Comment by ribit
3 years ago
It is a bit unclear to me what exactly is being proposed. That every app exposes some kind of common standard API that can be used to link with other apps? Take their twitter example. How would “taking your followers with you” work in practice? I can imagine some sort of indirection layer that associates each user with their respective provenance domain + an update protocol if the provenance changes, but there are likely challenges when it comes to scalability. Who is going to design/mandate these interfaces and where will they be applicable? What’s the criterium?
In one word, MyData: I should be able to authorize a new service Y to download all data about me from service X. I should be able to delete all data about me from service X and leave a redirect to my new profile URL at service Y.
Number portability is not a novelty requirement in competition law, but somehow we haven't expanded it to apply to online accounts.
Standardisation is needed but that's why RFCs, W3C etc. exist. The existing web standards go a long way if fully implemented.
Thank you! I totally agree that data should belong to the user (in fact, I find it shocking that some consider this opinion controversial). I’m still not quite clear however how the software can interoperability is supposed to be achieved. I understand that one can impose a standard, but a standard presupposes a certain data model. What if my application does not follow this data model? Would one ban social network apps that don’t want to implement a particular database schemas?
Interoperability is focused on what happens between services, not what happens inside. You don't have to use a specific database schema to be able to support standards in APIs.
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The exact example you're describing is what the ActivityPub spec and the resulting "Fediverse" are aiming to solve. Mastodon and compatible microblogging platforms are distributed versions of Twitter, Lemmy & Kbin are compatible distributed versions of Reddit/HN style link aggregators.
Given the boost both of these parts of the fediverse have gotten from Twitter/Reddit's series of missteps recently, they're starting to look like they could become viable long-term alternatives.