The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years.
We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily.
Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses.
We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.
We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily.
Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses.
We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.