Siri, I promise you I am not.

The web literally exists to share content. The first web browser was also a web editor. And ever since then, programmers have been working on ways to make publishing easier and better. As such, there’s no shortage of existing technologies that a new platform can build off of.

A brief aside about the nature of technology and its place as a part of a whole

It’s easy to think that the right technology will change everything. That somehow, the right code will make all the problems with Old Blue go away and we will live happily ever after in our new paradise.

It’s easy to forget that Posterous existed around the time of Old Blue’s ascendency. It was blessed with better technology, including a dedicated URL shortener and the ability to post via email. Old Blue arguably had inferior technology. But it won. The right technology came together with the right design and the right people at the right time, and the lightning in a bottle struck.

It takes more than good technology to change things. It takes good design, good timing, and a good understanding of the problems being solved. But the right technology can enable change. And as we talk about the technologies that can enable a new platform, it’s important to remember this.

The Interface Is Hot

So, for this essay, let’s look at some interfaces. These are also called “protocols” or “standards.” The general idea here is a group of people have written down, in technical language, how a thing should be accomplished. The most obvious of these would be the HTTP standard that governs how web browsers and servers talk to each other.

We’re not talking about code yet, just the ways we can use it.

oEmbed

This is what turns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ into the embed code that makes all your friends hate you. It involves a few steps:

1. Blog gets URL from user.
2. Blog looks up oEmbed endpoint for the URL, either
   • Matching the URL to a list of known endpoints, or
   • Looking for a particular link tag in the page’s head.
3. Blog hits the oEmbed endpoint and gets back the code required to embed the content from the URL into a page.

While this was likely originally intended for video websites, it has since grown to encompass all manner of sites, including Old Blue herself. The maintainers of the standard have a (non-comprehensive) list of sites using oEmbed on their website.

The takeaway: Reblogs worked on Old Blue because everything was still happening within the platform. Old Blue was able to enforce attribution and keep social information flowing back to the original poster of the content, no matter how far from the original it traveled. On the open internet, however, the distinction between “reblogging” and simple plagiarism can be hard to see. The ability to embed posts from other blogs, however, can re-create the idea of reblogging while maintaining attribution and social information.

RSS / JSON Feed

RSS has been used for nearly 20 years to allow other sites and programs to read updates from blogs and other regularly-updated websites. It’s evolved slowly, but its simplicity has allowed it to remain relevant even as most internet users don’t realize they’re using it.

Today, though Google Reader has shut down, RSS readers can still be found in services like Feedly and Feed Wrangler. It’s also used to populate stories in the Apple News app. Most prevalently, though, it’s used to deliver every podcast episode to their many listeners.

JSON Feed takes the same principle as RSS but uses the more JSON instead of XML as its primary syntax. This makes the format easier to understand at a glance, and it helps make the format more resilient in some edge cases.

The takeaway: Old Blue’s dashboard allowed you to follow other blogs on the platform. A decentralized platform would need a standard way to follow other blogs, and it already exists in this.

oAuth

This is the authentication flow that allows external, third-party apps to tie back into a platform. By now, it’s hard to exist on the internet without using this to connect one app or website to another. Whether it’s signing into a mobile game with Facebook, or connecting Old Blue to Twitter, everyone’s familiar with “An app would like permission to connect.”

The takeaway: No social network can exist in a vacuum, at least not anymore. Any new platform is going to need to exploit connections to other networks, even if only for cross-publishing posts.

Webmention

Webmention is a new standard that allows posts that are responses to others to link to each other automatically. It is patterned after the similar functionality found on social networks.

The takeaway: Once again, getting the same social information normally found on a monolithic platform would be key for making a decentralized platform feel like a “normal” social network. This is a relatively new standard, and care would have to be taken to make sure that spam and harassment wouldn’t overwhelm they system.

When a Plan Comes Together

None of these technologies alone will make a new platform successful. Even all of them together doesn’t guarantee success; in fact, if the different parts are not integrated well, the end result will be worse. Much worse.

