The Web We Lost, on the web of ad-hoc, bottom-up social networks before the pendulum swung fully towards centralized networks like MySpace, then Friendster, and now Facebook, Twitter, and friends. I’m glad Anil Dash is pointing out that great things were happening before social networks were massively financed operations and the delightful things that were different when people ran the system from the bottom up.

Owning and operating your data is obviously better than letting someone trade on it. But, there are missing pieces for users:

  • Where do I host my corner of the social network? Putting content on the web without someone else to run it is still strictly nerd stuff.
  • How do I find my friends? The advantage of a centralized network is its easy to make global observations, like analyzing social graphs for recommended links.
  • What are the checks against bad actors? Comments and trackbacks were fantastic for weblogs, until spammers figured out how to turn them into toys for boosting pagerank.

I don’t think any of these are insurmountable. But, decentralization is hard! Can we pull it off? I’d love to see it happen.