in the early days of web2, everyone high on RSS feeds and dreaming about pubsubhubbub ... when a google maps embed was just a few seconds and half a line of code, when OAuth1a and JSONP were all the rage, well, back then 3rd party was not a swearword and it did not automatically meant ad-fucking-track-tech.

back then it was seen as the great, bold, and messy cross-linking organically-grown future.

it was called "semantic web", every day people were announcing how simple it is to encode more and more machine-readable stuff less-and-less intrusively into your HTML or xml+atom.

then facebook became the web, twitter became the truth and one day the dream got mugged, beaten up and left to bleed out in a back alley on July 1 in 2013.

everyone got mad and posted about it on their phone using an app from a nice boring, proactively curated walled garden.