Many of these technologies are in use by the IndieWeb, and all of them have open-source code that can be used by any platform. There is work being done to make these technologies more accessible and usable. And I am particularly impressed by the Micro.blog platform that has taken many of these technologies and others and made them into a plausible alternative to Twitter.

A new platform has to be aware of how these technologies interact. As I mentioned earlier, Old Blue won not on the strength of its technology but in how it used that technology to meet the goals of its users. Any potential replacement for Old Blue will need to take the same path: choosing the right technology and presenting it in the best way to allow people to understand it and use it effectively.

Design is a hard problem.

It’s not enough to just make something. It’s got to be worthwhile. So if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right. Let’s start with the past.

What made Old Blue so good?

Old Blue (the site I will not name for fear of Big Red) was lightning in a bottle. There’s not way any site can hope to recreate the same success. It was the right parts at the right time, and whatever truly takes its place will be something unexpected. So what were the right parts?

The Easiest Way To Actually Blog

Old Blue removed a lot of the friction of blogging. These weren’t just technical challenges, though it took care of those as well. There were no servers to configure, no software to download. You picked a username and boom! You had a blog.

Big deal, other services (like WordPress and Blogger) were that easy. Where Old Blue really excelled was in getting content onto your blog. You were allowed and even encouraged to post content you found, not just content you wrote yourself. This was emphasized further by the “reblog” functionality that allowed you to easily repost content from another’s blog onto your own, giving you content for your own blog while attributing it to the original poster.

The problem of starting a blog is easily solved. Old Blue solved the much harder problem of how to easily get content onto a blog.

Dashboard Confessions

Even with the reblog button, though, there was still the matter of finding blogs to reblog from. For this, Old Blue took a page from the then-new Twitter and added the ability to “follow” other blogs. Their posts would then show up in a standard format on your “Dashboard.”

While this took away a large portion of the customization, it made keeping up with blogs easier than ever. There was no worrying about RSS feed readers or poorly-configured Google Analytics to worry about; readers got to read and bloggers got their consistent audience.

Mid–2000s Geocities-Style Self-Expression

Purists will complain about the single-column layout of most Old Blue blogs. They will decry the lack of responsiveness, complaining in tandem that the owner has neither heard of smartphones nor twenty-seven-inch monitors. One comment complained that the state of web design on Old Blue was similar to Geocities in the mid–2000s. I agree wholeheartedly, but I see it as a positive.

Self-expression has always been a part of the social internet. It started with Geocities sites, migrated to MySpace profiles, and eventually settled on Old Blue blogs. All of these allowed mostly unrestricted styles, letting site owners pick and choose random HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets from across the internet and blend them together into a miasma that was unmistakably them. Old Blue took it a step further, allowing custom domain names for free. If you didn’t want Old Blue’s name anywhere on your public blog, you didn’t need it.

Did it look ugly? To some. Did it sometimes break? Yes. But it gave people ownership over their blogs, allowing them to feel like their space was truly theirs.

Anything Goes

Everyone “knows” that Old Blue was full of illicit/NSFW material. And, let’s be honest, it’s made it hard for many to take the service seriously. In a professional context, the last thing a service needs is something work-related showing up next to something, well, not safe for work! This is doubly true when it comes to advertising, a sad fact that has robbed the service of much-needed revenue.

And yet, this exceptionally permissive content policy had a side-benefit. Content creators were free to post without fear of their content being removed for a nebulous “terms of service violation.” This was especially relevant in the wake of other online communities like LiveJournal and FanFiction.net nominally “cracking down” on adult content. These crackdowns were, at best, selectively enforced and relied heavily on community reports; the end result being illicit material that was nominally disallowed but somehow acceptable or unknown to the wider community was able to survive on those sites.

Content creators whose work was illicit (or even objectionable in other ways) could post freely on Old Blue without worrying about their content suddenly disappearing. This drove more people to the platform, in turn making it more attractive to other content creators with “safer” material. The network effects took over and made Old Blue a force to be reckoned with.

Hyper-specific Hyperfixations. Or not.

