competition, it's not in our long term interests to let the web consolidate into an oligarchy

The correct way to fix these problems would be to teach people how to make their sites faster rather than enforce restrictions on how they create and monetize their online publications.

"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

He solved a different problem.

I don't think anybody at AMP claims that fast pages aren't possible. Their claim is that there's a need to enforce certain rules to achieve a certain quality of service.

> teach people how to make their sites faster

In a way, that's what AMP is doing. It picks a subset of HTML5 that can be rendered efficiently, and - for now - uses javascript to fill in the blanks (eg. where desired capabilities are forbidden due to how they're commonly implemented: provide build a polyfill that's better suited) and for enforcement of these rules.

As linked in my parent post, there are already efforts to offload some of these constraints into standards to be enforced by browsers - I fully expect the AAMP scaffolding to let go of that soon after (or revert to shims)

Here are some recent articles about it:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp

http://hyperlinkserver.com/webdesigning/tomorrow/

I have had multiple developers quit and don't have the $80k budget quoted by Gigster.

Concept: in the same way you might register a username/handle on ig/twitter a user registers a new domain (or "connects" a domain the user already owns).

Using Enom API we also offer "branded" email and private registration, and in the background the name records are automatically pointed to their "tomorrowbook page". By logging into tomorrowbook the user can use the "text tool" to add posts to their website, basic website analytics, and ability to customize their follow/like buttons...also access the tomorrowbook email client for their branded email, not unlike a social messaging tool only open bc it works on email protocol.

Obviously the explanation above changes just a little for users who own domains with 3rd party registrars and/or using 3rd party hosting.

How can HN help? If there are any developers who can get the Enom API out of sandbox and fully functional where my other developers have quit.

Social media works well for announcing stuff on my own web site (new blog articles, new releases of open source projects, new books I have written, etc.)

Hosting long form content of someone else's domain is not playing the game right.

eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com.

She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and follow some how-to docs from Shopify and Gmail.

That doesn't mean they couldn't still mess you up pretty bad. You'd want a pretty solid backup scheme, and you'll still have to accept the loss of some levels of privacy etc. but that might be worth it to you to subsidise cheap services, while still having an escape plan.

Learning the basics of something new, enough to get by, is part of being an adult, even if you won't ever be and have no interest in being an expert.

Solving 99% of technical problems requires nothing more than Google and following instructions in the first result, but people still can't handle it. Most people haven't given running a website enough thought that they would even know what to look for. A good portion don't even really understand URLs enough to type facebook.com into the address bar instead of Googling Facebook and clicking the first result.

This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?

And asking someone to rely on their geek friend for deployment, education and support instead of relying on a stable platform like Facebook is just silly. Unless we can provide a similar, stable and feature-packed platform then there is just no perceptible incentive for people to make the switch.

I mean heck, Google couldn't even do it.

I think the problem needs to be attacked from multiple vectors. Simply building a technologically superior platform with better privacy control isn't enough. There needs to be a real shift in understanding about the dangers of big social media.

The ease of use is only one part of the problem, the other part is that you are trying to solve a problem that a lot of people who use Facebook just don't care about. Facebook fills their need and they really don't care about walled gardens or open internet or whatever else the HN crowd views as a dire issue.

The main concern I still have is that I'd lose gchat if I swapped out my email host from Google apps.

So, gramma goes to a web page, clicks the signup, the website deploys a docker image on a webhost and spins up a UI that is not unlike what she is already used to.

Next, comment and "likes". You have to have a comment system that runs on there also. Gramma would invite others to her site by clicking invite. This would generate a specific invite signature for that person and would email it out (gramma would need to know Uncle Fred's email; sorry gramma). Uncle Fred would click the link and be taken to gramma's sight and can comment. All comments stay on gramma's sight. All gramma's content, period, stay's on gramma's sight.

How does one monetize, however?

With a docker UI like Kitematic, it's remarkably similar to an app store experience.

I get what you are suggesting, but I can't help but to think you are making this way bigger issue than it actually is.

Also all of you are missing the most obvious point: if it hasn't happened to a lot (and I mean literally more than 10-20% of user base) it is not a significant risk and thus spending extra effort for literally no gain (and actually probably more of a loss in views/users/buyers/whatever) is not worth paying someone to design you a website and paying for updates and then A) paying for (yet another) 3rd party company to host your website B) learning how to setup, host, update, and maintain your own website.

