A positive rather than negative vision for the "Small Web" or even beyond (the "Web of Social Trust" maybe?)
I want to see free tools for creating low-cost decentralised digital communities which:
* are robust against cyber-attacks
* are robust against insincere influencers and well-funded corporate buyouts
* are robust against government crackdowns and social panics
* are robust against their own members abusing each other or being swept into hatreds and panics
* help people be smart and kind
Maybe we can't create tools which achieve all of these.
But some network designs are more vulnerable to these failure modes than others and we should try very hard to be as robust against them as we can while still preserving freedom.
The "timeline" concept, for instance, and microblogging, helps create lots of content fast. But it doesn't help us keep a *memory*, so in that sense, it makes us more emotional, and more likely to be swept into panics, but not more calm and intelligent.
@skybrian
Having good tools that recognise the need for permanent, searchable, editable content (rather than a fast-flowing search-hostile stream of in-the-moment reactions) would be good.
Wikis are the first step, but we stepped backwards. I don't understand why.
Since 2006 I've been assuming that "obviously" the next step after web forums and wikis would be a converged forum/wiki where you have posts you can pin as edits to pages.
That never happened for some reason.