Dear "The Website League", Stop.

2024-10-30

If you're someone who's involved with the website league project and you're reading this, I know it may come off rather harsh. I didn't want to intrude into your forums and start a flamewar, so I'm just posting it here and if it finds it's way to you, then it finds it's way to you.

I'm going to do a mini re-litigation of this old post here for you. Some people became fixated on the idea that social media was bad, not because it's a fundamentally flawed system, but only due to "centralisation". That if they could somehow reform social media to be "decentralised", all of the problems would magically go away. You may recognise this argument as identical to the position taken up by the web3 crypto scam economy, just replace "social media" with "capitalism". One group of these decentralised social media proponents happened to work for the w3c, the shadowy organisation who control web standards (who can include among their membership such esteemed groups as, the united states department of homeland security, google, amazon, alibaba, netflix, and basically every tech giant and thinktank you've ever heard of alongside many you haven't.) They developed something called the "activitypub" protocol, and because they were the w3c, people actually took it seriously for some reason.

Unfortunately, activitypub and the software built upon it was developed by people with STEM degrees who had never read post-script on the societies of control, so it turned out shit. Briefly:

(for the pedants, the at protocol is pretty much the same shit even if it's not technically activitypub)

As traditional social media continued down the path of enshitification, more and more people jumped ship to "alternative" platforms, just as they had once jumped from myspace to facebook beforehand. To serve this demand, more and more "alternatives" were created. One of these was called cohost. It was pretty much a tumblr clone. Cohost was particularly interesting to me because they didn't even make any real effort to improve upon the structure of social media, they basically just said "it will be good this time because we're good people". The only thing that really separated them from a traditional social media company was their refusal to take outside investor money. They even include a link to a pdf of Capital on their website! Look how leftistly they're doing social media! They probably should have paid more attention to Gothakritik. I mean cohost literally isn't even open source. Like, come on guys that's falling at the first hurdle. So unsurprisingly, as I predicted, cohost ran out of money and shut down.

All of this might make you think that social media was perhaps a bad fucking idea, and you can't reform it. Maybe, you don't need to post on someone else's platform, because it's very easy to just have your own website with rss, and follow others' rss. It's like Posting, but good. If you want to talk about something with someone else in some sort of thread, you can use a forum or board for that subject. Maybe, you're just inventing new problems for no reason. Even Jae Kaplan, one of the founders of Cohost, has gone on to agree with me.

Many other ex-cohost users have also had the same train of thought, and a load of excellent new blogs and personal websites are springing up out of the corpse of Cohost. This brings me much joy. Look here's a webring full of these people. So imagine my dismay when I see people posting about how they're looking forward to abandoning their blogs to jump onto the Website League once that's up and running.

"What's the website league?" I asked myself. Well apparently it's this https://websiteleague.org/. Immediately, the fact that they can't bring themselves to make a basic text only homepage without using javascript does not fill me with hope. When you read further, yeah it's just "activitypub but Again".

So Dear creators of The Website League:

You don't have to do this.

Please do not drag people off of their personal websites and blogs and forums back into the walled garden of "social" media.

First of all you're doing this xkcd comic again. We don't need new platforms and we don't need new standards, the Gods have already given us rss.

Secondly, you're not going to fix social media because it can't be fixed.

Your website boasts that "You don't need to know anything technical, or how to make a website, to participate." Have you considered that perpetuating deskilling is not something to brag about. Moreover, I can guarantee that it takes significantly more technical expertise to actually host one of these instances than it would to set up a simple website with html and css. But you already knew that, and it's probably by design, to keep the moderators an insular community you can retain control of.

You're not going to capture people who are currently stuck in traditional social media, you're just going to suck the people who have already left back into the pit.

If you want to create a "union of websites" start a god damn webring.

All of your design goals are already implemented in http(s) / gopher / gemini + rss, but better and already in wide usage.

You are designing a top down system to impose legibility onto the existing ecosystem of websites, when we need to be rewilding the internet.

I recommend you cease operations immediately. We never asked for your help. Sincerely, people who actually use the internet.