The Challenge of Decentralized Social Experiences
“It’s simply… there’s a huge problem when you want to kind of build or have the same experience with a closed social network. Yeah. That we have to solve and… yeah. It’s funny because it’s still a problem. So you tried to solve that almost 15 years ago and up to now it’s still a problem. And it feels that nobody, maybe cad is the wrong word, but nobody tried to solve that in between this time at least on such a fundamental level that you started with web intents.”
— Matthias Pfefferle, Connecting Decentralized Social Networks and Rethinking Interoperability
The Invisible Backbone of the Web
“But if the product that Juliette Reinders Folmer works on stops in its tracks, it doesn’t matter what shiny framework you use, what shiny component library you have, it doesn’t matter because the cracks are going to come. And I know I sound like Doomsday… But really, I think the world needs a wake up call and the world needs to understand that it shouldn’t always be the same five, six companies, wonderful companies within the WordPress ecosystem, for example, to fund projects of this importance because it’s always the same people.”
— Anne Bovelett, Underfunded PHP Tools: A Global Business Threat
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On the Value of Building Now, Not Waiting for Adoption
“I would much rather build something that people can use as is, especially developers, without having to, without a big adoption challenge. I think that’s another reason I tend to build these things as services. I want individual users to be able to use these things as easily as possible. I don’t want them to have to self-host anything. I don’t want them to have to get their Mastodon or Friendica or Pleroma or whatever to add a new feature. And so, yeah, I tend to avoid kind of adoption problems. I tend to build for what is here now and not for some hypothetical future.”
—Ryan Barrett, Connecting Decentralized Social Networks and Rethinking Interoperability
