this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is pretty much my take.

The web sites that are interested in this tool never wanted to be actual web sites. They wanted to be closed client-server systems with proprietary, opaque protocols… HTTP was just a convenient implementation to leverage.

What WEI does is basically allow all of these wanna-be walled gardens to become actual walled gardens.

They never wanted to be interoperable in the first place, so what are we losing? Good riddance.

Maybe with this in place, we’ll be able to start rebuilding the interoperable web that we had before VC money took it over.

We just need a compelling business model for it. “Free” ad-supported is toxic for open discourse, and now it’s functionally deprecated on the open web. I think that’s a good thing, but good changes are not necessarily easy to endure.

I’m not sure how we’ll do it. Attention tokens and all that crypto stuff seems like garbage, but having a thousand different subscriptions to get past paywalls is not great either.