Old Blue made it incredibly easy to sign up and start a blog. That blog could be as specific or general as you wanted. And when you got to the point where you needed a different space, you could start another blog. And another. And another.

Content creators could make different blogs for different fandoms, different levels of content safety, or just different ideas in general. This gave rise to creatively-named specific blogs, like the notable “effyeah” named blogs, or particularly specific names like “picsthatmakeyougohmm.”

What Would We Need?

So, using these principles, what features would a potential replacement for Old Blue need?

• Low-friction signups
• Easy to find and post content
• Easy to make multiple blogs
• Easy to follow interesting blogs
• Open-ended theming
• Custom domain option
• Clearly-defined (if not permissive) content policy

Five of these are technical problems. Good programming and good design can make these features sing. The issue is the last, social problem: the content policy.

The only site of any significant size that has survived with a permissive content policy is Archive Of Our Own. It’s run by the Office of Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to making a space for works that would not otherwise have a home. As such, they have devoted significant resources to ensuring their policy can withstand legal challenges, and they rely on true tax-deductible donations to fund the site instead of skittish advertisers. Any platform that would truly wish to fill the shoes of Old Blue would probably need to take a similar approach.

An alternative is the one taken by WordPress. Savvy web citizens know that there are two sides to WordPress: the free website where anyone can sign up for a blog, and the open-source software anyone can install for free on their own web server. While downloading and installing WordPress is not necessarily for the faint of heart (it requires some technical knowledge of web servers and how to maintain them), WordPress is widely considered one of the easiest pieces of web software to install and use.

This ease of deployment allows the free website WordPress.com to have a stricter content policy, since anyone adversely affected can take their content to a self-hosted blog with a little effort. This is more than simply offering a blog “backup”; WordPress has built-in mechanisms to move content from one WordPress-powered blog to another with few changes. A blog hosted on WordPress.com with a custom domain can be changed to a self-hosted WordPress blog with few to no visible changes to visitors.

While the WordPress method doesn’t eliminate the social problem of a content policy, it does reduce the stakes. If a group of users find the content policy onerous, they can set up (and pay for) their own WordPress-powered platform.

What next?

And here is where I will cut this off. I humbly submit this for comment, knowing I’ve left some things out that may not have been integral to my experience on Old Blue but essential to others.

I’ll also be working on a follow-up to discuss particular technologies that could be used to create a new platform in this vein, so if you have any suggestions there, I’m all ears.

But I do want to close with this: these are ideas. These are thoughts. And that’s all they are. Building a platform takes a lot of work, both in the programming but also in how it is socially maintained. And as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Big Red are learning, the rules you choose to have and how you enforce them can have dramatic consequences to the community that builds up around your platform. This is not something I can tackle on my own, and it is not something I would ask anyone to volunteer for.

This is a thought exercise, a way of getting these ideas out of my head. I hope you find it useful, or at least a little informative. And if it helps shape whatever platforms come next, I’ll be even more happy. Thanks for reading; I’ll see you next time.

I appreciate the place that Avengers: Infinity War holds in the Marvel universe and in culture as a whole. I do not like it.

Spoilers below, as I would like to use this to process and discuss the movie.

All agony, no payoff

About one-third of the way through the movie, Peter Quill (a.k.a. Star Lord) has to kill his crewmate Gamora in order to prevent the knowledge she holds from falling into Thanos’ hands. This was discussed between them earlier in the film, and then the moment arrives. Gamora is being held by Thanos, begging Peter to kill her. Thanos, having just retrieved the Reality Stone, just holds her there, literally daring Peter to pull the trigger. Peter agonizes for a long time, probably two minutes of screen time, before he tearfully professes his love for Gamora and pulls the trigger…

…only for his gun to squirt bubbles, Thanos having already disabled it with his Reality Stone.

It is a cruel, cruel trick for a character to have to go through an agonizing decision like this, weighing the ramifications of their decision and ultimately making a decision to go against everything they stand for, only for that decision to instantly be rendered meaningless. Peter made the decision to kill Gamora, weighing her life and their feelings against keeping important knowledge out of Thanos’ hands. He finally decides that Gamora’s wishes and the fate of the universe are more important than his feelings, but in the end he still loses Gamora, her wishes are not respected, and the fate of the universe still falls to Thanos.

