A consensus has emerged: our World Wide Web is taken over by a handful of World Wide Despots, and something should be done about it. But what? On that question there’s no clear consensus as of yet.
I’m starting to believe we need an immediate fix, an open standard that can force open the existing social monopolies right now. Almost twenty years ago, Microsoft was coerced into standardizing its opaque Office formats. Today we should oblige likes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to do something similar. And there’s no need to let come up with their own overengineered concoctions. A straightforward solution would be to simply force them to support Webmentions.