Green Grape Tim
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- Joined
- Mar 5, 2023
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I think everyone and their mothers are now aware of the blackout on Plebbit going on as of the time of this post. Between this and the embarrassing decay of other services like Discord, Facebook (I refuse to call it "Meta") and Melon Husk's twitter, we are starting to see the decline of the first iteration of a centralised web, and it's for a much more interesting reason that one might think.
I'm currently working on a dissertation surrounding network ontology. I won't bore you with the specifics, but an interesting aspect of networks is the combination of their latent and emergent properties. An important property that characterises reliable networks such as the World Wide Web is that they are scale-free - this means that the network has a degree distribution that follows a power law. Put simply, the web is reliable despite attacks against it because most of what comprises the network are nodes with very weak connections. It is far easier to take down these nodes in a full-on attack, but we hardly see this happen because the chances of us encountering such nodes/sites are very slim.
Sites like Plebbit and Twitter, by virtue of their centralisation, act as hubs within this network. A lot more connects to these sites by virtue of their nodes being robust for a number of reasons (robustness is a requirement for an effective hub to even exist; think of it like an evolutionary adaptation - websites like twitter aren't perfect, but they succeed by virtue of being a "well sharpened tool" as far as sites on the web go). Because they are effective hubs, they have a hell of a lot more information flowing to and fro than 99% of other sites on the entire web. This is what these companies rely and capitalise on, but in order to improve their "robustness" they are forced to make decisions that make their userbase resentful, yet reliant. They understand that because of their established power, a user is not really able to get the same access to information, nor nearly as conveniently, if they abandon their site and go elsewhere. It may be more individual, but I'm sure the inconvenience of finding smaller, more independent spaces online is a struggle all of us share.
The fact that people are starting to refuse the bullshit these companies are feeding them means there is an ever-increasing awareness that independence and user freedom are fundamentally incompatible with both node robustness and profit motives. It will get worse before it gets better, but I predict that these nodes will struggle to maintain the same level of influence they had before, for reasons x or y or z, and we'll soon be entering a second phase of a decentralised form of internet. There is a broader discussion that can be had about the surge of protest against what I personally call "convenience activism" - the prevalent behaviour of people that will only advocate for something so long as it's convenient or requires very little change of lifestyle - but I contend that there is a physical explanation and a physical consequence of the hyperinflation of these web hubs that may radically alter the robustness and prevalence of smaller, less-connected nodes. This is good for smaller communities for obvious reasons, but will also bring the spirit of adventure back into the internet, as we will be less inclined to use these faceless hubs to obtain routes to other locations in cyberspace.
If anyone is interested in any particular point here I'd love to hear it or provide further recommendations (to the best of my ability!). This is my first long post on this site so I'm sorry in advance if I've broken any etiquette.
I'm currently working on a dissertation surrounding network ontology. I won't bore you with the specifics, but an interesting aspect of networks is the combination of their latent and emergent properties. An important property that characterises reliable networks such as the World Wide Web is that they are scale-free - this means that the network has a degree distribution that follows a power law. Put simply, the web is reliable despite attacks against it because most of what comprises the network are nodes with very weak connections. It is far easier to take down these nodes in a full-on attack, but we hardly see this happen because the chances of us encountering such nodes/sites are very slim.
Sites like Plebbit and Twitter, by virtue of their centralisation, act as hubs within this network. A lot more connects to these sites by virtue of their nodes being robust for a number of reasons (robustness is a requirement for an effective hub to even exist; think of it like an evolutionary adaptation - websites like twitter aren't perfect, but they succeed by virtue of being a "well sharpened tool" as far as sites on the web go). Because they are effective hubs, they have a hell of a lot more information flowing to and fro than 99% of other sites on the entire web. This is what these companies rely and capitalise on, but in order to improve their "robustness" they are forced to make decisions that make their userbase resentful, yet reliant. They understand that because of their established power, a user is not really able to get the same access to information, nor nearly as conveniently, if they abandon their site and go elsewhere. It may be more individual, but I'm sure the inconvenience of finding smaller, more independent spaces online is a struggle all of us share.
The fact that people are starting to refuse the bullshit these companies are feeding them means there is an ever-increasing awareness that independence and user freedom are fundamentally incompatible with both node robustness and profit motives. It will get worse before it gets better, but I predict that these nodes will struggle to maintain the same level of influence they had before, for reasons x or y or z, and we'll soon be entering a second phase of a decentralised form of internet. There is a broader discussion that can be had about the surge of protest against what I personally call "convenience activism" - the prevalent behaviour of people that will only advocate for something so long as it's convenient or requires very little change of lifestyle - but I contend that there is a physical explanation and a physical consequence of the hyperinflation of these web hubs that may radically alter the robustness and prevalence of smaller, less-connected nodes. This is good for smaller communities for obvious reasons, but will also bring the spirit of adventure back into the internet, as we will be less inclined to use these faceless hubs to obtain routes to other locations in cyberspace.
If anyone is interested in any particular point here I'd love to hear it or provide further recommendations (to the best of my ability!). This is my first long post on this site so I'm sorry in advance if I've broken any etiquette.
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