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he open protocol tension is real, and i get it. but there's a meaningful difference between a discovery layer and a full content host.
open protocols need good citizens on both sides. readers benefit from rich content ecosystems that only exist because platforms invest in them. when a reader renders everything natively with little-to-no platform context, it kills the incentive to invest at all.
the rss era is a good case study here. publishers started truncating feeds or dropping them entirely because reader apps were siphoning traffic with no attribution back. google reader had hundreds of millions of users and blogs saw their direct traffic collapse. it pushed everyone toward medium and substack because they could force the read-on-platform experience. which is honestly worse for the open web than what we're all trying to build.
as a maintainer of @standard.site, i'd love to see this solved at the spec level. proper conventions around how readers surface platform attribution, not just a subtle link buried somewhere. happy to work on that if there's interest?
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