If Facebook Threatens the Web, then WordPress Saved the Web (marcgrabanski.com)
After reading Tim Berners-Lee’s writings on how Facebook threatens the future of the web it occurred to me just how in the reverse argument is also true...projects like WordPress actually saved the web up until now by saving the intellectual property of millions of content publishers.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] threadBlogging was originally very one-directional. From the author to the audience. Sure there were comments but, let's face it, more often than not, they were just noise. Of course they served a purpose: they let those who felt like they needed to be heard have the illusion (and occasionally the actuality) of being heard, but ultimately the flow was largely one way.
So Wordpress was certainly useful but the blogging paradigm has largely shifted. We've gone "social" (whatever that means) and embraced "micro-blogging" (which is a nifty way of calling random non-sequitors like "I like ham" "blogging").
Running your own blog makes a lot of sense when the flow is one way. Even so, it's more work than I want to do (particularly with Wordpress where you have to keep on top of security patches) so my own (languishing) blog is on Blogger (but hosted under my own domain so I am free to move it where I like).
Anyway, the reality of "social" services is that they are fundamentally two-way. Now this sounds like a great idea: unlike blogging the author is actually listening, right? Wrong. The reality tends to be that instead of the audience only listening with blogging, with social nobody is listening. We're just narcissistic peas in egotistical pods (borrowed from Scrubs) chattering away in our own little worlds.
But the reality of two way communication is that it favours centralization (a la the Facebook model). Technically, it's much simpler that way.
Everyone running their own server is the Diaspora model. And that isn't what anybody wants and was doomed to failure before it began (for that and many, many other reasons).
The in-between ground is where Google was going with Wave: federated servers. This would mean that facebook.com could talk to handjournal.com and vice versa. You could sign up to either service and it doesn't matter which your friends were on. Ideally it would be an open federated system where anyone could join. I guess it would require some kind of directory layer but there are precedents for that kind of thing.
Anyway, Wordpress had a useful role in the history of the Web: it allowed people to move off of centralized services like TypePad and gave us choice. That was important but all that was to service a few particular needs, some of which have declined in significance since it first emerged in their own right or simply that they've been eclipsed by new needs and use cases.
But it's a bit of a stretch to say Wordpress saved the Web.
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Run...
Even Wordpress is increasingly becoming a huge liability for someone who isn't a sysadmin to run. Telling a non-geek friend to use a self-hosted Wordpress install to host their personal blog strikes me as incredibly irresponsible in the same way that jailbreaking/rooting a non-geek's smartphone would be doing them a huge disservice. Nobody should be self-hosting unless they know exactly what they're committing to. I'd much rather they use a hosted platform with a good export mechanism than use wordpress, see their site hacked using a zero-day export, and completely lose faith in "openness".
Data portability is something that average people can understand, something that sites can implement fairly easily, and something that's compatible with how regular people use computers. If geeks push self-hosting, they risk completely losing their credibility with regular people in the same way that the FSF has. Data portability might not be as sexy, but it's something that we have a chance of seeing through.
There's a reason why people used closed systems like Facebook, and it's not ignorance—it's convenience and quality. People aren't going to move away from these systems for the sake of "openness", but they might be convinced to push companies to implement true data portability if we can convince them why it's important.
Plus, a lot of the Wordpress exploits have been zero-day. Even if they are checking their Wordpress dashboard every day, or even every week (and that's probably not a good assumption to make), their installation could be silently compromised before an update was even available.
I think geeks tend to assume that regular people understand and care about even the most basic (by our estimation) best practices. You could argue that that's their fault, not ours, but I think there's a certain lack of pragmatism involved in thinking that regular users can responsibly administer a Wordpress install. I'm sure contrary examples exist, but there's a lot of horror stories as well.
Personal publishing where wordpress.com (and posterous, tumblr,etc.) are the best use case.
Professional publishing where Wordpress self installs are the best.
Since it doesn't look like these companies will give up copyrights anytime soon, I chose to promote self-hosting with WordPress so heavily because it is one of the only proven and relatively easy methods I know that provides publishers with complete control over the content they produce. Millions and millions of articles have been kept in the rightful hands because of WordPress and similar open, self-hosted publishing tools.
I think more people will chose to self-host if they are aware of the consequences and it is easy for them to do, which WordPress is probably the best we have to promote for now.
Eventually I'd to promote a viable and open alternative to Facebook, but nothing like that exists yet.
Funny how much of a difference subtle details of implementation can make.
it is just a FUD. Self-hosting can be done in a range of options - starting with your personal webserver on your own home or collocated computer (geek) to the pages personalized with your domain name on some common hosted and managed _open_ platform like wordpress, etc... (regular, non-geek person)
The issue isn't about technicalities of hosting or data portability. It is about content ownership. What FB does is "all you base are belong to us".
My related post on similar issue about giving away reviews to sites likes Yelp http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898945
Edit : this post is actually a reply to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943861