I'm sure most of people on this site could easily setup their own website and run it wherever, but the reason why people are paying you to do such things for living means that most people can't be bothered to learn all the necessary skills.

I'd guess that amongst my friendship group around 5-10% of people have been affected by this. This is disproportionately high - a suburban soccer mom is far more likely to never see anyone have problems with their fb account. But amongst certain populations this is a real problem and can put people at risk.

Fb has decided that the increase in value from 99% of users is worth the pain for 1%, and that the network effect will keep the 1% in line. They're probably right. On the other hand, fb got a foothold in the market through 1% of the population who are college students, an alternative social network could get a foothold through the queer or other communities that fb is ignoring.

It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.

And if I needed to post a controversial point of view on my model steam loco business page, I've got bigger problems than facebook.

I can't stand facebook, but for my purposes it is probably the cheapest, most direct, and low effort way for those people to get to me. It's also probably pretty low effort on my part.

The business would never be more than a cottage industry and I certainly wouldn't want to spend ANY money on IT that I could avoid.

Anyone here offering to donate their time to keep all my IT in order for the same cost I can do it with facebook, and give me the exposure it will to my potential customers?

If so I'll give you my gmail address to get in contact ;)

The way I understand it, the question could be phrased : "What costs are we willing to pay to reduce the collective social costs of ultradependence on private companies". You clearly states what are the costs you're not willing to pay, but don't really answer the question which is : what costs would you actually be ready to pay ? (Maybe the answer is none, but I don't feel like you actually state that ?)

The web presence of the business would basically be an advertisement, newsletter, and contact page.

There are related businesses that sell lots of small items, eg nuts, bolts, material, that would be a lot more convenient to use with a shopping cart, but mine doesn't need it.

Docker containers make sense because they are portable apps. You can choose where to deploy them, upgrade them, and store the data or what not.

The majority of the world do not want to know about containers, hosting services, domain names, or anything else that is related to computers.

I'm not even sure that is changing with younger people - they're happy enough to dick around with social media but don't want to get involved in running a web site and all the software on it.

If a business can work with a "no obvious cost" platform like facebook, the owner won't start paying for something "better" in response to non-quantifiable downsides and threats possibly posed by the platform.

Yeah, but what if you post it on your personal wall, and get banned for that? You won't be able to access your page, it doesn't matter you kept it clean.

I can see there is a potential trap there for the people who decide to mix their personal and professional lives on something like facebook. I just think it is unlikely to get sprung, and comments like "why on earth don't they take complete control of their online presence and register their domain, get their system hosted, set up all their e-mail addresses, etc" could only be written somewhere like HN. The rest of the world would just shake their head slowly.

That was an awakening moment for me. Promptly deleted the damned thing and every other social media account I had. Technological echo chambers are going to do so much harm to society.

Something something something beauty without pain.

I think my posts were well beyond the "frustrating but redeemable" category, because I had a purposeful tendency to discuss abrasive subjects in order to elicit strong reactions.

So the question is, how the hell do we create a platform that encourages people to challenge their preconceived notions in a way that doesn't make them unbearably uncomfortable in an age where people will do just about anything to not feel uncomfortable, even if it leads to stronger discomfort later?

I have a nascent idea of an anonymous conversation app that pairs users and groups together with various conversation starters, migrating them to new groups over time, while still allowing them to have conversations with users and groups they have befriended over time.

What do you think of such an app and its potential utility for solving this problem?

That sounds a little like trolling, but I get that you meant it as educational. Maybe a distinction that simple machines don't make.

> ... anonymous conversation app that pairs users and groups together with various conversation starters ...

And that sounds a little like Usenet, or discussion forums. Except that group selection and migration are totally voluntary. In my experience, unless there's moderation, you eventually get trolling wars. Which seem like harassment, to people who don't want to (and/or don't know how to) play those games. And everyone but the trolls eventually leaves.

If you could build an app that facilitated intense discussion, and prevented trolling and harassment, that would be very cool. Forcing anonymity would largely prevent harassment, because anyone who felt harassed could just move to a new persona. And there would be no meatspace impact.

