frankie-tales

This was for every one: about the crisis of the web

2025-12-25T15:30:00Z

I just finished reading the delightful book by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled This is for Everyone, published this year. It is a trip, long, almost 400 pages, about the origin and evolution of the World Wide Web, seen by those who conceived and pushed it from the start. The entire first part of the book is dedicated to the history of the web, the W3C, and the Web Foundation's operations as we have known them in the first 30 years of its development, from 1989 onwards.

I was there at the very beginning of the 90s: I was connected to the Internet since 1991, and reading such a book for a good part has been an emotional trip in my memory of those events and people. He is a visionary and an idealist who fought for an extended period to prevent his WWW creature from being intercepted and disrupted by for-profit interests.

It happened almost from the start, when first NCSA, then Netscape, and Microsoft tried one after the other to change the whole idea of openness into something proprietary, driven through the same scheme of embracing, extending, and extinguishing. In practice, the complete negation of standard and openness, with a clear goal in mind: obtaining users' lock-in into proprietary products, clearly for profit.

Tim provides evidence on multiple critical aspects of the current incarnation of the net as we know it today and over the last 20 years or more. They are both technical and social defects or drifts. The web is no longer what we learnt to know in its first years of existence. The start of the end of the original web concept was the mobile-first approach, which relegated the use of a regular computer to a second-class experience for most users. Most of the digital-native people never used a computer to access the network, and that user experience deeply affects the current vision of the web.

For years, nowadays, a browser has not been the main program for accessing content and services. Social networks are mostly not interoperable because companies have little interest in having their users leave the walled gardens of their apps. Using a browser and potentially exiting the company's services to access other servers and spaces is tolerated, but is perceived as damaging profits. That's simply because users are not users, but customers. The result is the shattered Internet about which I already wrote: the W3C standards are still relevant, but embedded in applications and frameworks that enrich and upset the user experience with proprietary workflows and extensions.

An emblematic case is Apple, which has, in practice, abandoned its WebKit engine and Safari browser in favor of apps and proprietary services to monetize customers and companies.

The concrete risk is that the whole web and its standards would become a marginalized component of the net, while most users are confined to walled-off realms of proprietary services and social networks. The recent AI innovation can mark the definitive end chapter of web content creation and search as we have used them over the last 30 years. More and more users will limit themselves to AI-provided overviews instead of collecting and consulting multiple sources of information and independent services. That will also have a concrete impact on revenues and interest in content creation and provision at large.

The second part of the book is fully dedicated to all such problems: the impact of social networks, the last few years of generative AI, the BigCo dominance, and includes all Tim's worries for the foreseeable future. He's an idealistic, optimistic, and positive guy due to his past experiences. However, he also has a good dose of sane realism. He understands that the path is nebulous and full of dangers (specifically, the AI path is highly polarizing and can hide multiple issues at many levels).

He sees in the indie web, and specifically in open and well-structured distributed standards (such as the ActivityPub protocol), a possible way to change the present and future by favoring interoperability and independence. A concrete proposal is the Solid standard for personal data wallets (or pods in Solid terminology) under complete user control for accessibility by third-party services. Such a standard is still in its infancy, but the true problem I see is the trustworthiness of involved parties, both companies and governments. Trusting is the key, and maybe we all individually lost such a superpower a long time ago.

Creating a corpus of rules to manage all such technologies and ensure ethical behavior can be a desperate illusion; the only concrete alternative would be to opt out, at the cost of exclusion from the social context (not only the digital one). But I agree there is no other way to recover the original idea of the web. The AI technologies are even more polarizing, among doomers and boomers, with a bumpy road ahead. For sure, open protocols and distributed multi-peer services are the inevitable starting point, but they won't be enough.

"It was not enough simply to release new technology and hope for the world to improve. You had to develop technology and society together. You really had to fight, in a principled and continuous way, for human rights. The web offered people a platform for their voices to be heard, reducing the cost of publishing and distributing information to effectively nothing. But, used improperly, it could also be turned into a tool of surveillance and control." (timbl)

References

Breaking dependencies on BigCos and a US centric IT world

2025-05-17T15:00:00Z

I recently read some interesting articles (see [1,2]) by Bert Hubert about IaaS and SaaS in the EU, which are generally considered cloud computing at large. He has quite a deep understanding of such topics, and the reading is enjoyable and triggered a few reflections.

The problem could be analyzed as a vast version of the indie web movement. Ensuring independence from a handful of big companies, all geolocated out of the continent and possibly subject to the inconstancies of a humoral government, as in current times, is a duty not only for individuals (who should also protect themselves locally), but also for whole countries.

