We're heading for AOL 2.0
I absolutely agree with this, and I'm not looking forward to the near future of the internet, but it's inevitable. We will hit AOL 2.0, well a few of them. We'll have the Apple internet, the Facebook internet, the Google internet, etc. but it won't last.<p>The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death. People will start to see cool new things happening outside their silo, or get fed up with them and the silos will eventually fall. These trends seem cyclical, we go from mainframes and silos to personal computers and an open network, then back to the same mainframes, this time called the cloud, and the same silos. It's not gonna be a fun time for those of us who don't like the confines of the new internet, but the handful of us who care won't stop the inevitable.<p>Me, I still run an irc server because I can, because there's a million clients to choose from, and everyone can have their own interface, and the protocol is so simple a decent programmer can hash out their own in a day. Nothing has come close to it yet (xmpp was great in theory but too complex for its own good). If you want a pretty ui and emojis and images, well there's a client that can do it, if you just want text, plenty of those too.<p>I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be, hoping that in time people will notice that you don't have to just accept your preferred silos interpretation of it.