Did you ever go on talk.masked? It used to be a main branch off core.onion (Tor onion services).

A little off topic, but an example: Someone declared that if you ever doubt any woman's claim about being raped or assaulted, you are the worst kind of person, and you're sexist.

Well, I was assaulted once, and then the girl turned around and told all of my friends that I attacked her.

I lost a LOT of friends over this and it had a pretty negative impact on my life. I shared this experience, and next thing I know dozens of women I'd never met are telling me I'm likely to be a rapist when I grow up and I should just kill myself and I was probably lying about not attacking her. I was just a white male who has no experience with abuse and should keep my mouth shut. Nevermind that I was physically abused for 15 years until I left home.

The complete irony of the situation, what with the victim-blaming and being called sexist while being told my opinion as a white male was invalid, was not lost on me. That was the first big sign that Facebook had become a cesspool.

This is exactly the kind of harmful backwards thinking I want to eradicate. However it seems that some rich and powerful have decided it is in their best interest to manufacture this kind of thought and impress it into the masses. I want to find out how technology can create a level playing field.

The app's just a thought experiment but I wonder if group moderation could be done in a way that doesn't produce social bubbles or echo chambers.

I haven't been on talk.masked. Is it not active anymore? I haven't been on Usenet in a while.

Searching "facebook blocked" suggests that it's a common problem.

It happened to a lot of Facebook meme pages.[0]

[0]: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/the-zuckening-mark-zuckerbe...

The internet is not crucial to everyones daily life. And honestly, it probably shouldn't be as crucial to ours.

https://neocities.org/

The original uploaders of very popular content would accumulate a surplus of credits, which they then sell to to mega-crawlers. Content creators would do well to be the original uploaders of their own content on such a network.

The credits would also be incentive to buy devices and leave them running in poor-coverage areas. E.g. the owners of billboards could mount repeaters along rural highways.

The only thing that bothered me about the general design is that it used email addresses as identification tokens, and for the site I was making I didn't even want that much personal information from my users.

Indieauth lets you authenticate to websites based on your control of a website you specify (via rel=me links).

[0]: https://indieauth.com/

That's your choice. You can use the same credentials for all accounts you create and manage the entire mass as one. It's a bad practice, I know, but it's still a solution.

That's the understatement of the century.

I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur?

By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at any real level of risk.

For business, sure, because there are other benefits to having a custom domain, but for personal stuff, I don't really see the cost/benefit analysis making sense. The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either way. Am I missing something?

Perceived by some but apparently not by many others who are still clueless. I know multiple people who invested considerable time and energy into building up Facebook pages only to suddenly be cut off from fans who had followed them when fb decided to go the pay to play route. I personally lost my YouTube channel, due to sheer incompetence on Google's side after they moved to the single login system across Google, Plus, YouTube, etc. I tried many times over multiple years to get access again but their support is crappy as I'm sure you've heard many times before...

For a short term experiment, it's totally reasonable to give it a shot. But if you're trusting Google, Facebook or any other tech giant (or even small startup) with things important to you, you're making a mistake. Not backing up something as important as all your email history in Gmail would be insane, in my opinion. Even with a backup, you could lose access to a lot of other services if Google ever locks you out, as they have done to many, many people in the past.

An anecdote on a similar note, there's a comedian I'm a fan of who had an Instagram account he used to post funny boudoir style photos as a big, bald, overweight man. All of his posts were well within Instagram's terms of use, in that he never showed full nudity or anything overly suggestive. Basically he was doing the same thing thousands of "butt models" do on Instagram. These weren't just cell phone snaps, either; they were staged and professionally shot images.

He gained a few thousands followers with this, until one day when he was locked out of his banned account with no explanation. With the help of a friend he managed to contact someone who works at Instagram and was told his account was removed for "harassment". Since no other explanation was given the only conclusion that seems reasonable is that people reported him for "making fun of" plus sized female models by doing the same thing himself, which is absolutely ridiculous, as he was always positive about what he was doing. He just happened to be a bald fat man while doing it.

* spam everyone I know to use a new email address.

* go through authorship information in any READMEs out there for projects I may contribute to.

* deal with an invalid email address embedded in public commits (ala Github).

