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fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

It's facisnating to see how the #OpenWeb ideology was formed in the late aughts. Technologists and early Internet tech personalities have long believed in open and free information.

That's great for academia, and the accumulation of humanity's knowledge. But when we extend that ideology to personal data we end up with what we have now.

Open Web evangelists criticizing early Facebook for being *too private* is an incredible heap of irony.

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn't index any user-created information on Facebook? AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open...all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Compare this with MySpace or Flickr or YouTube. Much of the information generated on these sites is publicly available. The pages are indexed by search engines. You don't have to be a user to participate (in the broadest sense...reading, viewing, and lurking are participating).