[cronjobber]

> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools

Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days.

But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?

[Freak_NL]

Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting.

It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low-power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means.

If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to).

This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?

[tnone]

This has been tried in various forms, and always fails for a few reasons:

- Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution.

- Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv, music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge preservation and freedom of expression.

- Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn, private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it.

Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3.

There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom, which the contemporary web sorely lacks.

Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild.

[brad0]

We need a win-win system.

People adopted schema.org so their search ranking improved. Adding markup for machine consumption doesn't make sense otherwise.

We need to build systems that benefit both parties.

[alanfranzoni]

This is an EXTREMELY good point. We'll need to dig out a way.

[jacquesm]

This is what happened to twitter in a nutshell.

[jalfresi]

Sell better tools?