* deal with possibly important, time-sensitive emails ending up in a blackhole.

* updating email information for online accounts. Especially for sites that use a combo of email address/password rather than login/password.

* etc...

I only have to pay ~$12/year (or less if I buy years in bulk) to keep the domain, and I also get the benefit of being able to grant emails on the domain to other people too.

It's a shame that this is not something the average person can do easily. Email addresses are by design linked to specific domains.

To have an "open web" we have to have as usable, hassle free alternatives. And as I don't see that day coming yet, because you have to invest your time and money to take care of something (e.g., your email) that wasn't a worry to you before, we won't have "an open web" any time soon.

Some may have the perception that they are "free" and "contributing to an open web" when they're not.

Furthermore you may argue that is best to post in your own website instead of facebook. But what if your business depends on posting on Facebook to earn more? Some may write a copy in their websites, but they will be secondary. Or everybody moves out from such closed source platforms (the masses won't), or we won't have an open web.

I'm looking forward to be completely mistaken. Tell me how wrong I am.

p.s.: my entire comment is not necessary a reply to the comment above, only part of it.

It might be too romantic these days, but it you might be better if you see it as a matter of principle...Doing the right thing (Backed by your own thought ofcourse).

Think of it as selling your identity off to a thrid party. If you see that as an improper thing on its own, then you shouldn't do it no matter how much value the third party provides, right?

Things like facebook are essentially saying. "Give us your identity, secrets and your whole life, we will save you some cash and make some (nonessential?) things (slightly?) easier for you"....

The biggest threat is that Google removes or locks you out of your gmail account.

So now she's forced to get another email address to log into Tumblr. I got around that by creating an email address at my own personal domain that forwards to her current bellsouth.net address, and that was good enough for Tumblr.

Enjoy your free Internet.

My guesses: Tumblr belongs to Yahoo. Yahoo had some agreement with AT&T to provide them services. The agreement is no more, AT&T customers can't use their AT&T email to login into Yahoo services anymore. I don't see why that should be technically our commercially necessary, but that's it.

a true one -> at some

I have been working on a purposed solution over at http://www.peerprofile.com which allows creation of a personal domain and instead of getting locked in provides an open model.

Yeah it's a tradeoff and for many people giving up that control is worth it.

Due to some unexplainable optimism, people always believe that injustice won't happen to them. Just like with car accidents. And just like with car accidents, there should be some sort of "insurance" against unforeseen douchebaggery.

It's like this : - let's say there's a 1% chance of FaceGoogle abuse for anyone - when faced with that 1% chance, most people (99,99%) will choose to forego the insurance - 0.99% of people are now vulnerable to injustice

People are not as rational as we'd like. We don't have a very good sense of how likely something is to happen, especially when the probabilities get smaller.

> Make your website of record your website.

I don't see a typo (and your comment is 3 minutes more recent than his, so I don't think he made any corrections). Maybe "record" is throwing you off?

What he means is that "Your official or authoritative website (i.e., website of record, like owner of record) should belong to and be controlled by you."

Edit: If you're saying that the sentence could be hard to parse, yes I agree.

* https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting

* https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers

* https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realtime subscriptions to feeds

* More: https://indieweb.org/specs

We focus on making sure there are a plurality of implementations and approaches rather than trying to build a single software solution to solve everything.

Try commenting on my copy of this post on my website by sending me a webmention! https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb

They want more than just features, they want to get them for "free."

We've had equivalent standards in the late 90's and early 2000's (RSS, ATOM, XML-RPC pingbacks, etc.), had open/free code for that (MovableType and WordPress) and yet personal blogging mostly died because it was easier to just post on Facebook and there was a bigger audience there.

Facebook from that perspective is "free," as in no software to install, no updates to do and no servers to pay for. Running your own install of some blogging software entails paying for it, having a lower audience and having to handle software updates (and database upgrades, plugin upgrades, templates, etc.).

The success of Facebook is that they offered these services in a very user friendly manner and for "free". The tragedy of Facebook is that their implementations are a proprietary walled garden, and now pretty much a monopoly.

Personally, I think we need to be encouraging people to pay small fees for services. A dollar a month to use Twitter? Sure! $20 a year to use Gmail minus the data mining? No problem.

