Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

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The solution to all of Big Tech's monopolies is actually pretty simple: Interoperability must become a law - this includes using custom algorithms or allowing other platforms (like your own app) to access YOUR data on whatever platform 'hosts' it.

Cory Doctorow wrote a great article on it:

"Interoperability Can Save the Open Web" https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability

> While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic.

Most notably, he retells how early Facebook used to siphon data from its competitor MySpace and act on user's behalf on it (e.g. reply to MySpace messages via Facebook) - and then when the Zuck(er) was top dog, moved to made these basic interoperability actions illegal by law to prevent anyone doing to him what he did to others.

We can’t depend on these platforms to offer interoperability or even laws to force them to do so. The DMA forced Apple to allow 3rd party app stores in Europe and they still hampered it so rarely anyone uses it.

We need platforms to offer that interoperability and simply connect to these “marketplaces.” Take Shopify for example, sellers use that platform to list on Amazon, Google Shopping, TikTok shop, etc. We need open source alternatives to those where the sellers own the platform and these marketplaces are forced to be interoperable or left behind by those that are.

For Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, each person having their own website where they post and that post being pushed to these platforms is also another way to force interoperability on them or be left behind.

It’s a tall task, but achievable and it will happen given enough time.

> For Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, each person having their own website where they post and that post being pushed to these platforms is also another way to force interoperability on them or be left behind.

There's an acronym for this: POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Part of the IndieWeb movement, for those who want to explore this worthwhile idea further.

Sure, you can do that. But then the syndicated content usually ends up looking like low-effort slop and doesn't get much traction. Each publishing platform has it's own features, limitations, and cultural norms. If you want to have any impact then you can't just copy content around: you have to tailor the message to the medium.

How will it happen? Writing open source code is one thing, maybe enough people will volunteer their work. But running an operational marketplace or social media platform is something else entirely. You need a real revenue stream to pay for hardware, connectivity, operations staff, regulatory compliance, etc. That stuff isn't cheap.

I'm been building towards an interoperable marketplace[0] and realized I needed to launch open-source alternatives to Shopify[1], Toast[2], Instacart, etc to take on the proprietary marketplaces.

It really comes down to merit and how much value you can bring to the actual sellers in these marketplaces with the software. If enough sellers switch, marketplaces will follow.

0. https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace

1. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront

2. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront-restaurant

The foundational problem with interoperability is that it can and will immediately be abused by bad actors as long as there is no price tag attached to every piece of communication.

Among social media, Mastodon (and anything Fediverse) has it the worst, obviously, but Telegram and Whatsapp are rife with spams and scams, Twitter back when it still had third-party apps was rife with credential and token compromises (mostly used to shill cryptocurrencies).

As for the price tag reference - we've seen that with SMS. It used to be the case that sending SMS cost real money, something like 20 ct/message. It was prohibitively expensive to run SMS campaigns. But nowadays? It's effectively free at scale if you go the legit route and practically free if you manage to get someone's account at one of the tons of bulk SMS providers compromised. Apple's iMessage similarly makes bad actors pay a lot, because access to it is tied to a legitimate or stolen Apple product serial.

Because some hostile entity might rat fuck the a slightly better system, we're destined to use the same current shitty system because something better might have a downside?

Do you understand that this is all literally made up? The rules can change anytime and society can exert its will to make better world rather than letting a dozen people decide how technology will shape humanity (mostly in a negative capacity if you look at the current state of things).

>Because some hostile entity might rat fuck the a slightly better system,

And make it a worse system, is what you happened to leave off.

>Do you understand that this is all literally made up

You mean the existing system that evolved from billions and billions of interactions? Explain what is 'made up' about it.

The thing is if you start 'making up' random ass laws that piss people off, they will run screaming back to the billionaires to pwn them with locked down systems. Apple is a great example here. Shit is locked down and people love it.

Being afraid to do things because they might possibly, but never proven, be worse is just the political machinations of enforcing the status quo where our corporate overlords get to dictate how technology shapes our lives.