First of all, it is evident enough that Europe is not that bad about infrastructure. In multiple countries on this continent, there are quite a few big companies that have nothing to envy, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, for their capabilities and critical mass. There are already companies with multi-region data centres, a good level of automation, and high SLAs. Of course, they are mid-range companies, not monsters with country-size balances.

It is already perfectly possible [3] to depend on EU-based standard capabilities, including email services or file storage, which represent a primary part of common cloud services. What is truly missing is a capable enough set of web-based cloud personal productivity software based in Europe, which would be comparable to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, including video conferencing and instant messaging.

Other important services could be Youtube equivalent, but what it is evident for me is that such kind of services are also available at small scale, what it is really missing is a sizeable financial effort to fund consistently projects that already exist in the FOSS/indie web ecosystem and the will of doing that instead of paying new consortia to develop from scratch some new solutions. Europe is full of brilliant people and companies that are just waiting for that.

As a personal example, by manual, at work, the central management recently abandoned the whole idea of maintaining fully on-premise systems to move some key services to the cloud for the entire national research network. Our non-specialistic needs were quite average profile: shared storage, email system, the usual personal productivity tools like Microsoft Office, and a teleconferencing/webinar system. The same could be enough to cover the digital needs of most of the companies and bodies out there in Italy. The result has been a national contract with Microsoft for MS365 and a more limited contract with Cytrix for GotoMeeting/Webinar. IMHO nothing is transcendental, something that could be implemented with a decent pumping of money to scale up a multi-datacenter on-premise solution to have full redundancy and an equally decent dedicated team, with many more possible features and capabilities available, at the end of the day. Maybe the only actual key point was the availability of MS Office, which is the only severe lock-in source for most users (and also why Google Workspace here has no hope of being considered). But even in the past, we paid a lot of money for desktop multi-licenses in any case, without any additional cloud solution.

I will not deal deeply with these incomprehensible dependencies on a single application: in my honest opinion, a lot of users are simply too lazy to refuse such a kind of lock-in, even if they depend on a very limited number of features of such an application. There are at least three different alternative desktop programs that most users could use successfully, but we still see Microsoft Office as the holy grail (and I would also add that its web version has an embarrassing UX).

Anyway, so what? That has been a precise abdication to autonomy of digital services and choices, whose consequence will be for sure visible in the future: loose of internal tech skills, missing investiments in FOSS alternatives, lack of human resources growing, and missed diversifications of solution providers (now both located in USA, not even Europe).

Seriously? We did not even have to externalize such services, only to reasonably invest in the right direction for additional human resources and infrastructure improvement instead of paying fees. In the last thirty years, I have not even seen a cent directly paid by my organization for FOSS projects used daily by tons of us, except for some rare fees for conference participation and sometimes indirect payments for people that incidentally worked on FOSS project during their daily job.

Let me be quite pessimistic about the actual intention of European bodies to find a concrete way of improving continental clouds, which could be perfectly viable instead. Until this moment, I have seen only an exaggerated capability of defining rules for the IT ecosystems that are not always sensed and also often misapplied. I saw instead a great lobbying capability by the well-known BigCos that have sustained their own interests and de-potentiated any past effort about this subject (hey, Gaia-X, yes, I'm talking about you).

Is this a lost war? I don't know, but I still don't see concrete signals of changes in European policies about digital innovation, except for a big regulation effort that does not change our full dependency on a handful of US companies. I have more hope in individual actions, but of course, as in the case of FOSS, they require a high level of awareness, which I still see in a limited measure: just compare the number of Mastodon accounts against Meta socials, TikTok, or Twitter/X ones. Maybe we are now at the same level of FOSS as about 30 years ago: a few visionaries and geeks see the problem and act, and most people will follow. Or at least, I hope so.

References

Socials, they are not your home.

2025-01-20T17:00:00Z

Recently, I participated in a brief thread on Mastodon about how to maintain relations with people that have been built around a social network, specifically through Facebook. This is not different for Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever you prefer.

I explained that this is simply not possible because, in my experience, people use multiple socials based on their age, technical experience, personal taste, and even the presence of other peers in any of the existing social systems.

This post explains in long form what I think about socials and, in brief, why you should not base your relationship life on any of them, including any serious business, of course.

In the last 30 or more years, a series of social networks appeared on the Internet with different characteristics, and all of them are (or have been until their closure) typically usable for free (as beer). Of course, they are pretty expensive toys, requiring a lot of servers, data centres, worldwide networks, software and human resources. As said briefly with a joke, if they are not selling you anything, you are the product.