Micropub servers: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers

Webmention implementations: https://indieweb.org/Webmention

More details: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network

I found this on the Webmention Implementation Report [1].

1. https://webmention.net/implementation-reports/summary/

Is there way I can be notified about different such projects being done at W3C?

We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone. We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely.

The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking, liking, voting, etc.

By 'expressing' themselves, they contribute to a cacophony of content, which makes it very hard to discern truth from fabrication, leading to confusion, apathy and insecurity, exactly the sweet spots that advertisers of all kinds target.

A small minority profits greatly from this system, while the users themselves are rewarded with a 'virtual self' which is slowly taking over their 'real' self, making even the idea of losing it scary. This mental trap is very powerful - just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets - people interacting with their phones there and then, disregarding others and their personal safety..

The remaining 5% who are aware of these issues get to share all the alternative technological solutions and monetary scraps left over from the big fishes.

So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large crowds.

I respect and applaud the efforts of so many who try to build distributed and anonymous systems, but I'm very bearish about any of them becoming 'mainstream' for the reasons described above plus this one: most people don't care about these things.

Those who control these systems are some of the most powerful people in the world. In time, they will get older and more conservative. Soon they will venture into politics on a global scale.

Considering the alternatives, maybe that's not the worst thing after all.

Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.

I'm sure when the tractor was invented, some bright minds realized this was going to be the end of small farms, and that some day we'd be eating manufactured food product out of a tube, having long forgotten the art of cultivating a rich breadbasket for your family.

They would've been right, of course, we've lost our health and our knowledge of the earth, somewhat catastrophically.

Which isn't to say we should've skipped the tractor. But just that "it's net good" won't be the end of the story.

Agricultural examples are also tricky analogies here. Replacing beasts of burden with fossil fuels for one always carried the siren song of "we can feed more people for lowered costs --- think of the many hungry ones" (of course reproduction rates always outran such promises then til now) and certainly none of these inventions had the potential to so profoundly rewire brains and actual human consciousness as the always-on, easy-to-use, always-connected, full-mobility "smart" screens that spreaded slowly less than a decade ago.

My MacBook is a 2011 MacBook Air.

I think you might be pretty interested in how I see the path back. It won't be retreading the path we came in on. And things will be very different when we get there.

As that technology diffuses, large corporations will lose their competitive advantage over individuals, and we'll switch over to voluntary contracts for all commerce, instead of coercive employment and property regimes. There will rarely be a time when you think "well, this deal isn't great but I don't have a lot of other choices". You'll be able to just decompose the deal and bid out its parts to an effectively infinite network of contractors, and bond it out in tiny increments. Any business plan which makes sense will be immediately implementable.

Simultaneous with this, we will also develop softwares for other political organizations besides capitalism, including communism, monarchism, fascism, etc, which we will all participate in voluntarily in the same way. Anarcho-syndicalism will be notable among these, because it is the only one with a mechanical basis in consent and a morality grounded in self-defense.

In this new regime, where people are no longer dependent on large cultural institutions for basic sustenance, consent will become a much more valuable marketing tool. People won't be used to being pushed around, so pull-based institutions will start to work better. Anarcho-syndicalism will have a powerful advantage in this market, and people will shift over to using it for most of their daily transactions. These will have to be mirrored with capital-based accounting in order to be legal in capitalist states, but the actual people involved will think less and less in terms of capital. You will come to my bakery and ask for some bread, and depending on the rules of the syndicate, I'll give it to you. In the background AIs will note a "sale", a bond if necessary, and file tax forms, but you and I won't look at them. Anarcho-syndicalism will be how we make decisions, capitalism will just be an accounting method required to not be put in jail for illegal distribution of bread.

Eventually the capital accounting will be ignored for most things, certainly basic healthcare concerns like housing, food, mental health, maintenance of sacred lands, etc. The capital contracts will still be used in the entertainment industry, which will make up the vast majority of GDP. And even within that industry, corporations will be a minority. Most work will happen inside small partnerships of 2-10 people who are working directly together, said partnerships also contracting out to the individuals as sole proprietors. Full time employment will be extremely rare.

The economics of this are based on the presumption that human health is inherently valuable, so bonding it is no problem.

