Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.

Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.

But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?

It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.

Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).

Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.

That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.

▲ bigfishrunning an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.

Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)

All this to say: bring back webrings.

▲ cestith 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.

    Telnet    1969, standardized 1983
    FTP       1971
    UUCP      1979
    SMTP      1981
    RSH       1983
    TCP/IP v4 1984
    NNTP      1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
    IRC       1988
    Archie    1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
    Gopher    1991
    WWW       1989 first published 1991
    Veronica  1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
    SSH       1995

▲ akoboldfrying an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)

▲

bigfishrunning 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.

	▲	mgbmtl 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.

▲ trompetenaccoun an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.

In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.

It's Eternal September.

▲ anal_reactor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.