It should be noted that this used to exist in the early days of social media. All of their APIs were open - and mostly REST - and though they were all different it was trivial to make compatibility layers. There used to be at least half a dozen major services that did automatic syndication across over a hundred social media sites, and custom clients that were much more useful (at least to power-users). The problem wasn't in the technology - which was built by engineers who I'd guess saw this as an obvious feature and had to be told by marketing that it was a bad idea.
Then they changed the TOS to make these syndication services and custom clients illegal. Probably not just for spam control, but also to force users onto the platforms to get their eyes on the ads. The multi-platform clients didn't actually inhibit the data harvesting, but nobody cares about the data harvesting until they say something obnoxious enough to get a visit from the FBI or snail mail ads for abortion clinics before they told their parents/SOs that they were pregnant. Privacy advocates notwithstanding.
As you say, many of these networks used to support XMPP. It was not a great protocol, which is probably part of the reason they dropped technical support for it, but the business motivations were more powerful than the technical ones.
Some platforms still support other open-standard protocols. For example Youtube still has channel RSS feeds, but they're buried so deep that most people are unaware of them. So does bitchute incidentally. This is how I watch videos, in an embedded video iframe inside my RSS feed reader. No ads! No account necessary! But they're still tracking me ... or at least my VPN. Ironically most of the big podcast platforms do not use RSS, so if your favorite podcast is not on libsyn or somesuch, you have to download _yet another_ podcast syndication app. Horrible, but I digress.
Fundamentally I don't think platform censorship is a problem. So I'm not sure any of this is the solution. "Twitter is the public square" is just a marketing slogan - not enforceable by law, and not actual reality. You don't need to be allowed on twitter. What you need is to realize that twitter is a platform for discussing progressive politics and how they apply to everything under the sun.
False advertising, and the network effect, are closer to the problem. If you didn't _believe_ twitter was the public square, you would not care that you were banned from it - except all your friends are on there and don't want to be dragged to yet another social media platform to share pictures of their lunch with you.
Moderation is not going away, and that's what the conservatives are complaining about. Anybody who has ever run an internet forum knows moderation is necessary. Even if you hypothetically believe in "absolute free speech on the internet" you'll find that your forum about obscure 1990s video games quickly becomes the latest place to talk about furry fandom, neo-nazism, or your custom-made gender pronouns if you don't ban all of the above or at least relegate them to an "off-topic" subforum. Actual absolute freedom of speech consists of making your own website, but again I digress.
The only really scary problem is the practice of denying access to DNS (or banking/payments!) to people based on political faux pas on facebook and twitter. This is actually technically solvable, and solved, but will be unsolved the moment any of the solutions become widely adopted and gain the attention of boomer senators.
The reason why Dorsey is infinitely worse that Zuckerberg is that at least Zuck pays us the G-D respect to speak and dress and look like a proper Robotic Oligarch.
Dorsey has this Rasputin mentality that because he looks like a homeless peasant, he can't possibly be a part of an entrenched Aristocratic elite. Which makes everything much much much worse.
Forums, IRC, and the chans (4, 8, etc.) are likely the closest we've seen to loyal, internet polities. Some have even been quite large at times (4chan)--but they remain fundamentally fringe. That may have something to do with the fact that these platforms enable anonymous connections among users who don't know each other in real life, whereas the social media giants are focused on existing, real-world connections (Facebook) or celebrities that users assume / wish they knew (Twitter)--in essence, 'normie' interests/interactions.
The anonymity (less usable marketing data) and fringe nature (undesirable marketing cohorts) of the forum/IRC/*chan category have made them a challenge to monetize regardless.
I think this misses the mark a little. Protocol transparency basically already exists. Facebook, for instance, has an extensive series of APIs and SDKs for interacting with their 'servers'.
