I have been in a low key bad mood since August 21, 2012, the date I succumbed to pressure and joined Facebook. Prior to that date, I had been a regular and enthusiastic daily user of the internet for 17 years. I had a lot of systems in place to keep informed and entertained. I read blogs and had maintained my own blog for a decade. I subscribed to RSS feeds in a newsreader and podcasts as well to keep up with news and world events. I interacted socially with people I was close to via email, the phone, and IRL while interacting with the rest of the world via the vibrant and loud social web. Hell, I was even a regular contributor to Usenet groups.

There were some ads online, but they weren’t hyper-intrusive. You could use the internet without being tracked, profiled, and monetized every second. Things were pretty diverse. Google was actually a useful search engine. I’m not saying that the world was perfect, but, it was a damn sight better than what it is today. The web was fun, and rewarding, and personal.

Then it seemed like overnight the entire world decided to move into this one stupid site and the rest of the web started to wither and die. The problem with Facebook wasn’t that people were gathering there, that was fine. The problem was that Facebook didn’t behave like other sites on the internet. They completely thwarted all attempts to integrate or interact with the rest of the web from pretty much the beginning.

For example, one of the first things I attempted to do when FB arose was to enable some sort of integration between this blog and that site. Ideally, I wanted to avoid using the FB app or website and instead set it up so I could post and discuss here but syndicate the result over to FB so that my friends and family who used that platform would be able to engage with my blog. That was not technically possible. I wanted to have my FB home feed available as an RSS feed so I could integrate the posts and events in my friend’s lives in with my other RSS feeds and podcasts. That also turned out not really to be an option. FB didn’t play nice with the rest of the web, their entire solution was a walled garden with proprietary algorithms. I wanted none of it, hated it from day one, resented every time I logged on to the site or the app, and developed a deep hatred for Meta as a company because I felt that I had been forced to chose between the people I cared about and using a product I did not want to use which supported a corporation that I despised.

Instagram was briefly a potential alternative, but Meta bought them. Besides, that platform was likewise a closed silo. Ditto Twitter.

None of the social media apps were actually, you know, OPEN. They were “free” in the grossest sense of not technically paying cash for them, but you paid in the content you produced by documenting your days. You paid them by allowing them to sell your time and attention to others. You paid alright. If you didn’t, why are they so rich and powerful? Where do you think the money comes from?

The dirty not-so-secret of the tech industry is that tech companies don’t want you to have any data privacy. We could already have had encrypted, trusted, email (with no spam or phishing) decades ago were it not for the fact that governments and tech companies need to be able to read your mail. Gmail is not a case of Google being nice to you. Gmail is Google collecting information about your life to sell to other companies in exchange for a little hard drive space and a web app. Email might actually be useful if it were encrypted and secure and not filled with garbage, but the big tech companies that have the power to stem the tide of enshittification have no incentive to do so. Quite the opposite.

The same holds true with all corporate run social media platforms. I don’t care if you’re talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twit(X)ter, TikTok, or any other app, the business model is simple. Create something that people get addicted to, make sure they don’t leave for other apps or websites, drive engagement, profit by selling access to your penned up cattle… er… users.

If they can’t read your posts and analyze your photos and track your clicks and gather metrics on what you buy, wear, who you love, what sports teams and hobbies interest you, how you vote, where you live, how old you are, and your dietary preferences then how can they maximize the ad rates they charge? Google and Meta combined rake in about half of the money spent on digital advertising globally every year. They don’t charge for their products and yet they make half a trillion dollars between them?

The web was designed to be a decentralized information network where information flowed freely between disparate sites using open, universally available, technology.

And then these damn people showed up and undermined the whole model by figuring out how to build giant cattle pens so they could hoover up all of the money, and the key to it all was US. Our friends, our families, our relationships, our loves and hates and hopes and dreams and foibles and pets and clothes and jobs. We were the product. Our lives are the revenue stream, if only they can keep us on the platform as much as possible and maximize “engagement”.

I kept asking myself why, oh why, had everybody decided to give up the freedom of the open web and sell themselves to Facebook and their ilk. The answer was simple: user experience. Joining is easy. They encourage other sites to use their authentication and signup services for single-sign-on. The UI is dead simple and consistent. Algorithms shovel content recommendations at you instantly. Friend discovery is built into the on-boarding process through the simple (extremely invasive piece of data mining) process of granting access to the contacts list on your phone so the site can find people you already know to follow. It’s fast, simple, and beguiling to the new user.

The web never had it so good.

The web also lacked standards for carrying on back and forth conversations across different websites or connecting and following the activities of other users across websites. If I had a friend who posted music on a music site, writing on a blog site, photography on a photo sharing site, and random thoughts and status updates on a micro-blogging site, I had to do an awful lot of friending and following to get the sort of experience I could have in a closed silo where it was all aggregated into a feed for me. The convenience of the endless feed, the hyperconnected silo, created the perfect human cattle pen.

Is it possible to create an equivalently convenient user experience around the FediVerse, IndieWeb and the ATProtocol? Maybe include a secure messaging solution based around email in the process? I can see it happening, honestly. I think I can even envision how to build it. Watch this space.