Robin Berjon

I first heard about this in an former coworker's (Robin Berjon) talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s878bm15mrk at an IPFS conference Fascinating He writes about these things on this blog as well(https://berjon.com/ethicswishing/), and has a forthcoming book on related topics last I heard

Maybe if you've time for a long but very interesting read have a look at this [0]. R. Berjon gives a good explanation of why the internet (and we mean IP routing, DNS, BGP and ISP governance etc) is far from a level system and what needs to be done to restore it to public service as a global tool for the good of humanity. [0] https://berjon.com/public-interest-internet/

What he's actually proposing are Web Tiles[1], which he explains in the next article in this series. Basically a move from web pages as Internet-connected applications to being locally-cached reusable components that compose into workflows. 1: https://berjon.com/web-tiles/

OK, it's not quite the same but last week Robin Berjon wrote "Web 2024" which spoke as if from the future and he said: "This is 2024. In terms of the ecosystem, not only do all browsers have large chunks implemented in JavaScript but at some point someone started a pure-JS browser from scratch. It was initially meant as a joke, but this 'Inception' browser caught the fancy of the ever-resourceful JS community and quickly grew in usability." http://berjon.com/web-2024/

What might be useful for the re-decentralized web community is a detailed comparison of the ATProto, ActivityStreams/Pub and maybe Solid specifications, protocols, standards, vocabularies (or whatever exactly these blueprints actually are). As the blog post illustrates quite nicely (literally), ATProto is a fairly complete, bottom-up type specification that makes concrete various server/database aspects that in the ActivityPub spec are somewhere in the remote background, "left to the implementation". One could almost think of implementing AP over ATProto, and sure enough somebody wrote about this [1]. One can also not miss the (at least) linguistic affinity of a Personal Data Server with a Personal Data Store (Solid) and sure enough somebody did and asked [2]. [1] https://berjon.com/ap-at/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/ywrw3f/whats_the_diffe…

The author defers a lot to their "fixing search" article[0] for arguments and numbers. That article wrongly assumes that search (and the other problems mentioned, like social) is simple to rebuild to avoid misaligned incentives by relegating it to "just" an API. A search company would still have to implement crawling, recrawling (efficiently, timely for topical events), spam filtering, ranking without being game-able, and a ton of other subtleties (robots.txt, many ways of tagging, stale content for certain categories). It also doesn't solve the underlying non-UI misaligned incentives of not injecting ads directly into the API results or however. Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely. [0]: https://berjon.com/fixing-search/