I'm sorry but that's deeply undemocratic, todays generation should have a direct say in how new things effect their lives.

Failure to do this might literally condemn our species to extinction, and this only took less than 200 years to achieve. I'm sorry but they've proven their failure and it's time to make drastic changes.

Good news is many people agree with this across the electorate, so now you get to decide which people you want shaping society. The previous world order of US imperialism is going to end and I rather have the people decide what to do than those that want to continue running head first into extinction.

>The previous world order of US imperialism is going to end

I don't disagree.

Of course Chinese imperialism probably won't be much better.

> Apple is a great example here. Shit is locked down and people love it.

The key thing with Apple is that Stuff Just Works. Not necessarily with non-Apple things (the compatibility ranges from almost excellent aka AirPods on Windows/Android to disastrous aka ever tried to transfer files from an Android phone to a Mac), but as long as you stay in the Apple ecosystem of macOS + Apple TV + iOS + AirPods, the user experience is generally really, really frictionless.

In contrast, with Windows, it's an unholy mess of catastrophic drivers, Windows Update, aggressive pushing of AI and advertising. And external hardware is a hit and miss, with compatibility issues being around everywhere.

And Android, oh dear god. I used to prefer Android over iOS because the hardware was cheaper and I could reasonably root it so I could do actual backups that worked... but ever since Covid, more and more apps break on detecting root and there's still no backup solution, so I bit the bullet and went second-hand Apple. At least I got backups now.

Personally, I admit, I have aged - I'm 34, I don't want to fiddle and mess around with my daily driver constantly, and frankly I don't have time to bother with ads, so that's why I went with Apple for most of my things. When I want to fiddle, I got a fleet of Raspberrys plus a decent homelab. But there, I can choose to fiddle around if I want to.

This is a confusing comment. Interoperability and bad actors are separate concerns, because you get bad actors in systems of all kinds, not just in interoperable systems. Paywalling a system does not necessarily mitigate bad actors, either.

Paywalls can have the opposite of the effect you want. Implemented incautiously, they can fail to disincentivize parties who can make profit in excess of the cost, and it can succeed at disincentivizing genuine, non-profit-motivated interaction.

Imagine how much less you would use text messages if they still had a per-message cost.

I would reply to your comment, but my 2GB data allocation for my cell phone is already spent this month.

But bad actors already do this, as there is a monetary incentive to implement adversarial interoperability. There is then an incentive to not scale it up too much, lest that implementation get cut off sooner. For example, I certainly don't think all of the spam ads I see on Faceboot Marketplace are from individual people manually creating accounts and typing them out.

Breaking up these monopolies would be a good start. We aren't supposed to have those. There used to be something we called "regulations" but they got rid of that part I think. Elections have consequences.

Regardless of current administration policies, which of those companies actually meets the legal definition of a monopoly?

Just because you don't understaned why they are does not mean they are not. It just means you haven't done your research.

Do you have a substantial comment to offer or are you going to stick with lazy, low-effort snark?

These platforms aren't monopolies. Being popular isn't being a monopoly.

Yes, yes they are. Do your research.

That just leads to embrace/extend/extinguish

Exactly. The deal of all these platforms is that there is a fuckton of up-front costs. Hard drives. Networks. Peering. Transit. Operators. Payment. Lawyers. SREs. And so on and so forth.

The solution to this used to be that governments provide the platform. You would think this wouldn't be hard to do, since people have now shown that this can work and so it's a guaranteed money maker, or as close as you're going to get.

Yet I can't find a single initiative.

So any such rules will just make all internet platforms disappear ... and nothing.

Govt already backs DNS, registration, and regulation of backbone transit along with a bunch of other services.

Beyond that, there really isn't much that a small shop couldn't manage unless you are trying to be the next FAANG (and lotsa luck with that).

Be careful what you wish for. Making it easier to access your data in a standard way just means more companies and governments will ask for it.

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