In this way capitalism will "die", still existing but no longer being a central conduit of resources and power.

Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?

Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?

The fact that billions of people can do something they couldn't do before is commendable, but it also raises the bar for everyone - just like reading and spelling did 100 years ago and now it becomes obligatory for everyone to learn and communicate or be left behind.

In other words, we have super powers compared to past generations, but it doesn't matter because everyone has them now.

Do you find yourself an active participant in any of this, or more of a passive observer?

As for whether this is a good thing: Who is president in the US again? How did this come about?

Get used to the zombies...they are going to become far more prevalent. When Neuralink or whatever technologies converge to directly project experiences mind-to-mind, people will not be broadcasting selfies...they will be broadcasting self, as in their current, total sensate experience. People will tune in and live the most exciting virtual life that they need...while their physical sits decaying with saliva dripping from their half-opened mouths. The drug wars will come nowhere near as close to the holo-virtual experience tune-out that's rather near.

Fast forward 15 years: many surprises happened, non-IT people don't even think of buying desktop computers. Laptops are borderline geek-devices, most of the stuff is going on cell-phones of which most are Linux-powered.

Windows as a growing platform is more or less dead. (There are serious efforts to reanimate it, but who knows...)

Maybe the example is too geeky, and one may argue that Windows didn't have so many users as Facebook and Google now. Instead think of Televisions, at least in Germany they are dead. Most of my friends don't have a TV and even among those people who have one, many argue that it's bad for you.

So yeah, think positive. ;)

If things continue on this trajectory its going to be even worse,

Oh man, or like you edit something in Office or, say Paintshop Pro, and the program just crashes, all data lost. Haha, or you boot and the filesystem is corrupt and you need to run chkdsk or whatever the name was. My god, Windows used to be such a bad operation environment. The worst where Microsoft's world domination tactics, pushing vendor lock to the limit and at the same time making the competion's life so hard that even international courts go to action.

Seriously, computing has become soooooo much become since Windows is not the dominant OS anymore. Many people are so lucky to have never used Windows, others like me might have stopped using it when it refused booting for good. (Becoming sentimental, thinking of my Windows XP/Ubuntu dual boot. The XP just showed a blue screen at some point. After that I stopped using Windows for almost 10 years. :-D)

  > while being subjected to constant brainwashing into
  > behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking,
  > liking, voting, etc.

  > So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it
  > - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large 
  > crowds.

To the OP, "combating" these tsunamis-that-already-happened is akin to various other (past or ongoing) "wars on intents"/ideas (won't name them here to not derail but insert any of the various "war on XYZ" memes that have been floated for the past century+ where XYZ is not a specifically identifiably nation or group) --- unwinnable.

The internet hasn't changed, we have, and the only way to take the internet back is if we change ourselves back.

I think this is a really important point. When I see services that give me a choice of either 1)logging in with Google or 2) logging in with FB, I don't do either. I simply elect to not use that service.

There is no way we can keep control of all those separate login details. There needs to be a central control over login.

Sure, login details are pretty old skool bonkers.

I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion, but in the real world where I have to hand a class of 35 students over to another teacher and they need to have confidence that all 35 can log in and complete the lesson.

Repeat this across all classes and all years. That's a lot of users.

Look. I'm not an idiot. I write open source. I love free and open web.

Google login works. We use use Gmail - it works. We use google classroom - it just works. Most websites offer Google Login - it just works.

When you have 30 students and you waste 2 minutes logging into a website -- that is 2 x 30 == 60 minutes of student learning lost. Little things like that add up.

In yesteryears, no one could compute the things our phones do today in seconds.

But the demand for time has gone up, not down. Now idle time is a target to "get stuff done".

Even on HN, people have complained about how being idle during idle moments is a luxury, since everyone is on a treadmill to see how hard they can perform even in leisure.

The point being that when things just work, other long term issues being invisible, people will go for the cheaper option.

The same way people have burnt fossil fuels because the costs are sent off to the future, they will choose convenience over security.

But being observed by senior management, they would see students not learning. You could expect extremely close scrutiny for the next few lessons. To be put on special measures. Not quite a sack-able offence, but ....

I think your last paragraph would be sufficient to explain your reasons along with a single, "it just works."

