A silo is a place where developers feel protected from the unbounded world of the web. In return they are completely controlled by the silo owner. The owner decides where you can go, and can and do revoke privileges. Developers in silos are mostly powerless.

Companies usually are the ones who create silos, but open formats can create them too. JSON, for example, has been used as an excuse to reinvent everything that was done in XML.

Open source projects create silos too. A protective zone that doesn’t interop with competitors. Where you have to climb into the project to build on it.

Outside of silos, on the web, your code calls a platform using a standard API. Developers who, because of standards, can plug into anything, and thus give users maximum choice.

Podcasting is not a silo. It’s part of the web. Support two easy formats and you’ve got a node. You’ll find packages that do all that on any well-developed coding platform.

I believe we can do something like that for text. That’s what I’ve been working on in the 2020s. It’s slow-going because the foundation ideas of the web are not well-understood by today’s developers, or at least that’s how I experience it. 😉

We’re rethinking the whole tech world right now, and we can use formats and protocols that are available on the web, not by replacing the ones that are already there, but by using the existing paths in new ways. Big difference.