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Comment by smugglerFlynn | Hacker News Reader

> as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are)

Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.

Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.

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“Will we ever end the MySpace monopoly?”

> MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.

> "In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are".

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....

Sure, but then everyone moved to Facebook. The monopolist changed, but not the monopolistic market and the lack of consumer choice.

And nobody gained privacy in the process (I rather think everyone lost even more of it).

The situation currently permits only a tiny number of winning companies at a time, and the userbase is locked in even as the site becomes wildly unpopular, until some threshold of discontent is reached, and then everyone moves, and then that new site also enshittifies and the cycle repeats.

Federation is a mechanism whereby people would be able to actually choose providers as individuals and at any time, instead of having to wait years for a critical mass of upset people to build up and leave [current most popular social media site], and instead of being forced to go to [new most popular social media site].

federation would never work. How would it work here? Either you are forcing tiktok to give pageviews to federations of spam, or you are letting tiktok decide which federations to work with, which essentially results in no federation.

Nobody stops spammers from creating websites, but we still have search engines and web. Nobody stops spammers from sending emails, but we still use SMTP.

It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.

>Regulations are needed

Lolololol. No, not regulations. Regulators. With the people we currently have voted into office in the US the only regulations we are going to get are ones saying Sam and Peter must look at everything you do all the time.

Until we stop voting for more authoritarianism, expect ever increasing amounts of authoritarianism.

I would argue the only thing that does stop current situation from snowballing into something much worse are pre-existing institutions and regulations.

That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.

I think it was clear what they meant.

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