(2024-05-23) Entering A New Phase Of The Web With Molly White

Entering a New Phase of the Web, with Citation Needed’s Molly White. Welcome to Dotsocial, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement, someone who sees the Fediverse's tremendous potential and understands that this could be the internet's next wave. Today, Mike is talking to Molly White, a researcher, writer, and software engineer who cares deeply about free and open access to high-quality information.

I know that a lot of people know you as a very prominent crypto critic

But what's most interesting to me is it seems to me like you're coming at this from a place of optimism about the future of the web

You're a web warrior looking to make the web better. Crypto isn't it. But I get the sense that you have some ideas about where the web should go.

a lot of my work actually really does stem from profound optimism about the web, my lifelong love for the web, and my desire to see the web move into a positive direction

social media just feels bad

I think the same thing is true with AI-generated (GenAI) content

Those things actually give me some optimism that we're entering a phase where people really need something new.

there's been junk content on the web ever since the web existed, pretty much. I'm just thinking of the SEO keyword spam that people used to do

now I think people are just very, very aware of it and looking for alternatives and actively seeking out and using and developing alternatives

much more adoption of federated platforms like Mastodon. We're seeing alternatives like Blue Sky

I think that the same thing is going to be true when it comes to AI-generated content, where people are going to start looking for that really human, authentic material

It might be harder to find through all the noise. But that's the thing that I think where social can help, right? If there are ways to curate great content creators

Do you see so how important in your view is social as it relates to the web? Sometimes, you know, we talk about the fediverse, sometimes it's the social web, you know, talk, sometimes you talk about a social graph being part of the web. How do you think about this?

I think that social is inextricable from the web. I mean, you know, the whole basis of the web is, you know, hyperlinking

it's just a question of, you know, what kind of dynamics are in play there? You know, what do you you know, these different platforms enable, can you comment and message? Is it that type of social interaction? Or is it more of a, you know, reader publisher relationship?

people were never really a part of the web. In its early formation, it was documents linking to other documents, obviously, people made those documents, but there wasn't the notion of like, there's this person and they're another node on the web

when you have an account, on Twitter, you have an account on Facebook, you basically have a web page of sorts, you're publishing, right? It just so happens that you're not really posting on the web, you're posting in this more sort of walled garden world. And now we can make that actually be more like you're actually posting on the web.

Yeah, that's something I've tried to, I've tried to argue for a long time is I have this sort of strongly held belief that everyone is a blogger.

any sort of writing on the web, I think, is essentially blogging. And I think that's great. I think blogging is like a really healthy activity for people. And it's something I think everyone should have a blog

you posted your blog role recently.

those posts end up on Twitter on Mastodon, Bluesky.

POSSE is an acronym for post on own site syndicate elsewhere

I sort of actively use at least three social networks

you first write that content in a place that you control

and then you syndicate that post to anywhere else

And so now I can just write it on my site, click a button, and it goes out to wherever, I like to post my ideas

And it'll also allows me to sort of build out the features that I wish those sites had, which has been really enjoyable as well.

It's mostly stuff that I built myself, I'm using, you know, like a JavaScript library for the rich text editor and stuff like that.

for now, I'm keeping it just, you know, on the social networks, because it feels a little weird to like, copy people's comments back to my site without their consent. But I do have support for Web mentions in there

I thought a lot about ActivityPub when I was writing this because part of me was thinking, Oh, I should just, you know, build an ActivityPub, and then it will just itself become part of, you know, the federated web. And instead of like, cross posting the Mastodon, for example, I could just have the blog be a part of the metaverse and I sort of started down that road, but it's a pretty heavy lift to incorporate ActivityPub into a website

it's interesting to think about the intersection of RSS, and ActivityPub, AT Protocol.

is there like a wish list that's materializing in your head? Like how how this can start to help form a better web?

I think that usability is a really tough part

it's really challenging to implement ActivityPub

so I think that, you know, the more that we can make it possible for people to just, you know, create a website and incorporate it into the fediverse

where people don't have to go figure out what a server is, you know, when you sign up for Mastodon, it says, what server do you want to use?

you could type my name in to a browser, and you could go to that, that was my identity on the web. What you know, mollywhite.net, really is, is like this. It's your identity with the your different facets

I really liked that model to where like, I have sort of one primary record on the web. And then this is the source of truth about Molly White on the internet

There are a lot of other Molly Whites on the internet. There are people who try to impersonate me and run crypto scams

a lot of crypto advocates have sort of talked about where they're like your wallet address is your primary identity. And that's how everything will work on the web. And like, I see the the appeal behind that, but I don't think crypto wallets are maybe the mechanism for it. And so for me, you know, that the solution is, oh, I just have a domain.

I'm really interested in this idea of sort of digital ownership. And one thing I read about recently was the fact that when people talk about ownership, especially in a digital context, people imagine, like 10, different things, you know, 10, different people will have 10 different ideas

But for me, I think, you know, ownership is really, especially when it comes to the content that I write online, it's about, you know, being able to share the content that I create, under my own terms, you know, and that could be, and often is, for me, sharing it with a free license that allows people to reprint it if they want, because I care a lot about open access and free licenses and sort of the commons.

I had this realization, a couple years ago, when I started working on crypto stuff that like, I've been freely licensing my content so that people can reuse it. And that suddenly means that like, someone could make an NFT out of a blog post that I wrote, and I don't know if I really liked that, you know?

people can train an AI model on it, and it's like, oh, boy, I don't know how I feel about that either.

so in the piece that I wrote, recently, I talked about that as like digital sovereignty, you know, the ability to just go somewhere else. I think that's really key.

I liked what I was doing with Substack. For a long time, I found their platform to be very useful. And then, you know, things changed. And I decided that I didn't want to be publishing there anymore for you know, a host of reasons

When you think about, you know, how the web eventually as it develops further from a business model point of view, you know, how are people able to be subsidised as creators? How does the web evolve?

I think one of the great things about the web is that there is a lot of space for a diverse group of models

I also think that there should be more public funding of the web. And different types of things that happen on the web, like news, for example, I think, really needs more public funding.

I love the idea of co-ops on the web

But I am also very cautious about sort of describing that as, like the future of media or the future of how people are paid to create

there's there's tradeoffs that you really have to consider and that I think, sometimes are missed when people talk about, oh, this is sort of the new model that everyone's going to be using.

Wikipedia has been funded largely through donations by individuals right

So it's a mix of individual donations and also larger grants, but yes