The game is clear: they are profiling your personal data and preferences to create selective advertisement campaigns (included in the social network feed) if you are not paying a premium charge. That could happen even if you pay for a subscription, of course, but it is less disturbing, at least. Moreover, those networks also have been subject to data leaking from time to time, because of security issues or intentionally, and probably you would not appreciate that your personal data, telephone number, and the photo of your children/cats, or the photo of you drunk and naked in a party ten years ago walk publicly on the net.

If this is something you are not available to accept, avoid any not-so-free social network, plain and clean. Of course, any of your peers (family, friends, colleagues, any other) could have a different opinion about that. Any of them could choose one of the many social networks out there, and those networks leverage specifically the FOMO syndrome to collect and increase users/customers. If any of your friends are on Facebook or Instagram, you could be captured in the network easily because of that mass syndrome. The only way to escape is simply not playing that game.

A viable alternative is participating in modern independent networks of small community-based services, such as Mastodon for microblogging or Matrix for one-to-one communications and groups. Of course, they need to be sustained for cost coverage, and any instance can always disappear at any time because the admin(s) move to other interests or costs exceed what the admin(s) are available to pay at the end of the day. They are probably not long-term solutions, but one can always move from one instance to another when things turn down. Simply, do not rely too much on them. And probably they will not solve the problem of the leaking of photos of you naked and drunk in a party of ten years ago: shit happens even on those systems.

If your major interest is ensuring privacy and security, all the protocols and software of those distributed networks are purely FOSS, and you can always create your own instance. Of course, again, this is not something free of cost; you always have to consider computing resources (both cores and storage) and your time. This is not viable for people who lack the required skills and knowledge, but potentially, it is the only indisputable solution.

Unfortunately, after creating your own Mastodon/Matrix instance or moving to a nice maintained instance by a trustworthy party, you still have to convince your peers to participate in such a network, and that is the tricky part. The hard truth is that most people do not care about abdicating their freedom and participating in a social network as a customer. That is until the whole thing becomes a PITA because of censorship rules, excess of advertisements, moderation, and lack of active peers. That happened in the past for X/Twitter and will happen again for other social networks. It is a matter of critical mass: if the network is not large enough, you can miss a lot of your peers, and you can do exactly nothing to solve this problem.

That is the same problem you find in IM systems. For historical reasons, most of your peers have probably registered a Whatsapp account, much less a Telegram one. There are even fewer with a Discord account (not that better) or something less invasive and respectful of privacy, such as a Signal or Matrix account. The only valid reason is that WhatsApp started in 2009, Telegram in 2013, and Signal in 2014 and all of them, in one way or another, tried to maintain a user's lock-in or managed to solve scalability and add features since then.

One should ask why they all avoided systematically extending the existing XMPP protocol soon instead of re-inventing the wheel. I'm a bad guy and think that standardizing does not solve the problem of sustainability for such systems. They need to lock in the users to survive.

Think if you had to use a non-standard SMTP protocol to send emails in the 90s. That would have been an epic failure for the Internet tech community and users. Curiously, this is not true on the current shattered Internet, and this is the reason for the current social nightmare.

It's not too late: let such non-distributed and proprietary networks die as soon as possible; simply close your accounts or freeze them and move to something more standard, distributed and human-sized. Don't care about missing out on someone; they will come sooner or later if they share the same ideas, so why care? And if they do NOT share the same ideas, why care?

Come on, let's free ourselves of any social dependency on closed and proprietary networks.

And possibly, if you absolutely have to go around naked and drunk in the next party, at least avoid that people make photos of you and publish them.

IPv6 is a matter of freedom, not a technical issue

2024-12-24T12:44:00Z

In a recent lenghty post Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asian-Pacific Network Information Center, discussed the status of the IPv6 protocol migration and made some considerations of the future of that migration. An interesting reading that motivated this brief post.

"[...] the transition to IPv6 is progressing very slowly not because this industry is chronically short-sighted," the APNIC scientist argued. "There is something else going on here. IPv6 alone is not critical to a large set of end-user service delivery environments." Indeed, he believes that we are already "pushing everything out of the network and over to applications."

Of course, he talked about CDNs, the cloud and the business environment that transformed the Internet from a network-of-peers to a broadcasting network in the last twenty years or more. I have already considered the shattered Internet as a modern deprivation of the original spirit of the Big Network. The almost current irrelevance of the IPv6 migration for many involved parties is a sign of time and again proof of such a kind of drift for me. We are still around 40% of the net with a fully operational dual-stack, with the prospective to live in dual-stack IPs until 2045 or more.