If you're part of a school don't you have student accounts in some central place like LDAP/AD/IdM?

LDAP/AD/IdM doesn't necessarily work with third party services.

Which does seem to be a passing fad. "Log in with your Facebook account or go away" was a thing a couple years ago, but now most sites do offer an independent login method.

Using Email does help in what way? Most people do use Mail , Gmail that is. Do you mean Email as a protocol in opposition to Whatsapp, FB Messenger?

How does not hosting on the major hosting providers solve the problems of walled gardens and filter bubbles and the closed internet? That's just ephemeral infrastructure.

Login integrations can make a lot of sense. I don't really see how not deploying integrations will protect us from walled gardens.

The filter bubble problem is particularly relevant for us because it's critical for an open network to let users filter out abusive content (whether that's spam, stuff they find offensive, or just a topic they don't care about)... but doing that in a way which doesn't result in creating a profiling db or creating bubbles and echo chambers. The problem is one of letting users curate their own filters (including blending in others' filters), whilst keeping the data as privacy protecting as possible. It's a fun problem, but on our medium-term radar.

Do you never wake up and just feel depressed about the state of things? Ever wanted to just say fuck it and create a facebook account?

In my opinion it all comes down to putting your money (and time, effort, convenience or lack of it, etc) where your mouth is. I don't like Google, Amazon, or Facebook's policies and practices so I choose not to participate. That most people around me are subsidizing their lives (free storage, free email, 2-day shipping, easy home automation, etc) in exchange for their privacy and independence doesn't really factor into my own decision. I do try and raise awareness and encourage others to take similar steps but ultimately they need to make the decision for themselves of they won't commit to it.

Yes, you can permanently delete your Facebook account

http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291871

This is exactly what I am thinking and doing all the time. I have one problem however, that is, convincing my friends. How do I do this? Any idea?

This sounds a lot like my own practices.

There is one pitfall which I find interesting and that is that you cannot host your own phone number in the same way that you host your own email/DNS.

If you own a domain and self-host your DNS and mail, you really are the provider - the requests come to you and you first and you have a good deal of "control" over that resource.

However, unless you actually become a CLEC, you cannot "own" your own phone number and become the "server" of that resource. No matter what your setup, some third party intercepts that requests and hands it to you - you are never first in line with a phone call.

One reason this is interesting is, if you run your own mail server, you can email other local users without generating any network traffic - it's just a local copy operation. This is not the case with VOIP/asterisk/anything - your calls are going over the telco network no matter what (again, unless you are a CLEC).

I know some of it is not completely ratioanal--Boeing makes civilian aircraft as well as military. And I accept that not all "defense" products are bad. We need a strong defense. What we don't need is bombs falling 24x7 for 17 years now jus so some a-holes can make billions of dollars off the suffering of others.

And yes, Microsoft, Oracle, and even Apple and Google products run a lot of military systems that enable that killing.

What I found in this exercise is that many of the companies I worked for were indirectly compromised--it's amazing how many firms take money from government sales, money handouts from government/military programs, etc. It's truly amazing how little "private" there is in the private sector.

All developers should take a course in ethics and not stray from those teachings. It would also be helpful to get some philosophy in your toolbox as well. And then maybe, maybe, some of this bullshit would finally cease.

I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years from now. But what is there to do?

Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB. Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.

This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action, and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.

Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in admitting that.

As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok, Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?

For example, if you're really set on doing something about it, one of the most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them yourself.

So what happened?

A competitor came long with less scruples. Facebook erupted on the scene very happily crossing the creepy line to wring every bit of data they could out of their users.

So Google now has to compete with this company that has far, far more data (advertiser captnip) than they do. And no one really seems to care - Facebook grows to 2 billion users. Google can either be outcompeted on this front, or they can race to compete, gather more and more data.

Google perhaps tried to stop Facebook by becoming them, but there's so much money in this industry that people are willing to do anything unethical to get past you to get it.

Same with the open web. Same with vendor lock-in. Etc.

I wouldn't bet too highly on those services.

Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't.

In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them!

So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.

If it was freely available I could see a massive migration of users abandoning google. Who needs google in such a context?

