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It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen! https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/20/mcp-web20-20/
@anildash Do we have any reason to believe that once the power grabs have happened, things will not get closed down again?
@fromjason added a missing `not` :D
@janl ahhh then no reason to believe lol
@janl oh no, definitely will lol
Old TRON fans know that MCP stands for the villainous “Master Control Program.” Think: Sauron.
Avoid. 
@brianstorms @anildash honestly didn't know what we were talking about but came here to make sure this was in the comments. 
@anildash I find it hard to see any good in the proliferation of GenAI & its integration with tools & services.
@causticmsngo okay. MCP can still be interesting even if you don’t care about any of that stuff
@anildash
Nothing says either endpoint has to have anything to do with LLMs or DL systems. This could have real potential for tool and services integration in general.
@anildash Hard for me to be optimistic here. They're commodotizing their complement. After it's flourished, they'll bite the hand that feeds by reimplementing the popular ones first-party and giving 1P preferential treatment. A tale as old as time.
> "But we can make it better!" they'll say. Developers always say that. But better is worse. Anything that's different is worse. Stop being smarter and more clever, and stop cleaning up that horrible spec that is riddled with inconsistencies, and just ship the same shit as everybody else.
This reminds me of how Microsoft gets itself into trouble time and again that created it's reputation for "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Many of the improvements that their in-house developers make are good ideas but their managers are much more focused on gaining market share than interoperability which is why they green-light them, and you are advocating a different and more ecosystem friendly approach. Their developers see it as dev-friendly and technically justified, the managers see it as product differentiation and outsiders see EEE which the devs don't understand, "They're just trying to help make it better", but sometimes worse is better.
@anildash the analogy also seems to hold regarding security or the rather the complete lack of giving a thought to it. "the S in MCP stands for security"
@anildash Facebook killed web 2.0 because instead of building its business on the platform it turned building the platform into its business. Web 2.0 as a platform focused in creating value to its users, Facebook as a platform focuses in extracting value from its users. The key is openness in Doc Searls' sense:"nobody owns it, everybody can use it and anybody can improve it".
) @anildash MCP is not an open standard.
Open standards are developed by standards bodies. This is just a murder of Big Tech crows getting together and saying "let's use this GitHub repo".
Web 2.0 2.0? More like AMP 2.0. And web publishers would do well to steer clear of it entirely.
@jaredwhite @anildash If it was a standard, then people would hopefully think about some implications - as it is MCP is just saying to AI "here, have access to my file system, network and databases"
Having watched the rise of NPM from it's inception to now, I have absolutely 100% belief we'll get to the same point people will just install any old MCP server and then expose themselves to malware
(jgg) @tanepiper @jaredwhite @anildash
There will be AI powered malware botnets in the future, once local AIs become performant enough.
Having a MCP server in that world may be very risky.
@anildash Thank you for this. The Verge's interview with Microsoft's Kevin Scott sparked similar giddy thoughts about MCP. Hence, I was disappointed to see early takes on it as: MS wants us to give it all our data for free. This is the better reaction: enthusiasm, and let's see where this goes. #ai #mcp