This is Infinity War in a nutshell: it doesn’t matter which impossible choice the characters choose. It doesn’t matter whether Peter kills Gamora. It doesn’t matter whether Spider-Man stays at home or gets on the spaceship. It doesn’t matter whether Wanda can take the Mind Stone from Vision or not. In the end, Thanos still wins. Half the beings in the universe are still erased. There is no free will; choice is meaningless.

It's not a tragedy

It’s hard to enjoy a movie that revels in the darker aspects of its own meaninglessness like this. That’s not to say that sad movies can’t be enjoyed. Tragedies have been a staple of theater since the dawn of Western civilization. But that line of logic doesn’t apply here.

A tragedy is more than just a sad story. Tragedies, despite not having a happy ending, still have a moral. Oedipus Rex, one of the more famous tragedies, has a message of not succumbing to one’s own hubris. Despite being warned by everyone around him, Oedipus falsely believes he has beaten his fate and carries on. When his folly is revealed, he walks away a broken man, and both he and the city he ruled over grow and change as a result. In turn, we the audience learn a truth about the world that, though it hurt to watch and learn, changes us as a result.

The Avengers are not fighting fate and succumbing to hubris; they are fighting Thanos. They are fighting a being that is not a god and in fact does not want to be. They are fighting against an ideal only insomuch as that ideal is going to kill a random half of them. And they lose. There is no moral here, no great truth for the audience to learn.

In Captain America: Civil War, the Avengers lose and fall victim to the villain’s scheme; but in the end the characters grow and mature as a result. Even though Tony and Steve end the movie at odds, there is hope for reconciliation. Steve reaches out to Tony in the end with an apology and a way to contact him, and we the audience learn a lesson about loyalty and forgiveness.

In Infinity War, we don’t even get the Avengers.

Unassembled

There was a bit of a meme on YouTube for a while about the lack of memorable music in Marvel movies. The Avengers theme is the exception that proves the rule, tying itself to the iconic 360° shot in The Avengers when all of the Avengers—six at the time—were standing back-to-back on the field of battle for the first time.

This lack of distinctive music from the solo films is incredibly apparent in Infinity War. Several characters have grand entrances set to different motifs and themes from The Avengers. At a climactic point in the major battle in Wakanda, Thor arrives in a classic heroic entrance…

…and the theme from The Avengers starts playing.

Not present in the scene: Tony Stark/Iron Man, Peter Parker/Spider-Man (who Tony explicitly made an Avenger early in the film), Dr. Steven Strange, Drax, Mantis, and Peter Quill/Star-Lord. At the risk of channelling Archibald Asparagus, you can’t say the Avengers are assembled when the Avengers are not assembled! At the scene in question, I found myself wishing we were hearing “Immigrant Song”—a song more specifically tied to Thor’s great and powerful entrance—instead of music that evokes triumph and unity.

When the Avengers theme starts playing in The Avengers, we know that they’re going to win. We don’t know how they’re going to win, but we know it will happen. In contrast, when the theme plays in Infinity War, it is growing increasingly clear that Thanos will ultimately be victorious.

Part One

Ultimately, I have to feel at this point, that the original title of Infinity War: Part I was more appropriate. Having a “Part One” in the title denotes a sense of incompleteness. It signals to the audience that the “all is lost moment” will most likely come at the end of the film instead of two-thirds of the way through. It sets up expectations accordingly and helps prepare the audience for the film.

As-is, it’s hard to enjoy this movie. The fun moments are few and far between and are drowned out by the oppressing futility of the movie. Even an unexpected appearance by the Red Skull—a moment I would have enjoyed on its own—fell flat and was overshadowed by the content of its scene.

I look forward to part two so we can officially erase this movie from the MCU.

2/4: it’s only worth it in context, and some of that is context we don’t have.