Anyone with high-school level 'web development' skills can hack together their own custom client to view, for instance, the same information they might see on their feed (and no one will use it, because it will suck). Same goes for Twitter and the like. They are all using pretty much the same toolbox of already-open protocols: publicly documented REST/Graph APIs, OAuth, etc. Heck, a lot of these companies have already released a lot of their internal projects as FOSS - out of the goodness of their kind and progressive hearts /s.
The problem with "Big (Scary) Tech" lies entirely outside of the 7 layers of the OSI model. The problem is that they have a direct line of communication into the brains of "the masses" via the dopamine drips we carry around in our front pockets. The issue is not *how* you access Facebook's servers, but *what* you see when you do. Boomers who might still believe that the news media is "trustworthy and honest" will also likely find nothing suspect with those same news outlets appearing with the same headline right at the top of their Facebook feed, giant 'Verified' logos and all.
Go ahead, see what happens when you mandate that these companies instead use *open algorithms* to determine what gets promoted on their site, and what gets memory-holed. They will run around screaming "But that's our IP! That's how we make all of the money!". And they would be correct. The subtle shaping of public opinion offered by such technologies may be the most politically (and commercially) valuable invention in human history.
Fortunately for us, these platforms are already on their way out - Demographics is Destiny after all, and only Boomers use Facebook anymore. Now all the cool kids are using ChiCom-developed chat apps. Problem solved.
Convincing the tech platforms to give up their monopolies would be like convincing the British Empire relinquish control of their empire. If social justice is the mind virus which convinced the British this was a good idea, then theoretically it could also be used a a vessel to implant the same idea into the heart of the tech behemoths.
Is twitter not the perfect sickly gazelle to spring this on?
Any web browser can act as a fully functional third party Facebook client (there are also specialized third party clients). Ad blockers are a dime a dozen. The platforms are still in business because most of their users don't care.
Nice Urbit ad you got here, Curtis. Thumbs up!
It should be noted that this used to exist in the early days of social media. All of their APIs were open - and mostly REST - and though they were all different it was trivial to make compatibility layers. There used to be at least half a dozen major services that did automatic syndication across over a hundred social media sites, and custom clients that were much more useful (at least to power-users). The problem wasn't in the technology - which was built by engineers who I'd guess saw this as an obvious feature and had to be told by marketing that it was a bad idea.
Then they changed the TOS to make these syndication services and custom clients illegal. Probably not just for spam control, but also to force users onto the platforms to get their eyes on the ads. The multi-platform clients didn't actually inhibit the data harvesting, but nobody cares about the data harvesting until they say something obnoxious enough to get a visit from the FBI or snail mail ads for abortion clinics before they told their parents/SOs that they were pregnant. Privacy advocates notwithstanding.
As you say, many of these networks used to support XMPP. It was not a great protocol, which is probably part of the reason they dropped technical support for it, but the business motivations were more powerful than the technical ones.
Some platforms still support other open-standard protocols. For example Youtube still has channel RSS feeds, but they're buried so deep that most people are unaware of them. So does bitchute incidentally. This is how I watch videos, in an embedded video iframe inside my RSS feed reader. No ads! No account necessary! But they're still tracking me ... or at least my VPN. Ironically most of the big podcast platforms do not use RSS, so if your favorite podcast is not on libsyn or somesuch, you have to download _yet another_ podcast syndication app. Horrible, but I digress.
Fundamentally I don't think platform censorship is a problem. So I'm not sure any of this is the solution. "Twitter is the public square" is just a marketing slogan - not enforceable by law, and not actual reality. You don't need to be allowed on twitter. What you need is to realize that twitter is a platform for discussing progressive politics and how they apply to everything under the sun.
False advertising, and the network effect, are closer to the problem. If you didn't _believe_ twitter was the public square, you would not care that you were banned from it - except all your friends are on there and don't want to be dragged to yet another social media platform to share pictures of their lunch with you.
