A nice person who was totally not a sex addict once wrote “Flimsiest of abodes is house of the spider”. Ain’t that right? Lee^1, et al gives this table in [TheWorldWideWeb1994] as a comparison of ‘Network information Projects’:

So, I really, really do realize that I am not ‘oh so smart’ for figuring this out, and people like Alan Kay and Weitzer have made stark criticism of it architecturally, and countless others have criticized just how stupid it is, but just as a ‘rando tricenarian’ who’d been using it for 21 years, ever since I was 10yo at my gramma’s manor made of adobe (yes, real adobe! not the kind that makes shit software, the brick kind) and two large, tall pines whose needles housed countless sparrows: HOW DOES TWITTER FIT INTO THIS?

Let’s not kid ourselves. This shit is crumbling. “A network of networks” means “whoever has the most servers gets to be the owner of the network” — and that is the top, link layer of the model — down, down there we got “a web of webs” and “whoever gets to spin more webs gets to own the webs”.

I think this shit is crumbling. I’m all for ‘the web’, I’m all for ‘WWW’, I’m all for small websites, static websites, making information available. But once you add any semblance of ‘dynamism’ in it, it’s not longer web. It’s no longer ‘info’. Wikipedia is not ‘info’. ChatGPT is not ‘info’. These are ‘web applications’, born out of laziness of web developers.

Ever since I began learning to ‘code’ (goddamn this term is semantically loaded! That’s why I am adamant to get back to college and get my degree in SWE, because I cannot bear the stigma of being ‘self-taught’ :*( ) at 16, I hated this ‘web’ shit and I always hated ‘webshit’. The one time I accepted a web project, I was duped into it by some chap who was for some reason asking people to upload their PKs! The dude was from a place called ‘Hindustan’ by their natives, had launched way too many startups an he was honedstly, as a person from his keen once said, “As sus as a character from the game Among Us”.

Now there’s nothing wrong with be a web developer^3 but please, watch out! This whole ‘network’, this protocol, is crumbling.

I am not one to make any forecasts, as I am not educated enough, but see, Lee later took these criticisms to the heart, and came up with the concept of ‘The Semantic Web’ [TheSemanticWeb2001]. SW is just a ‘formalism’ over web. It’s ‘the math kind of web’. It’s the web that holds itself accountable. I think; but in truth, I hope, that Semantic Web would become the norm, and all the software documentation and all the science shit and all the educational stuff gets relegated there. People can eat and drink from Twitters’s trauffe in ‘the shit kind of web’ as they please.

As for Lemmy, it’s not bound to web. So who cares. Lemmy is not a ‘website’. That’s why I like it.

Thanks.

Footnotes

1: Yes, the same Lee who got knighted for…? I don’t really care about Britain and their silly OBE-ship rules but what exactly did he do to deserve knighthood? Was he the one who discovered that God Particle at CERN? I don’t see why anyone would get knighted for something as trivial as WWW!

2: Information Retireval

3: I would marry a web developer though. As long as she is compatible with me.

Bibliography

@article{berners1994world,
  title={The World-Wide Web},
  author={Berners-Lee, Tim and Cailliau, Robert and Luotonen, Ari and Nielsen, Henrik F and Secret, Arthur},
  journal={Communications of the ACM},
  volume={37},
  number={8},
  pages={76--82},
  year={1994},
  publisher={ACM}
}

@article{berners2001semantic,
  title={The Semantic Web},
  author={Berners-Lee, Tim and Hendler, James and Lassila, Ora},
  journal={Scientific American},
  volume={284},
  number={5},
  pages={28--37},
  year={2001},
  publisher={Springer Nature}
}