Hey tech policy geeks, so several people (maybe most famously Doctorow) have proposed that social media should have interoperability. If I understand it right, it's something like you have your followers across platforms, so a single platform can't erase you from it's powerful network.
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It's not an unreasonable fear either.
I think we should be looking back at the old geo cities and link sharing services for inspiration to the future of social networks. Ownership should be controlled by the creators not the services.
B) How would it work in practice?
You “own” your identity and everything you post.
You can then share that identity and posts with any social network you wish.
The problem is multi fold.
What happens if you post illegal material? Who is responsible? Who removes it?
Can harassers follow you from network to network?
The value of social works lies in Metcalfe’s Law.
If you make it easy to move lock, stock and barrel from network A to network B then why would I pay the costs of running network A?
The pieces of this have been in place forever. Basically RSS meets usenet. We could have had this before y2k.
But yes, as you say, it would be hard to monetize and impossible to platform lock.
It’s the costs of dealing with the fact that humans en masse are a complete shower :)
You only "need" to "lock in" users if you're trying to trap them and shove adds down their eye holes.
Blue sky is built on top of the AT protocol that makes it possible.
https://www.africa.com/the-rise-and-rise-of-facebook-in-africa/
B) The fediverse is already 80% of the way to achieving that (as in, it's clunky) while Bluesky has promised but never actually implemented it.
Just saying...
And other creators are currently in the process of creating apps on this protocol.
I’ve been adjacent to the tech industry for about 30 years. I have zero optimism for anything’s “potential”, especially when what it is now, in public use, is as broken as it is.
It’s always a concern with corporations that they won’t deliver what they promise, but the devs are genuine and the real deal.
My expectation is I will be running my own instance in 2025.
I trust no company that plans to make a profit. Whatever sincere people that are there doing the work, they’re no match for management if they don’t own it themselves (if management isn’t sociopathic now, it could be later).
I will only be upset if I am unable to run my own instance in 2025.
At this point, it’s been a reasonable timeframe given the number of devs and the situations required with growth.
Interoperability means an open protocol that would allow the easy export of settings, friends lists, other info.
More fundamentally, it means networks can talk to each other. Like email. You don't have to have a Gmail account to email somebody with one.
I expect I will be running my own Bluesky instance at some point in 2025.
How does it work in practice?
Depends on what you mean. From a users view? From an instance owners view?
@aliceweb.xyz @pfrazee.com if y'all find the time and have links/corrections, this rando is a very influential rando 😉
The only reason we didn't have this 20+ years ago when RSS came out is greed.
The best we can hope for is a system that works in the same manner as phone networks or email providers.
Mastodon created an open source framework like what I described above, but only one major player ever utilized it (Truth Social) and of course deleted the interoperability. Bluesky similarly has an open protocol, so far unused
With a distributed network that anyone could host, "social feed hosting" could be an add-on service to your cell service.
Free for basic plan w/ads, use our app to upload your content.
$10/mo ad free hosting
Your data being yours by default and not being packaged up and sold.
An incentive to delete old data instead of everything you’ve ever done online being stored and analysed…
Verizon or t-mobile could basically make it happen, but they are also known for pushing garbage cloud services nobody wants so that's a barrier.
Bluesky could lead on this.
The amount agency granted to digital citizens is purely a political choice.
For some reason so-called Western democracies opted for the most extreme form of digital oligarchy.
There are some friction points, but mostly because ISP's want it so. Empowering individuals is not on anybody's agenda.
The reason is because all aspects of "security" are an order of magnitude harder when you need open ports indexed on DNS. The second you start hosting you attract an onslaught of automated attacks and it never stops.
Today I get my hosting from an old friend who works in tech. He DOES host at home, but because his employer (DNS itself) pays for high grade fiber service and he uses commercial server hardware.
But, maybe that’s just because early software sucked. Mine was basically just a list of links.
See. e.g., https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
https://www.sciencespo.fr/public/chaire-numerique/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Interoperability1.pdf
and the ACCESS Act
but basically = you get to move/connect your data and social graph where you want.
Done.
It's called having a website.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol
The major technical questions have been resolved since the 80s.
Omg!
Let's everyone start one!!
Is this a modern idea?
Oh autism.
Yer so fun.