Agreed. I don’t even know what this elegy is for. “what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.” Is that no longer the web? It seems pretty easy to find communities these days.

The web I want back is the one powered by real people making real things. But rather than complain about it I think I’d rather be one of the people who is still here, making things.

Don't worry in about 5 years they'll come to the conclusion I did about 5 years ago (because I was like that in 2014) - that is to say, they're realize it's futile and liberate themselves from the angst of it all and just accept the world is shit and the internet is shit and there's no going back and you will be free from such horrific lust for the dead remains of an archaic past. You will be glad when new potential "solutions" come up, but be sad to see the loss of expansion of said places and ultimately learn to accept that it's "creative destruction" on a smaller level, and the only people who care are the old heads who are a dying generation. We're like hippies at a dead show, with a few young hangers on who love to hear the glory of the old days, But they'll soon be dead too. Freedom in acceptance. Freedom in serenity. Free at last, thank god almighty, they will be free of such mental strife at last.

It's always the start of eternal September for someone

Winer in particular often writes in a style that approaches technology with the attitude that even the most obvious ideas weren't truly finished until he's had a hand in them.

This is controversial and perhaps rude but I've started to copy-paste these articles into ChatGPT to summarize into a single paragraph to help me decide if it is worth reading or not, for me.

Again, I mean no offense but humans only have 2,207,520,000 seconds on average. You can be goddamn right I'll take all the help I can allocating this precious resource called time.

Example output from this article:

> The author reflects on their early experiences in Silicon Valley, feeling at home among peers in the tech world but later realizing that many influential figures, including gatekeepers and executives, lacked a deep understanding of software. This disconnect was disheartening, as key decision-makers often misunderstood the potential and intricacies of the technology they were overseeing. Despite this, the author celebrates the web for its ability to connect people globally with shared interests and expertise, yearning for a return to a time when the internet was a space for meaningful connections and innovation. They also express enthusiasm for their current blogging on platforms like WordPress and Mastodon, envisioning future improvements and business potential.

(it's worth reading for me so I'll read)

That stood out to me too. If your customers won't care about it I wouldn't expect your execs to have deep understanding of it.

Why should execs have to know anything?

Why not rewrite the twitter stack from scratch?

Why shouldn't a CEO be able to sell the idea that P=NP. We can have the engineers work out the details later.

An exec that does not understand core tenets (and challenges) of the industry his company operates on is an exec that will drive said company out of relevance. Whatever the size of the company.

Boeing is one but a glaring recent example of that.

Is it tho?

Twitter traded space (initially 140 characters) for time (you read it fast). That turned out to be a pretty substential decisions, also for consumers.

This is how I read the notions of space and time in that post.

All the fake sites that use those same words but have none of the real content

It's also pretty disheartening that certain famous 'tech' podcasts are hosted by people who've never written a line of code in their lives. Like who are you to comment on where AI will be in 10 years? You don't even know what back propagation is.

I see this as a good thing (hear me out.)

Building a product or business is a multi-skilled task. Broadly speaking you need to cover product development, marketing, finance.

Good leadership covers all 3 bases, but leadership in the latter 2 is more important than leadership in product.

Which sounds backwards, but you're the tech guy providing the tech. Leadership is figuring out what / how / to who of marketing coupled with the balancing of finances to make the business work.

VC funding of course up-ends this model. It removes financing and marketing (and even product fit) from the equation. Here's a pile of money, "go build something and we'll figure out the rest later..."

Sure 90% fail to figure it out, and the business part fails, but that's OK because the VC (although not always the techie) comes out a winner. It's a great model to handle the edge-case of good ideas that are hard to pull off.

If you end up in a non-vc business though, don't be surprised if most of the layers above you don't care about the tech.

If you only had technical people in every position, software would be designed only for technical people.

Money is a technology.

Lex?

Looks like something is misconfigured. Searching for "daveverse" returns the following URL that works in the Mastodon UI, but redirects when opened standalone: https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.w...

Depends on you and a bunch of luck. There is a higher then average amount of technical folks, but a lot of them just are in it for a paycheck and focus on normal activities. If you put yourself out there, you can find a community, but it might involve some luck, depending on what you want out of it.

nothing here is how this author describes it

Kind of funny to see Dave Winer of all people saying he doesn't sweat the technical details here.

So I think this is what's going on. Dave had an idea he called textcasting which he describes on his textcasting.org site, I didn't see anything really new there - syndicating text from your blog to any other app or social media site, seems to be the basic idea.

A protocol called ActivityPub has been around for a while which enables this exact scenario, it's the core of Mastodon etc. and I believe is even supported by Threads.

Dave was pleasantly surprised to discover that this all just works on his Wordpress.com blog. I think the underlying implementation is probably the ActivityPub WordPress plugin which is developed primarily by Matthias Pfefferle - https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ - you can install and run this plugin on any WordPress site.

I agree with Dave where he says Automattic is sleeping on the potential here, I feel ActivityPub support should have been rolled into WP Core a few years ago. The tech for this federated media is getting pretty good. Mastodon is a thing, it works, adoption is slowly creeping up but still not really huge. WP could roll out ActivityPub support to 800 million websites and then if you so choose your own website then becomes a node in the social network and you don't have to sign up with anybody else to make that happen. This is once-in-a-generation sort of potential perhaps. Pfefferle did the original version of the plugin himself and Automattic hired him a few years ago.

In theory anyone who deals with a lot of WP installs could be putting their own money/time/code into this vision (your personal website is your social media profile, basically), and piggybacking on the established fediverse as modest as it may be, and growing it.

So it's a POSSE[0] system, like everything should be.

You keep your content on systems and platforms you control. Then republish to walled gardens and silos, either via a link to your own platform (which is downranked by algorithms...) or repost the content.

[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I have been trying to understand what is being suggested here and all I can think of is some Buffer.co-like posting UI for the desktop. The parts of podcasting that make it discoverable, consumable, shareable is already in the web for text…

(I edited the above comment to separate the first two links more clearly)

Yeah but I think that's the point, isn't it?

The author expected the people who were gatekeeping which tech got built to understand the tech that they were deciding on [0]. Instead they did not understand tech but understood business. Which means that a techie explaining the idea to them had to couch it in business terms. Y'know: a pitch.

If a techie is explaining a tech idea to another techie, we use completely different language than if we're communicating to a non-techie. This blog post feels like that, like they're talking to a group of peers rather than an audience with a different viewpoint on the world.

[0] I think it's a little naive, but perfectly understandable, to expect this kind of person to understand the tech. It is interesting that these decisions are made by business folk with no understanding of the tech. There are, after all, business people who do understand tech available to make this kind of decision.