The Good on the Internet - Design Issues

There is a growing movement to understand, fix, and mitigate the problems of the web, and specifically of social media. Parents of children and youth worry about the potential harm to their offspring from engaging in democracy, and schools and wonder whether to just ban phones for kids. There are a lot of important and good things on the web - which in fact come from the vast majority of the web sites and apps. We need to recognize that, make sure we and our children make the best use of it, while protecting ourselves from the harms. When you look at all of the things to do on the web, or in the apps, then the majority are actually not damaging, many are in fact good - and many are actually wonderful. There are the pre-web systems like email, podcast and blog readers, and chat. There are web platforms which are beneficent, including open source systems. There are systems built on top or the Solid Protocol, which naturally provide users with a power that we call digital sovereignty.

Introduction

So many discussions recently have questions about how to avoid the harm that some things on the internet have done, sometimes suggesting that children should not be allowed phones at all, that I have had to point out that there there are many important good things out there on the internet which generally do not tend to cause harm -- in fact, will help people be creative, to work together, to have a good time, to understand the world and the many people in it better.

So I put together this big map of everything on the internet.

A diagram with apps at the top and processes they encourage at the bottom.

Well, not everything but a lot of the things. Apologies if I have missed off your favorite website. Apologies for a bit of overloading of colors and shapes to get some points across. In general, the boxes with rounded corners are websites or apps. The circles at the bottom are processes which they lead to in the world, be it communal decision making, or disinformation.

The diamond shapes stand for problems with the platforms - things they do like spying and tracking people, or optimizing their AI-driven feed to optimize user engagement. Platforms like, say, Amazon retail, LinkedIn, and Google search do track you and build a profile of you. That mostly helps them provide a service, connect you with people and ideas and products which you will find relevant.

To the extent that they allow advertising by third parties, the platforms which profile you are capable of being part of the world in which you are manipulated by targeted advertising to do something against your own best interests, like to buy junk products, or believe conspiracy theories, or to vote against your own best interests.

You can see that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are among those which do have feeds which they optimize for engagement. For the world as a whole, that can be a bigger problem than the problems which just stem from tracking, spying, profile building and targeted advertising.

The dystopian processes have been described by many authors elsewhere. I have gone into them in more detail in another note in this series, ""The Dysfunction of Social Networks" (as I write the Surgeon General of the US made an NYTimes Op-Ed [NYT] pointing to his 2023 report [SGR] suggesting health warnings on Social Media sites). To summarize, then, the problems that follow from the feed manipulation for engagement,

People trying to get noticed in the feed learn that lying is more effective than truth
People trying to get noticed in the feed learn that clickbait is more effective than honesty links
The wider community becomes polarized in opinion
Civilized discussion about important topics becomes impossible
Democracy breaks down

There are also, separately, the mental health problems arising from people, typically teenage girls, comparing themselves to an apparently impossible level of beauty on Instagram and the like [INE].

Not a static picture

It is interesting to see how these platforms move with time in this space. When I first got an instagram account, I used to track friends and family, and when I opened it I knew I would get a list of posts by people I had followed. Now years later I find that I get a feed of amazing videos of amazing things and products -- all very clickable and doom-scrollable - but now it's no longer useful as a private place of private friends and family. Also, Skype which many use as a chat and video conference seems to suggest I follow not just people but subjects, basically Skype-controlled feeds. WhatsApp, too, seems to suggest following some sort of channel. Is the reward for a platform that grabs my attention so great that all kinds of current social media platforms will drift toward the same identical model, and lose their originality? Some people fear that is inevitable.

Fortunately, though, there are all kinds of ways in which we use the internet which will be safe, because they are not web platforms with the dystopian business model. So now let's do a tour of those, to remind ourselves that they exist and that they produce huge value in our lives. And maybe to pick back up again some good healthy habits we had stopped doing.

Protocols

This article, and the diagram it starts with, are not about just the web, but about the whole internet. The web is the mass of stuff you get to with a web browser. The browser talks to the web site over the internet using a particular language, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP. HTTP gives to access to the web, but there are a lot of other things you do on the net which actually use other protocols. These are the boxes in green in the diagram.

