> Maybe what will evolve the space is automatic translation from any possible format to any other format using AI.
Easier said than done. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Co. like to gatekeep their data and don't allow third party clients access. So you don't just need an AI smart enough to capture the data and reshape it, but also one smart enough to pass whatever CAPTCHA they throw at you, which will likely get progressively more difficult the more popular your tool gets. And of course they'll lock your account when you try, so this is at best a read-only participation in the social network.
The problem has shifted over the last decade, it's no longer about fixing a broken Web, but about a large part of the content no longer even being a part of the Web. Everything is either moving to Apps or getting gated behind login screens and ToS.
CAPTCHA is a big problem but not impossible to overcome. It's an arms race.
That said, CAPTCHA can be defeated by changing the landscape of incentives in favor of giving the consumers what they want.
The consumers will use these user agents when they get so good that they're better than the alternative and/or it's easy enough to "dual boot".
Once one of the above happens, then there is a greater incentive for everyone to make their content available e.g. by uploading to public Google Drive folders.
What I'm trying to get at is that the dream of decentralization can happen perhaps sooner if we focus on building the client side of it as a layer over the existing structure, instead of trying to supplant the current server side structure.
Easier said than done. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Co. like to gatekeep their data and don't allow third party clients access. So you don't just need an AI smart enough to capture the data and reshape it, but also one smart enough to pass whatever CAPTCHA they throw at you, which will likely get progressively more difficult the more popular your tool gets. And of course they'll lock your account when you try, so this is at best a read-only participation in the social network.
The problem has shifted over the last decade, it's no longer about fixing a broken Web, but about a large part of the content no longer even being a part of the Web. Everything is either moving to Apps or getting gated behind login screens and ToS.