Whatever happened to interoperability?

There was a point in history where both facebook and google offered XMPP with federation to their chats

You could just join any XMPP server and chat with your google/facebook contacts directly from that. Imagine that now...

> It's unthinkable today.

Not really. There were all sorts of tools available to migrate off twitter once new management began to screw it up.

(Of course they have since been blocked).

I was occasionally working on Facebook applications around 2008–2010 and even back then Facebook had clauses in their terms and conditions forbidding using a person’s social graph to build them a new social graph or mirror their data elsewhere. LinkedIn had the same. The restrictions started coming in a long time before the Cambridge Analytic scandal. They stopped it because they didn’t want the competition, not because of privacy issues.

> Speaking of Google specifically, my experience with third parties, even ones who are modestly well known is them not keeping up to date with the latest versions of Google’s software and APIs and whatnot and things breaking and becoming less stable. Nobody is as committed to long term support of Google’s technology than Google themselves.

I assume that last sentence is sarcastic. API stability is pretty important in the real world (look at the system call interfaces of modern OSes for example); Google stepping their APIs (and then abandoning their products) is the opposite of commitment to long term support.

You are missing the point about the DMCA. Ad blocking with a pi-hole conveniently sidesteps the DMCA but modding a mobile app absolutely would violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, because you'd have to defeat the DRM in order to do so.

Interoperability requires conservatism in general if you want to avoid breaking a ton of APIs that third parties rely on.

Probably just made the cut because it checks the "liberal tech elites are bad" box.

Very strange. I mean this is a publication that has Tucker Carlson on the Advisory Board.

I was as shocked as you, but then I remember, the paleo-conservative right doesn’t like big tech as they are seeing them as censors.

Funnily enough, literally the previous article from the same series praises Margaret Thatcher.

Lol.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-re...

Culture wars make strange bedfellows.

Right now there seems to be proto-forming an (reluctant) alliance between the saner right and the part of the liberal left that is scared/disgusted of the more fanatical illiberal ultraprogressives.

If you want freedom of speech and the freedom of computing - the conservatives are natural allies. Not that they are terribly principled, but because they are getting the shaft at online censorship they are willing to tolerate free speech a bit more, at least until they get to power.

Doctorow (imo) prioritizes breadth of reach over control over how and where his message gets delivered.

It's an interesting strategy in part because it means a lot of the people encountering him are probably not aware of him in other online spaces, they'll only see him when republished in sources they already read, and they might not ever work their way back to his blog.

On one hand I'd be very worried about dilution of the message, misinterpretation, etc... On the other hand, it's enabled Doctorow to get some of his concepts into much wider cultural circles than he otherwise would have access to, so it's hard for me to criticize it too much.

And I think that Doctorow also has a talent for figuring out how to frame his ideas in a way where the conclusions stay the same, but it feels like he's reaching those conclusions by arguing specifically from your individual starting position and ideological base. His essays tend to (again, imo) feel tailored in a way where regardless of the context or regardless of where the essay is published, it'll have this vibe of "I'm on your community's side and I'm saying stuff that you all are going to nod along to and agree with... and therefore X/Y/Z."

Pros and cons to that approach, but it makes him accessible in a way that many other political writers aren't. So it's not too surprising to me to see his writing show up in Conservative circles as well as Liberal ones, I think it just kind of shows his talent for subtly reframing political discussions depending on the context.

He's a socialist? I've always gathered that he is pro-capitalism but doesn't like the market capturing aberration that is big tech. Capitalism thrives on fair competition. Wanting to take a regulatory hammer to break up trusts isn't socialist- it's a necessary part of fair capitalism.

Conservative outlets can be less censorious towards socialists than liberal ones. Left-liberals like to pose as being progressives and socialists have a tendency to reveal that they are not.

(I take your word for it that they are a socialist since I don't who they are.)

Oh? And the web? Big Tech engines (including their pesky SDK: that c++ what a mistake, world scale mistake), are beyond grotesque and absurd, securing nearly full control for those toxic for human beings network of companies?

The only way out is interop, and interop with Small Tech, and for the web it means noscript/basic (x)html, IRC, etc. Modularity is key, but without one bazillions mandatory modules: it has to grow as layers until a good enough result is produced, and it must be frugal in module usage.

I expect the worst from Big Tech: "shadow hiring" of hacker teams to destroy Small Tech alternatives. You cannot defend yourself on economic grounds: vanguard and blackrock are tens of thousands of billions of $, and itself does manage hundred of billions in cash. There are only strategic and ethical interests left, don't expect anything, even though you may be lucky for some time, that would be anecdotal.

I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.

> Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game?

No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation.

There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point.

* Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).

There's a beautiful lecture given by Prof. Richard Buckland of NSW where he talks, in a Douglas Adams kinda way, about the near infinite improbability of the CD player ever playing the first CDs people bought. If you ever need an account of a supernova of industry growth built on deep, deep interoperability worked out by the cleverest bastards all around the world, the is a jolly good one.

> And when was this magic period of interop?

From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd you had a blog with an RSS feed rather than a homepage. Your Flickr galleries had RSS feeds. Many sites we'd call "social media" today had some type of feed. If you knew someone's account name on the service you could get a read-only feed of the content they chose to make public.

You could "follow" someone by adding those public feeds to your RSS reader. They might even allow pingbacks/trackbacks that let you reply to them on your blog.

You could fire up your Jabber supporting IM app and send messages to other Jabber users as well as any Facebook or Google user.

The model was very interesting but was not workable for billions of normal people that didn't have blogs or Flickr accounts or whatever. I say these things were only available to computer nerds because to run a blog usually required you be your own sysadmin, moderator, and security. Pingbacks and trackbacks were ruined by spammers as were blog comments. WordPress was hilariously insecure and damn near every blog was hosting at least one piece of malware.

Facebook et al worked for "normal" people because Facebook took on the roles of sysadmin, moderator, and security. Most of the services offering composable feeds were either going out of business or shutting down feeds because they realized (like Facebook) that they could monetize access to their users.