The #openweb is a network of links, not silos

Ten years ago, I wrote about a problem that was already undermining the #openweb, that nobody was linking to anybody. The incentives were all moving in the wrong direction. #Mainstreaming platforms had little reason to send people towards alternative sources, while grassroots projects were left struggling to build connections with each other. Even when people wanted to cooperate, there were plenty of reasons to avoid linking, sharing audiences or giving another project visibility. The result was an increasingly fragmented web. Lots of websites, lots of content, lots of people doing useful work, but fewer meaningful connections between them. Ten years later, the technology has changed, the underlying problem has not gone away. In some ways, it has become worse, as the attention economy has eaten the #openweb. The commercial internet is built around capturing attention. The more time people spend inside a platform, the more valuable that audience becomes to its owners. External links…