[troupo]

> The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it.

what?

> It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier

You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?

Edit:

For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's tunnel, and the world would be better for it.

E.g. some opensource projects in the Elixir space have been moving to Elixir's ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/. And now you can search those discussions, link them, point people to them etc. The "small public internet" seems to accommodate it just fine

[foul]

>You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable?

W3 at its core is very simple. This simpleness gives large gaps of freedom in what two parties have to do for exchanging data, e.g. 27 years have passed between the birth of W3C and Webauthn.

>Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?

There is a multitude of reasons why you have marvellous designs on websites but you can't name a mass-market search engine you can run outside of the browser on your local computer using on-line data. Sure there are some or you can nowadays assemble some software parts and build your own, but it isn't a thing, and there is a why.

[squigz]

What is the why?

[foul]

Data in W3 is designed as poorly as FTP, relies on third-party for consistence and transfer. And we used it a lot for bullshit content we thought we paid upfront (by buying hardware and access to a network).

W3 will always be the perfect medium for an ad publisher (given the role of publishers in a capitalist nation) who may or may not give away for free a platform for evaluation and a delivery network.