I recently changed ISP at home, abandoning Vodafone and moving to a human-size national provider. The new contract came with a dual-stack connection that includes a (free-as-beer) /48 IPv6 static class allocation, as recommended by RIPE, which was not even considered by Vodafone and other prime-time big telco companies here. Even my VPS provider gives free-as-beer IPv6 addresses, which can be attached to my VPS to provide different services.

Every damn connected device at home now has its own static IPv6 address, which can be controlled and filtered via my home router. I mean potentially 65535 different devices with their own static addresses. Filtering by source and destination IPv6 and ports in such conditions for security is elementary, as well as organizing multiple VPNs for any use. If you want to expose your home NAS or any other service out of your home network, even behind a CGNAT connection (as provided by many ISPs out there with no other chance), using IPv6 is a practical and immediate solution under your complete control. Here in Italy, if you have a business contract, you can sometimes pay for a static IPv4; otherwise, you are NATed with a minimal chance of creating easily internal services among multiple sites.

A nice plus is the drastic reduction of port scanning by bots, which is a sad, shared experience for anyone who exposes any service to the IPv4 limited space of addresses: scanning billions of addresses is not for the script kiddies.

For me, IPv6 has the same exact role as the indie web movement for users' independence on the modern Internet. If you are able to act, this needs to be done now, not in the next twenty or thirty years, before all the users would be considered always only customers or passive subjects.

The shattered Internet

2024-08-02T13:00:00Z

I recently finished reading a book published one year ago, written by Vittorio Bertola and Stefano Quintarelli. Unfortunately, it is only available in Italian, but its title perfectly encloses all the topics it covers: The shattered Internet: digital sovereignty, nationalisms, and big techs. Like me, Vittorio and Stefano are among the relatively few early users and participants of the primeval internet network of the 90s, even before the World Wide Web was conceived. This book is a disenchanted and realistic travel in the story of the Big Network and how it has become a broken dream today in many respects.

Thinking about it, it also shares some of the reasons why I started this self-hosted blog recently. At the end of this post, one could also consider that this site and the whole indie web movement make little sense altogether. Simply, they represent another unrealistic attempt to return to the origin. In short, it's just a daydream. Maybe, or maybe not.

The Internet has been conceived from the beginning as a great, unified, worldwide and resilient web of neutral connections based on open technical standards and cooperation among developers and participants to allow end-to-end communications all over the world, without discrimination. At its very beginning, in the middle of the 90s, it appeared to be a realized dream to the most tech-savvy people.

Unfortunately, reality later started to appear in all its hard truth. The world is not neutral and equal for all human beings, and there are multiple drivers of inequality and diversity. Moreover, human groups tend to create private walled gardens with deep moats among themselves, often for the mere interests of the few.

Nowadays, there are at least two great sources of fragmentation for the Internet, because of its own worldwide success. Nationalisms (and let me also say different ways of seeing life, values, and our society itself) and the creation of an oligopoly of a few big companies that dominate the network. Companies are interested in making a profit and maintaining their walled gardens with millions of users-customers locked in there. This is not something new, but it is a big problem when companies have balances that are more outstanding than those of many countries.

These centrifugal thrusts are shattering every day more the dream of the big, unique and pacific network. Internet users are more and more closed in limited bubbles, because of their nationalities and cultures or the profit plans of the big corps.

Note that - as the book's authors - I don't think that the occidental US-centric world has the correct/absolute answers for that. In many cases, I cannot share some ideas and values considered standard thinking overseas. I don't even know if the tentative regulation policies here in Europe will succeed in creating a better and respectful network.

Moreover, in many countries the Internet is limited and under the control/monitoring of central authorities, and I'm not talking only about North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, or other nations with some known issues in accessing the network. As we all discovered in the immediate past, even the so-called free democracies show their fallacies from time to time.

Anyway, as tech-savvy individuals, we have the right and duty to escape as much as possible from the mainstream short-field vision of the network, by diversifying and avoiding the walled gardens, as well as the unique thought for the evolution of the society.

It is a matter of freedom and equality for all of us, even if it is wishful thinking. And above all, even if many people out there do not care and are willing to give up their privacy and freedom, too.

Wake up, Neo...
The Matrix has you...
Follow the white rabbit...
Knock, knock, Neo.

frankie-tales

This was for every one: about the crisis of the web

References

Breaking dependencies on BigCos and a US centric IT world

References

Socials, they are not your home.

Large social networks are an expensive game

The distributed small social networks can be a solution

IPv6 is a matter of freedom, not a technical issue

The shattered Internet