Protocol	Apps	access to the world of
HTTP	Web Browser	Web sites
SMTP, IMAP, POP	Email clients	Emails
RSS	Podcast App	Podcasts
RSS	Feed reader	Blogs
CalDAV	Calendar app	Events in Calendars
CardDAV	Contacts app	Contacts and Groups
ActivityPub	Mastodon etc	Profiles, Chat rooms and individual chats
Matrix	Matrix client	Chat rooms and individual chats
ADP	Bluesky client	Channels and individual chats
IRC	IRC client	Chat rooms and individual chats
Signal protocol	Signal client	Individual chats

Application Interoperability

Internet protocols are your friend. They allow you to chose which app you use. To look at the same emails, the same podcasts, you can use all kinds of different apps. Well, different device operating systems (Linux, MacOS, iOS, Windows, Android, etc) have different apps available.

An important thing is that you often have a choice of both commercial and open source apps. Commercial apps you pay for but you have someone to complain to if they don't work. Open source apps are written in the open so lots of people have looked at the code, and so you can be sure that they will work for you. They are Beneficent.

Keep using internet apps

You might use native phone or laptop apps for email, like Apple Mail, or Microsoft Outlook, but a lot of people use web apps like Google Gmail, or Microsoft 365. In this case, you have less power. The emails are not stored in a way you can use on your computer or phone. You can't use different interoperable apps on the same data. If you are an enterprise then it is easy to delegate the running of email systems, group management and security to one of the huge providers. That's ok, as it's easy, but you have less power.

In the world of podcasts and blogs, there are often web site versions you can use a web app to listen to or watch the show. There are apps, specific for the podcast (like This American Life) or a set of podcasts (like Audm)[AUDM].

Digital Sovereignty

As user of a digital device and the internet you should be empowered. and you are, to a large extent! We call this power Digital Sovereignty. You are in charge of your internet experience, and you can use it how you like. You can email whoever you want. (Yes, receiving spam is a problem with email, but I won't go into that here). You can bookmark anything on the web and enjoy it and use it as you like. You can share aspects of your life with friends, family, and colleagues - or not. You are not forced to share anything you don't want to share.

In practice, your level of empowerment does depend on your level of expertise. The operating system vendors are constantly tempted to make it hard for you to exercise a choice of app on their platform [MSFT/IE] [Apple/FTC].

Dynamic web apps and new platforms

The protocols in the table all operate in a fairly well defined world of messages, blogs, calendar events, and so on. But the web is different. Initially, the web was a well defined world of linked hypertext documents. But then the browsers added the ability for a web page to be not just a static page but a program that would run right there in front you you, and do whatever it wanted on the screen. They added JavaScript to the normal HTML language of web pages. The result was very different, much more powerful. Much more fun. But also a power shift. Instead of you as a user picking a favorite app to read your email, the person who controls the web site gets to send whatever program they like.

There are, of course many amazing things from online maps and Gmail and tools for making music and art and all kinds of amazing things. But functionality is controlled by the web app publisher, and also all the data involved - the trips or the the art or the messages and so on - are all stored back at the server. The Facebook app stores your posts at facebook.com. Gmail stores your mail at gmail.com, and so on.

And because in this model there is no common protocol, there is no interoperability. You can't send your Flickr photos to your Facebook friends and also your LinkedIn colleagues, because the websites of Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn are walled off, closed silos.

People try to help each other clim out of a facebook room into a linkedin room and so on, but they have to go over the walls.

HTTP is like a meta-protocol as it allows you to create your own new platform, and maybe when you should in fact have designed a new protocol.

Fedreated Chat protocols - The Fediverse

Federated systems are client-server systems where anyone can start a server. The protocols are open, and the system is designed to work with many servers in the world. The set of federated systems is known as the Fediverse.[FED] It is basically the blue and purple bits in the diagram. Examples outside chat are email, and RSS feed syndication--and anything using Solid Pods.

Activity Pub / Mastodon

Of the chat-specific protocols, one, Activity Pub, is a W3C Recommendation.[APS] ActivityPub is an open standard, and so anyone can write a client for it. The name "Mastodon" is used for the whole network and also for the name of specific client apps.

"Mastodon uses a standardized, open protocol to implement federation. It is called ActivityPub. Any software that likewise implements federation via ActivityPub can seamlessly communicate with Mastodon, just like Mastodon websites communicate with one another." -- [APCL]

There is a project ActivityPods [APP] @@ combining Solid Pods and Activity Pub.

In 2023, Facebook announced [APT] that their new twitter-like "Threads" chat would use ActivityPub. In 2024 as we write, there seems to be incomplete but increasing interoperability between Facebook Threads and existing AP systems like Mastodon servers and clients.

Activity Pub person IDs are written like "@timbl" but linked to "https://w3c.social/@timbl@mastodon.social" when the account is on a different host.