-- far fetched, yes. But it is a scenario where the breakthrough is algorithmic rather than Huge-data based. The learning can then happens slowly (2 years undercover from that basement?), and emerge as a powerful intelligence and company.

A group like OpenAI also has a good chance to make a breakthrough, but you can hardly call them "a team of coders in a basement".

It's unlikely that any a single company (even a large one) will have any significant advantage, because the research everyone does is highly public (everyone tries to publish asap). The research right now is at the stage where people are still looking which way to go, so as soon as someone stumbles upon a promising direction, everyone will jump on it (e.g. AlexNet success in 2012).

Open source search engines are still years behind what Google can do, but those technologies are much nimbler and easier to customize. Reactive paradigms, dockerization, open source tools for machine learning. Such tools might benefit the small players to allow building technology that might disrupt the big players.

Then again, many of those tools come from the big players which kind of defeats my point here...

Note that while I'm happy to deal with smaller businesses, and happy to spend money on them, I am still pretty wary of advertising-based businesses. It is a slippery slope of doom, and I think it's ideal to try and stay off of it.

Can you elaborate on this? Are there some privacy issues with Fast Mail that don't exist with ProtonMail?

ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client access and storage. (Obviously, unencrypted mail sent to or from other servers could be intercepted.) But their goal is essentially to be mathematically unable to view your email. Of course there are tradeoffs, things like IMAP don't work (without some sort of relay), for example.

Essentially, FastMail makes a point to not violate your privacy, ProtonMail tries to make it so it can't violate your privacy. I lean towards FastMail because it's 'good enough' on privacy, and has a lot of powerful features, but if you're looking to run afoul of state intelligence agencies, you might wanna lean for the latter.

Is this just TLS + block level encryption like LUKS? If so I would be surprised if FastMail wasn't offering the same. But maybe Proton is offering something else at the client level? It was my impression that the big differentiator was Proton Mail's infrastructure was all co-located in Switzerland.

* ActivityStreams 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

* ActivityPub - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

* https://distbin.com - My implementation of the above. Who wants to federate?

Another aspect of the project comes from a "house terminal" that I set up here, basically an offline Raspberry Pi running GNU/Linux and a custom chat/guestbook program that runs as a "kiosk". This terminal will morph into a kind of in-house only access to the federated network with real time communications etc.

The internet is only closed if we keep acting like it is. The protocol is the same. Go build stuff.

http://ryanglover.net

You are more likely to spread your ideas about open internet in a public place like Medium than the faraway countryside like your website.

Why should the end user care about this problem?

Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem?

If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix.

And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do it.

So what if Facebook as stagnated with user features? Why should your average Joe care? It's already serving their purposes, most if not all of their friends and relatives are on the platform. Again why is this bad for the end user?

I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.

Ultimately, email clients are services that have maintenance and development costs - if you're not paying for it, someone is selling your information to fund the service.

And, to be clear, I have no stake in Fastmail, nor do I work for them, I am just enamored with their product. I wish I would have made the switch years ago.

They mostly use email for promotion/ad emails and registering for services/games/whatever.

I've thought about switching, but last time I tried I couldn't get my own domain working on the first try, so I just gave up. I think even I would just like to have my own domain in the email and wouldn't gain any other benefits.

How do you get everyone to update their contacts?

Also it seems like even if you forward form Gmail to your Fastmail account Google still knows your business.

I'm not trying to make a case for not doing it but rather would be interested in hearig what has worked for others.

That said, Fastmail does have an import function, but I did not use it when I migrated: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/migratemail.html

edit: word choice

Running your own email server takes quite a bit of maintenance but as long as you're not using it for marketing you'll be fine.

Really? That hasn't been my experience the last couple of years. I wasn't joking when I said that Google and MS routinely blackhole mails from my users to their users. These are legitimate mails. Sent by real people, to real people. Often people they've been conversing with for years.

You can play by the rules, set up SPF, DKIM, periodically check blacklist statuses and be perfectly fine, and suddenly mail still disappears. No bounces, and no ability to contact an MS or Google postmaster to shout at. This certainly isn't due to incompetence on their part, so I can only assume it's a strategy to frustrate mail server operators to simply give up and use their little walled e-mail garden.

[1] https://ipfs.io

[2] https://peergos.org