The Internet Loves Diversity

It's in the name. The Inter Net. An interconnected network of networks.

From the very beginning, the Internet was designed to allow as many different kinds of computers as possible to talk to each other. This diversity of experience is built in to all our basic protocols.

If you email me, I can read your mail on the most expensive most modern Apple MacBook, or on a cheap IBM-compatible from 20 years ago. I can read the text in what we now call "light mode" or "dark mode", or I can have it translated into braille, or have a computer read it aloud for me.

If you write a webpage properly, then I have the same freedoms. Basic HTML works everywhere, and usually works for everyone.

…and already we're mixing up the ideas of technical diversity and human diversity:

• The Internet is built on protocols that work on lots of different machines.
• Lots of different humans have different needs. For example, they might have more or less money, or more or less visual acuity.
• It is increasingly the case that for every human need, there is a machine that can help meet that need. We humans have been doing this since the first time someone leaned on a stick to take the weight off a gammy leg.

By building a technically-diverse system, we support human-diversity

And this is great.

Of course, there are also centralising forces out on the Internet. Big homogenising corporate experiences that want their UX to look-and-feel the same everywhere. Instagram looks the same on every phone… Or at least on every phone where it works at all. You could be forgiven for thinking that google-mail is email, and that everyone always reads black text on a white background.

But these are subtle lies.

No matter how much they want you to believe otherwise, these big companies are not The Internet. They're a thin layer of shiny gloss on top.

A more human Internet already exists. Let's help each other to use it.