Molly White
Software engineer, researcher and writer, a longtime Wikipedia editor, creator of Web3 is Going Just Great and author of the newsletter Citation Needed, which she publishes on her own self-hosted site.
Molly White did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsWebsites outside of these handful of social networks are harder and harder to even find, and partially because of that, they have a harder and harder time sustaining themselves.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsWhat is out there is buried among ever-growing piles of useless content farm material or, increasingly, AI-generated garbage.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd it doesn’t always take a job at The New York Times or a huge pre-established platform to become one of the voices speaking up, helping to turn that tide.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 4th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBut the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable. They must do everything perfectly to maintain that position of power—not enrage their users too much, not push the regulators too far, not miss any of those competitors who are seeking to take a portion of that power.
↗Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news 6th of 6 in this piece
- 10 days earlier
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Their wordsEach shift takes its toll, and everyone has a limit of how much energy they’re willing to expend on a new platform that will eventually, like its predecessors, join the graveyard of defunct websites.
↗POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented worldcitationneeded.news 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsI think federation is the long-term solution to these problems. Eventually, I dream we will be able to seamlessly interact with people across platforms.
↗POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented worldcitationneeded.news 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsWith this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.
↗POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented worldcitationneeded.news 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsNext to proper ownership of your own work, my favorite thing about POSSE is that it massively expands what you can publish, far beyond the limitations imposed by most social media (and especially microblogging) platforms that try to enforce some uniformity in post style, length, and appearance.
↗POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented worldcitationneeded.news 4th of 4 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Their wordsThe thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back.
↗We can have a different webcitationneeded.news 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsMost of us spend our days within the confines of a handful of platforms, wandering around to admire what people have done with the seeds they are allowed in the space they are allotted, with platform owners directing us to the gardens they think we might like — or, more often, the ones they think will keep us within their walls for longer.
↗We can have a different webcitationneeded.news 2nd of 2 in this piece