This is effectively the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. From a detached perspective it was quite clear that "web 2.0", with its reliance on centralized servers and centralized naming, was inevitably going to devolve into this corporate surveillance hellhole. The incentives and power holders made for a poor foundation, despite the temporary flourishing of a vibrant grassroots community that ignored this while the investors hadn't yet called in their chips.

Having said that, "web 3.0" as recently coined is the same type of middlemen-led openwashing. The real revolutionary technologies won't be hyped as some unified trend, because actual elimination of middlemen leaves no outsized investment money to pay for such hype. As always, the revolution will not be televised.

On a technical level it was pretty decentralized. RSS and OpenID specifically did not rely on any particular server. XML namespaces, RDF, "folksonomies" were about open distributed permissionless participation. XMPP was federated. People got too excited with the Twitter API, but even the social services were in principle meant to be replaceable with rel=me (people were supposed to be identified by their URLs, hosted wherever, not by an account on a platform).

I do agree that Web 2.0 was naive in thinking that merely having open decentralized protocols was enough to ensure services built on top of them will be open and decentralized. The commercialized centralization happened despite the decentralized/open tech — on a layer above. Megacorps figured out that open protocols are merely a fertile ground for building walled gardens on.

> XMPP was federated

And still around :)

Nokia too.

Not tangential. It's pretty important, because although they're obviously symbolic, there have been huge changes to how websites work. Web 2.0 had a lot of user customization, for example. Web 3.0 has much less, though dark modes became prevalent.

Maybe it would make sense to call this Web 2.1 ?

Web 2.0 Gen 2

Web 2.0 type c

sigh, I miss google reader...

I'm too young to have used Google Reader, but I have a selection of ATOM/RSS feeds I follow. Is that not comparable?

Reader also had a really good discover quality where I could see stories that were not in my subscribed feeds and because it had a such a large user base, the algorithms got pretty good at showing me stuff I wanted to see. I visit HN for a similar reason, so be exposed to stuff outside of my normal sources. Google reader did this too but with broader scope.

edit: I'll note that if google reader were still around today, its likely the discover algorithm would have been corrupted by bots and trolls and growth seeking managers at google. But back then this hadn't happened yet so it all worked pretty good.

Inoreader and Newsblur have features like that. I can't really compare between those and Google Reader since I was nine when it shut down and I didn't use it, but there are readers that have similar features.

it is comparable, but if I recall, not only was Google Reader's interface slick and had nice features for filtering / automating your feed, but there were pleasant social and discovery features, as well as, I think, the ability to subscribe to websites that didn't even offer RSS feeds. The web felt different when Reader was killed.

It wasn't just the Reader itself (there were arguably many better RSS readers), but the fact that it was a mainstream product from a high-profile well-respected company. There being a Google Reader elevated credibility of RSS from a nerdy XML protocol into a fashionable feature you could recommend to "normal" users.

Similar thing happened with XMPP and Google Talk. There was a brief moment in time when you could use any instant messenger with any client of your choice (talk to both Facebook Messenger and Google Talk users via your own server). That also been killed off in favor of proprietary apps.

I'm trying to think of a current-day equivalent of what a shock and disappointment that was, but I'm afraid proprietary protocols and non-interoperable app silos became such a norm that nobody even expects things to work together. I expect GMail to drop IMAP support any day now.

Great point that I was having a hard time articulating. This is a massive part of why "web felt different" after its death.

Hey, I'm in the same boat! Usually when I hear people talk about RSS it's always people who used it before Google Reader's shutdown, but I was too young to have been interested in that (I was almost nine when Reader shut down). I started using RSS out of curiosity a few months ago and I really like it!

I've been using Inoreader on my ipad, and it definitely hits the spot for RSS reader.