Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because that's the size of every email I've ever gotten.

If I move from Gmail to Outlook, I can still email my friends but I can't go back and search our old conversations unless I export everything from Gmail to Outlook. If I switch from Facebook to Instagram, I can still message my friends but I can't see all of the pictures I posted on Facebook unless I export the pictures from Facebook to Instagram, but even then there are a lot of features of Facebook that I can't export data from because they just don't exist on Instagram.

History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around.

Gmail supports the imap and pop3 protocols, which allow all history to be trivially imported somewhere else.

That's the importance of open protocols.

History is crazy easy to move; any difficulty we have moving history is intentionally caused by the companies with a vested interest in keeping you from moving that history.

History should be decentralized too, then.

Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks.

Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you to enjoy your friends data and interaction.

Right now it's about the monopolisation of our data.

Zuckerberg. If you're reading. Your current model is bullshit.

What do you miss about RSS feeds? They're still there... It's very rare that I come across a blog that doesn't have one, even now...

You're right, of course. It's possible I'm still pining for my perfectly set-up Google Reader account which I cannot quite replicate. That still hurts! RSS felt ubiquitous (to me) back then.

Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.

I hate being locked in - hence I gave up on FB. It's trash to me until it solves this issue.

> Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.

For me they're different things. RSS is for things that I want available until I get around to reading them or until I manually mark them as read, this is precisely what I don't want out of facebook.

I suspect parent was talking about the distributed nature of it. Subscribe to whoever you want, allow anyone to subscribe to you.

My RSSing calmed down, it's just the XKCD feed now. But it still works perfectly.

Intruigingly given how many RSS feeds are out there from WordPress blogs, about the only way I found to get news on WordPress releases is via their RSS feed.

>Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks.

I think a big missed opportunity for Google on social was the failure to cultivate Google Reader into an open social network (it already had social features), and build each aspect of it on an RSS/OPML-like structure.

I don't see what would make basic facebook history hard to move around. Facebook of course already offers a "Download a copy of your Facebook data" function. Future-facebook could import it, or the most fundamental/basic parts of it, probably -- the problem is not the data itself, but the connections in it to other users, it's not that valuable without it. I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-trying-to-be-facebook of importing the data.

I think it's the ability to communicate that's harder to move around, and why there's such facebook lockin. Your social network and ability to communicate with them in a public/group fashion.

>I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-trying-to-be-facebook of importing the data.

And the legalities of that.

FB did a major legal smackdown on someone trying to do that.

Do you have a link to the history here? Would love to hear about it.

Curious for a link to that. Facebook lets you download your own data. But if you upload that data somewhere else, they're going to sue someone?

> History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around.

It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.

> That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy

Not sure what you mean.

It works as easy with Mutt. Open IMAP folder, select all, save to [other IMAP folder or local folder, as you wish].

Works reliable even with very large folders, you just have to wait a bit longer until it's finished.

Practically every email program can move email easily. It is somewhat trivial.

Recently we moved all our company mail with IMAPsync. Automated commandline tool. Awesome.

Thunderbird can also do this.

> history is really hard to move around

Is it? I think there's a way to get around that, if the protocol defines standards for verbs.

Of course, it's difficult and can grow wild, yet very much possible.

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