Comment by mike_hearn
1 month ago
Moxie's argument is that even if something has a flagship app, this doesn't help because if you use a new feature and then your friend complains that they can't see what you posted, the experience is just that the flagship app itself is broken. People don't experience this as, oh well, my friend should just have picked a better client. They experience it as, that's annoying, the video feature doesn't work reliably on Y but it always does on X.
An extreme example of this is WhatsApp and emojis. WhatsApp doesn't use the operating system's text rendering APIs to draw emojis, instead Meta license the Apple emoji font and draw the characters themselves. That's because if you do emoji the standards based, open way you get these problems:
• People use visual puns that only make sense if emojis look a certain way, without realizing they might look very different to other people.
• People use new emoji, without realizing that old operating systems can't draw them.
The experience in both cases is that it's simply broken and buggy. Version skew can kill platforms, which is why the most successful platforms today restrict which clients can connect and forcibly expire them on a regular basis.
BTW I don't think it's worth generalizing from Bluesky. Bluesky is an X clone whose unique competitive advantage is censoring conservatives even more aggressively than Twitter itself once did. It has no technical edge so they can develop the site as open source without it being a concern to them - they don't care if they leak what they're doing because technical innovation isn't a part of their brand to begin with - and the AT protocol clearly doesn't matter to more than a tiny fraction of its users. The point you're making in the essay is general, but ends up feeling overfit to Bluesky.
There is always one party "in control" of the lexicon and its canonical version.
I think it's important to distinguish this from the "every client adds their own features" thing. Technically yes, each app can add their own things to the open union that they support better. But it's also on each implementer's to consider how this would affect UX in other clients (e.g. if you add your own embed type, it seems reasonable to also prepopulate a link embed that acts as fallback). The problems you're describing are real, but I think we should give a bit more credit to the app builders since they're also aware that this is a part of their user experience design.
But still, whoever "owns" the lexicon says what's canonical. Then yes, some other software might not catch up to what's canonical but that's similar to what's happening with any platform that supports multiple clients today. Unless your outlook is that alternative clients in general are not competitive for this reason. I think that's a grim outlook, and if that were true, services wouldn't go to extra lengths to intentionally shut down their APIs, which so has been the trend with every network.
I think in longer term the bet is that the benefits unlocked by interop and a more competitive product landscape will become clearer to end users, who will be less interested in joining closed platforms and will develop some intuitions around that. This would not happen soon, so until then, the bet is that interop will allow creating better products. And if that doesn't happen, yes, it's pretty hard for open to compete.
Well, I never personally formed a strong opinion on Moxie's take, although I do understand it. Basically yes his outlook is that any service that doesn't actively ban alternative clients will be outcompeted by those that do.
The reason is that if alt clients are possible then some fraction of the userbase will adopt them. And if some users adopt them that means the experience of other users of the service gets worse, because new features become unreliable and flaky. You think you understand what another person sees and can do, but you don't, and this leads to poor experiences.
Viewed another way the client is an integrated part of the platform and not something that you can enable users to change freely, any more than they could be allowed to change the servers freely. We don't allow the latter because users would do things that broke the service, and so it is also for the former.
Empirically Moxie seems to be correct. Of the 90s era open protocols the only ones that survive are the web and email. The web survives but it's never been truly open in an extension sense - the definition of HTML has always been whatever the dominant browser of the era accepts, and this has become moreso over the time not less. There are no more plugin APIs for instance. SMTP survives, barely, because it's the foundation of internet identity. But many people even in corporate contexts now never send an email. It's all migrated to Slack or Teams. And if you look carefully at the Slack API it's not possible to make a truly complete alternative client with it, the API is only intended for writing bots.
This is grim but I'm not sure it's false and I'm not sure it can be changed. Also, Moxie's essay ends on a positive note. He observes that competition between mobile social networks does still work well despite the lack of federation, because they coalesced around using the user's phone number as identity and address book as the friends list, so you can in fact port your social network to a different network just by signing up. The notification center in the OS provides the final piece of the puzzle, acting as a unified inbox that abstracts the underlying social network.
This is rather mobile specific but seems basically correct to me. So that suggests the key pillar isn't file formats or protocols but ownable identity. It works because telcos do the hard work of issuing portable identities and helping people keep them, and ownership can be swiftly verified over the internet.
All good points.
Maybe I’m optimistic for no good reason. I feel there’s something slightly different at play here but I struggle to put my finger on it.
Overall I agree with the take that a client for somebody else’s product is usually degraded experience. You want to deploy features vertically, and even existence of worse clients is a threat to that. I think one exception to that is when the main client is intentionally worse for the sake of other goals. Eg lots of ads. Or just the company being (or becoming) incompetent at making a client. Then alternative clients inject some new life and competition into the product. But if the product owner is good at making clients, they probably don’t benefit from fragmentation.
And still it feels somehow different to me. I think a part of it is that the space itself is vastly expanded in AT. We’re not just talking about a vertical app with a few offshoot clients that do the same thing but poorly. I mean, that still exists, but the proposition is that things can reach way beyond the original product. Products can blend. When products blend, there’s always this inherent coordination problem. Those who make multiple vertical products have to deal with similar things. At some point you have to stagger rollouts, support features partially or in a limited way, or show a simple version and direct to main app for more. Think Threads “bleeding through” Instagram, different kinds of cross-posting that they experiment with between apps. This is valuable but normally only monopolies can build meaningful cross-product bleeding because otherwise you have to negotiate API agreements and it’s just too risky to build on someone else’s turf.
What AT changes is that every product can cross-bleed into every other product. My teal.fm plays show up on my Blento page. So yes, you do have this fragmentation, but you also get something in return. It’s not fragmentation between the main way to show a thing and a couple offshoots, but between a web of products. And there is always a canonical schema so it doesn’t descend into chaos. I think there’s a “there” there.
I actually agree the key pillar is identity. It’s what AT URIs start with identity first. I think one way to look at AT is that the “contact list” analogy is right, but now that we’ve chosen the identity layer, we might as well put all our data into the contact list.
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