Matrix

Matrix is a chat protocol which was picked when the Github-related chat site, Gitter, moved from its proprietary API to a common one. Because of that choice, a lot of the open source community, for example around Solid, ended up on Matrix. [MXS] (We made a converter to convert Matrix chat to solid chat, so that we have permanent archives of the discussions in our pods).

The dominant Matrix client is Element, on laptops and phones, though you talk about "being on Matrix" rather than "being on Element". Matrix digitally signs all messages, the matrix server being (it seems) the trusted carrier of the secret key. Messages ae encryped unless they are in public groups.

The matrix protocol does use HTTP as its lower layer but unforunately does not use actual HTTP URIs for its things - people, rooms, messages. These have names like @timbl, +students, etc. So while within Matrix your ID might look like @timbl:gitter.im to use in the rest of the world you need a URL like https://matrix.to/timbl:gitter.im or even https://matrix.to/timbl:gitter.im#/@tmbl:gitter.im . The matrix protocol is decectralized - anybody can start a server. But they have ended up with in fact using the central service at matrix.to to allow https: links to be able to fire up your local Matrix client.

ADP/BlueSky

We gather that when Jack Dorsey was looking to make twitter, he asked himself, "Should I make a new web platform, or should I make a new protocol?" [JBS]. He made a new web platform, twitter.com. He later expressed that he had made a mistake - he should have designed a new protocol. In fact he ended running a huge web app, with a huge number of users and messages, and having to design very special back end software to do the right thing when Justin Bieber (say) tweeted.

Jack, since, left twitter, and made a protocol, ADP. The site Bluesky runs ADP and can talk to any other systems running ADP [JD]. (We understand [BS2] that in fact ADP is in fact centralized because in fact it replies on a central server (at https://plc.directory/:did) to look up where things are from their hash-based DID - "Decentralized" ID)

Nostr

Nostr is a protocol for people to post things using clients and a series of relays. Users mint public/private key pairs and keep the private key secret, and don't loose it. Clients talk to relays, relays talk to each other. "To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays. To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people"[NOS] This is (2024) a relatively new system, and its not clear, for eample, who will fund the relays as it scales. Does every relay hold every post from ever user forever? Nostr is now being funded by ... Jack Dorsey.

Hosted Chat Systems

You can chat over the internet using systems which are hosted by a company or organization, such as Signal, Telegram, What'sApp chat, and Apple's iMessage. There are many comparison reviews in the press to help chose between them. Signal has a good reputation as itself using an open protocol, the Signal Protocol, and run by non-profit which minimizes the information it keeps. The Signal Protocol is also used by What'sApp.

Maximum Power

The main point of this article is to point out that people should appreciate the fact that most of the stuff on the net is beneficent, and should use that stuff to their advantage. To avoid, and help their child avoid, the things on the internet which are addictive and harmful, but not to throw their phone into the ocean.

That said, on the diagram there are things we have not discussed here. The purple bits! Those are the bits we are building now which will make the internet even more powerful, and take digital sovereignty to a new high. This is an internet where we have the power of personal sovereignty, to be completely in control of our internet life, combined with a crazy, creative world of web apps anyone can dream up.

It is in fact possible. More Later.

References

APC: Mastodon Docs: What is Activity Pub?
APS: ActivityPub W3C Recommendation 23 January 2018
APP: ActivityPods: The framework to create decentralized social apps
APT: Facebook/Meta announce Threads, a chat system to use Activity Pub
Apple: The U.S Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Apple for monopolization of smartphone markets by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers.
AUDM: The Audm app from New York Times audio
JD: Jack Dorsey left Twitter and founded Bluesky. He then left Bluesky, saying they were making the same mistakes as Twitter had made, specifically, it seems, allowing moderation.
BS2: Matej Ľach, 2024-09-24, On #ATProtp, the BlueSky protocol, AP
FED: Fediverse, in Wikipedia
INE: The relationship between Facebook and Instagram appearance-focused activities and body image concerns in young women.
JBS: Jack wrote in an initial Bluesky chatroom that "The biggest and long term goal is to build a durable and open protocol for public conversation. That it not be owned by any one organization but contributed by as many as possible. And that it is born and evolved on the internet with the same principles.”
MSFT/IE: United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation (2001) was an American antitrust law case where the U.S accused Microsoft of monopolising the web browser market for Windows illegally.
NOS: nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays
NYT: US Surgeon General New York Times Opinion piece calling for a warning label on social media platforms.
SGR: US Surgeon General issues New Advisory about effects Social Media use has on Youth Mental Health.
TAM: This America Life Home page, RSS feed.

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Tim BL