A nice essay on the “boring” Internet, a reminder that the veneer of walled garden social platforms is recent and will come and go, but the early network’s protocols and distributed nature is still alive and humming, and ready for new invention:
boring, adjective.
Of a technology: too useful to disappear, too uncool to hype, too federated to acquire, and too awkward to turn cleanly into a platform. The single most reliable predictor of digital survival. […]The failure mode is different. A platform fails in public. One acquisition, one pricing change, one API shutdown, one new owner, and suddenly the place you used to live has different locks on the doors.
A protocol fails unevenly. This server goes down or that client stops working. This network gets weird or that provider becomes hostile. One neighborhood burns while another one keeps posting through it.