path: root/open-source-insider-1803.txt

Where do we go from here? That's the question that's been on my mind lately, as I browse through Git repos looking for interesting projects, attempting to informally survey the state of open source and, closer to home, how open source might be able to fix the web. Because let's face it, the web today is about as interesting as the chatter of an encyclopedia salesman was a couple generations ago.

I've found I'm far from alone in thinking this. Time Berners Lee has sounded a similar alarm, 

But something I find that today's brightest seem to miss is that the web wasn't always this way and doesn't have to be this way today.

The internet was once little more than some very strange, some might say primitive, pages connected together by links. In the very early days there was no searching, there was simply exploring. The further you went the more you found. Pages and sites spread by word of mouth. Eventually out of this beautiful primordial cesspool some structures began to emerge. There were things called "web rings" which were sites that had banded together to help people find like-minded pages, authors, enthusiasts, what have you.

In these days the World Wide Web had yet to attract the attention of commerce. It was too unpredictable, scattered and lacking in any kind of discernible business model. This was the heyday of the independent creator. Suddenly mainstream media was unseated from its thrown by a thousand voices with a thousand different opinions. The notion of a shared cultural script was effectively chucked in the waste bin. Instead people were able to immerse themselves in millions of different streams of information, ideas, stories, and ways of living that had previously been difficult to discover or outright impossible.

For a few years, the World Wide Web really was exactly what it was envisioned to be -- a world loosely linked and endlessly free. It was rare that you went looking for specific things, instead you browsed, you explored.

This worked for a time, but the web kept growing. Web rings could be hard to find if you didn't stumble onto one of the sites on your own. Thus began the rise of the search engine. Lycos, Alta Vista and other early pioneers attempted to map the growing chaos of the internet. The early search engines did a pretty good job, good enough that they quickly became the first stop for newcomers.

Then came the rise of Google, which ordered the web better than its predecessors, but also went beyond simple organizing into value judgements. In roughly February of 2011, Google launched a change to its algorithm the began to favor corporate sites over independent publishers. Independent publishers lost 50 percent, often more, of their traffic and for intents and purposes were destroyed. Before that Google had banned web rings, calling them "link exchanges" and with those two moves Google effectively divided and conquered the web, killing the independent publisher and paving the way of the corporate commodified web of today.

These days search engines are largely gone. Google manages to cling to life, but its demise is all but fait accompli. Facebook and Twitter are the new starting points and if people search the web it's out of habit rather than because it gets them interesting results. What you get from Google these days is akin to what you got from mainstream media when independent publishing took off -- bland, boring content whose primary purpose to provide whitewashed, advertiser safe content against which ads can be sold. 

What does all this have to with open source? Well web rings were effectively open source, search engines were not. All things move in cycles and I happen to believe that we're nearing the end of a closed source cycle. That doesn't mean that open source solutions will replace it, but certainly the opportunity for that to happen will come in the near future.

I also don't mean to say that Google will disappear. It won't completely, Microsoft still exists though its influence has waned and no really cares what it does these days. Google is well on its way to the same. Already web developers have (finally) woken up to the <a href="http://ampletter.org/">dangers it poses</a> to what remains of the web. More than its hostile approach to the web though what really spells Google's end is very simple: can anyone remember the last time Google did anything innovative or even moderately interesting on the web?

While I'll enjoy a good jig atop Google's grave, I'm far more interested in what comes next. 

But what does come next? Crystal balls are notoriously murky, but I see two possible futures. The first and easiest prediction is that nothing happens next. The web becomes increasingly fragmented, corporatized and essentially turns to the digital equivalent of modern American cities: endless strip malls of the same ten stores repeated over and over again across the landscape. Depressing as it sounds, this is where my money would be if I were a betting man.

But you don't want to hear that. I don't want to either. I'm not ready to give up. And I believe that enough of us got enough of a taste of what the internet could be -- nay was -- for those few short years in the early part of the 21st century that we'll try to recreate it. I don't know what it will look like, but I do know it will be open source in spirit, which is to say it will probably not have a business model, it will not cede its central functions -- browsing and discovery -- to outside influences and it will not use a server-client model. 

There are already some efforts that vaguely look to be headed in this direction, like <a href="https://ipfs.io/">IPFS</a>, but IPFS has goals well outside creating a more experimental and creator-friendly web. It might be part of an answer, but not the whole thing. There is also the so-called dark web, that is all the onion sites out there that most people don't seem to know how to get to (hint: <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">install Tor</a>, and start looking for an onion site directory, which is similar to the web rings mentioned above), but at the moment the onion side of web has a reputation for being a haven of criminals, which it at least partly deserves. Again, this might be part of an answer, but not all of it.

Most of the answer remains elusive. Indeed, as I said before, it may not happen. It may be that all we get is a sense of nostalgia for the golden days of an internet that will never return.