Why? What else should I be able to demand from other people's products, simply by dint of their products fitting a particular description?
It's a policy change, not a product change, and demanding a company adjust their bad policy is totally normal.
Make it opt-in with advanced user verification if you want to fight spam, not simply blanket ban everyone whose data you can't monetize easily :shrug:
A lot of this stuff is UI-related; it's things that aren't a reskin, but they're a major shakeup of how the entire UI works, and would break all other clients using a framework.
The problem with "truly" federated protocols is that every design fuckup is preserved in amber for eternity.
And who is the one to name them a utility? Is it the government of the company's base of operations? If so won't they just move (such as many companies do to avoid tax complications)?
And where do you draw the line? Why is Discord a utility and not, say, Truth Social?
And then how do you turn federated networks like Mastodon into utilities?
Once something is classified as a utlity, what are the rules for guarding customer data? Are they more beholden to governments to release customer data? Less?
Well, we should certainly make an effort so that regulations are predictable and sensible.
> And where do you draw the line? Why is Discord a utility and not, say, Truth Social?
> And then how do you turn federated networks like Mastodon into utilities?
I think this is going about it from the wrong side. Snail mail, phone service, internet service - these are things we regulate in various ways. Maybe we should with various, similar digital services too. Email? Messaging networks like discord?
A website is a publicly facing API and if two different browsers can talk the HTTP protocol and implement all the other APIs the website requires then you shouldn't be blocked from accessing the website through one of them
The rule right now is "Any jerkoff can dictate what is and isn't allowed to run on my computer" and I would like to change that rule to "I'm in charge of what runs on my computer, you're in charge of what runs on your computer".
Who is forcing you to install Discord?
Don't like the Discord client or have trouble using it? Pay the price of not participating in dozens of communities you would like to participate in.
In fact, the problem is chiefly that a certain group of assholes never upgrade their clients, ever, and disingenuously try to keep everyone on an old version of the protocol, because they don't see a need for new features. Period. I've been through this gauntlet with some long-running open-source projects, and basically these guys were like "plain text and command-line should be sufficient for everyone (and shame on you if it's not!)".
Of course, that's fine if you're a programmer, but then these guys were SHOCKED - shocked, I say, that people's whose primary working medium was images rather than text - you know, UI designers and artists - found it a struggle to work on their project and quickly gave up.
This kind of bigotry constantly stifles progress in the OSS community.
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There's a damn good reason no federated service even comes remotely close to Discord, and it's because despite all of those features being developed for other clients, repeatedly, there is always heavy social pressure not to leave people out, so "newfangled" features get swatted down by communities, and people are forced to only use the features that everyone supports.
You can have IRC that supports pasting images just fine, but some asshole's client doesn't support it, so you're back to using a shithole solution like external pastebins or personal FTP servers, again. Otherwise you're dealing with a constant "I don't see anything! Why can't you just use something that works on my client!"
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So no, "interoperability and open systems" doesn't mean all users can be happy. It's a trojan horse to let luddites force obsolete versions of the protocol on everyone because they don't want to update.
People chose discord over them.
Maybe sometimes I could pick up on a meme without knowing the source material and sort of fit in for a bit. That's what not participating directly can be like, when you're caught at the fringe of your community because you don't use <platform>.
There's no jerk dictating what is allowed to run on your computer, there's someone offering a piece of software that you can willingly install on your computer if you want.
If you don't want that, you're always free to not use the software or use workarounds to avoid the things you don't like.
I, for example, hate ads and use adblock always. But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.
I'm not a fan but I understand that I have no right to dictate what people do with their software
With each of these products we keep giving up more and more of the powerful variety that was available before. While the average person doesn't lose much, the average person doesn't really exist and we've really lost a lot of long tails of value.
Is there a moral principle preventing a power company from providing you with all your electrical appliances and forbidding you from using those not provided by them?
> But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.
You can use ad blocking software because browsers are on our side. Our browsers support uBlock Origin whether webmasters like it or not and they don't have the power to force us to switch.
What companies like Discord and WhatsApp do is akin to contractually requiring us to use a specific browser that does their bidding on pain of banishment from the platform. That's how they get away with advertising, spamming, surveillance, DRM and countless other abuses: by forcing us to run their software on our computers if we want to use their service. If we could run our own clients, they would be powerless.
FOMO on "community" is a considerable factor. The regular person is quite likely a social being. They will care and value being able to use the same platform.
It is a personal sacrifice to resist it while it remains. Even when a Free Software alternative becomes wide-reaching enough for an exodus, it'll be years too late.
The thing actually stopping you from using Discord with a third-party client is that Discord’s server software responds differently to the way the third-party clients talk to it.
You’re in charge of what runs on your computer, and they're in charge of what runs on theirs.
The likelihood they sell/yield personal user data/metadata is too high to ignore.
Yes, exactly! Monopolies are bad and shouldn't exist, so companies that only exist to create them shouldn't exist either. Without Discord and other providers wishing to make a chat monopoly for themselves, development would be driven by need. That tends to create solutions that are much more open and less exploitative of its users.
Because consumers should be able to make demands in return for adoption?
In a world less completely asymmetrically imbalanced toward capital, consumers would have a say in the products offered them, not merely the option to purchase (or not) rights to use technology as-is.
It's the only way to ensure we have the ability to adversarially interoperate with the offered service.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Computing freedom: it should be law. Clauses like "you can't reverse engineer" and "you can only connect via our software" should be null and void.
> What else should I be able to demand from other people's products
You should be able to demand that your computing freedom be respected. We should all be able to run whatever software we want to interact with their servers.