.png "Cohost PLUS!")
is that until 2014, you could choose your display layout by choosing a different client.
want a grid of smaller feeds, separated by website? there's an rss client for that. or, was.
want a non-columnar Twitter layout? they existed.
want all your chat clients in the same view, including Slack via irc? pidgin and other clients could do this.
now we have webapps because companies want metrics and shorter development cycles and don't want their ads blocked at the client level and want to use tracking cookies. there's good reasons too, but I don't think they're ever just the good ones outside of scrappy small developers.
web 2.0 wasn't round corners, broadband, and a performant web. that was a side effect. web 2.0 was the web transcending the browser. Unlike what the cryptocurrency boosters say, we're already in web 3.0, a reaction, a regressive contraction. The web we're currently trapped in is the web of the browser and the browser alone.
Years ago, on twitter, I described being an ex-Adium-developer with no power to stop the slide into walled off webapps as being able to "see forever while being chained to the floor". It's easy to see what could be when you already built it once and it got taken away.
it is also super important to keep saying this, because there are people who don't know it, whether because they were kids at the time or because they just weren't paying enough attention or spending enough time online to notice the change
... because if we allow corporations to decide how much polish things need to have to be worthy of public attention, that bar will always be set high enough that only corporations will be able to meet it