Moderation is not going away, and that's what the conservatives are complaining about. Anybody who has ever run an internet forum knows moderation is necessary. Even if you hypothetically believe in "absolute free speech on the internet" you'll find that your forum about obscure 1990s video games quickly becomes the latest place to talk about furry fandom, neo-nazism, or your custom-made gender pronouns if you don't ban all of the above or at least relegate them to an "off-topic" subforum. Actual absolute freedom of speech consists of making your own website, but again I digress.
The only really scary problem is the practice of denying access to DNS (or banking/payments!) to people based on political faux pas on facebook and twitter. This is actually technically solvable, and solved, but will be unsolved the moment any of the solutions become widely adopted and gain the attention of boomer senators.
Unrelated but not entirely.
The reason why Dorsey is infinitely worse that Zuckerberg is that at least Zuck pays us the G-D respect to speak and dress and look like a proper Robotic Oligarch.
Dorsey has this Rasputin mentality that because he looks like a homeless peasant, he can't possibly be a part of an entrenched Aristocratic elite. Which makes everything much much much worse.
Forums, IRC, and the chans (4, 8, etc.) are likely the closest we've seen to loyal, internet polities. Some have even been quite large at times (4chan)--but they remain fundamentally fringe. That may have something to do with the fact that these platforms enable anonymous connections among users who don't know each other in real life, whereas the social media giants are focused on existing, real-world connections (Facebook) or celebrities that users assume / wish they knew (Twitter)--in essence, 'normie' interests/interactions.
The anonymity (less usable marketing data) and fringe nature (undesirable marketing cohorts) of the forum/IRC/*chan category have made them a challenge to monetize regardless.
In the long run, the world will be entirely Amish.
And thank God for that.
I like your funny words magic man.
“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
I think this misses the mark a little. Protocol transparency basically already exists. Facebook, for instance, has an extensive series of APIs and SDKs for interacting with their 'servers'.
Anyone with high-school level 'web development' skills can hack together their own custom client to view, for instance, the same information they might see on their feed (and no one will use it, because it will suck). Same goes for Twitter and the like. They are all using pretty much the same toolbox of already-open protocols: publicly documented REST/Graph APIs, OAuth, etc. Heck, a lot of these companies have already released a lot of their internal projects as FOSS - out of the goodness of their kind and progressive hearts /s.
The problem with "Big (Scary) Tech" lies entirely outside of the 7 layers of the OSI model. The problem is that they have a direct line of communication into the brains of "the masses" via the dopamine drips we carry around in our front pockets. The issue is not *how* you access Facebook's servers, but *what* you see when you do. Boomers who might still believe that the news media is "trustworthy and honest" will also likely find nothing suspect with those same news outlets appearing with the same headline right at the top of their Facebook feed, giant 'Verified' logos and all.
Go ahead, see what happens when you mandate that these companies instead use *open algorithms* to determine what gets promoted on their site, and what gets memory-holed. They will run around screaming "But that's our IP! That's how we make all of the money!". And they would be correct. The subtle shaping of public opinion offered by such technologies may be the most politically (and commercially) valuable invention in human history.
Fortunately for us, these platforms are already on their way out - Demographics is Destiny after all, and only Boomers use Facebook anymore. Now all the cool kids are using ChiCom-developed chat apps. Problem solved.
FYI: it's "onore" in Italian, not "honore".
Trillian but for social media let's goooooo
What do you think about Odysee/LBRY? Or Fediverse?
Convincing the tech platforms to give up their monopolies would be like convincing the British Empire relinquish control of their empire. If social justice is the mind virus which convinced the British this was a good idea, then theoretically it could also be used a a vessel to implant the same idea into the heart of the tech behemoths.
Is twitter not the perfect sickly gazelle to spring this on?
Any web browser can act as a fully functional third party Facebook client (there are also specialized third party clients). Ad blockers are a dime a dozen. The platforms are still in business because most of their users don't care.
Substack equivalent for Urbit when