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U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#21

Post by ysavir »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

Being able to take your data with you is good but most of the value in social media is due to the network effect. If you can't seamlessly being your connections with you, the incumbents will continue to have a huge advantage over newcomers to the market. In the context of social media, how could someone bring their connections with them to a new platform without compromising the rights of those connected to?

My thoughts exactly. If this becomes reality as described in the article, the only change we'll see is countless new social networks popping up, creating shadow profiles based off of the exported data, and spamming phones and/or emails with "Someone you know joined our network and imported your post 'XYZ'! Click here to join them and see their comments on your post".

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#22

Post by riffic »

G Suite, or what was originally "Google Apps for Your Domain" is a white-labeled Gmail.

Commercial social media companies can theoretically make some serious money by whitelabeling their services and selling those to whoever has an audience. Stop thinking about things in terms of followers - it's the publishers that need to be captured for revenue.

What I'd really like to see from U.S. Senators is legislation to require all *.GOV agencies spin up their own ActivityPub-compliant implementations and publish through that means, rather than via accounts on commercial social media services.

Eventually, media and other institutions will follow.

if anyone is interested in learning more, just look up Mastodon Project, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub in Wikipedia.

edit: By "whitelabeling" I mean "Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Youtube for Your Domain", federated and ActivityPub-compliant. Enterprises will eat this shit up.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#23

Post by readhn »

Another distraction from politicians!

The issue for me and many other folks is not taking the data - but its the ability to remove specific users data COMPLETELY and FOREVER from all of the companies servers!

So far this capability and access are reserved to special branches within the government (3/4 letter agencies etc).

Every human should be able to wipe off their own digital footprint forever!

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#24

Post by Mirioron »

amwelles wrote: post #5
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

Who asked for this, exactly? I know plenty of users who would like to delete their data--I can't think of too many that want to port it over somewhere else. Is the idea that this would fuel competition by allowing people to migrate their history over to decentralized/federated alternatives?

I would love to do that. Move all my Instagram pics to Pixelfed and all my tweets to Mastodon. Not sure I could do that with the way things are now.

But that kind of makes no sense. It'll be completely out of context and it's not going to provide much value. Wet can't you just link to your Twitter on mastodon?

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#25

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ghaff wrote: post #17
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

Who asked for this, exactly? I know plenty of users who would like to delete their data--I can't think of too many that want to port it over somewhere else. Is the idea that this would fuel competition by allowing people to migrate their history over to decentralized/federated alternatives?

>delete their data Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this. To the degree that data can be better exported and spread around, it's more likely to be persisted than if it's locked up in a single company's system.

> Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this

Disagree. Today, questions about persistence and portability are made by companies. Users have virtually no say.

Giving users say in the matter may mean some make bad portability decisions. But there is nothing fundamental to user-initiated portability that interferes with user-initiated deletion. Today, I can do neither with Facebook.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#27

Post by Mirioron »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #20

Good move. It’s data we create, we should own it.

You do own it. You can copy paste your posts around as much as you want. Does Twitter have to put in work to make it easier for you for no benefit of their own though?

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#28

Post by zubspace »

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement.

I assume that this proposal is based on good intentions. But how they want to overcome the technical hurdles is a mystery to me.

Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data? Will there be a standard? Social media platforms like facebook, twitter, reddit or youtube are so fundamentally different that I doubt it is possible to create a common standard.

And who decides which services need to have a compatible data format?

The idea of downloading my twitter feed and post it on mastodon and vice versa is, I guess, a pipe dream. Or will I be able to download my Imgur posts and import them in Reddit? Can I export all my Youtube videos and import them on Vimeo? Yeah, go figure...

I think a better alternative would be a requirement for such companies to open up their API. I want full access to my twitter feed for free. This would allow third parties to create a single interface to many different networks, like twitter and mastodon.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#29

Post by lowercased »

amwelles wrote: post #5
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

Who asked for this, exactly? I know plenty of users who would like to delete their data--I can't think of too many that want to port it over somewhere else. Is the idea that this would fuel competition by allowing people to migrate their history over to decentralized/federated alternatives?

I would love to do that. Move all my Instagram pics to Pixelfed and all my tweets to Mastodon. Not sure I could do that with the way things are now.

do all your tweets just mean top level? or all your replies to others as well? and the resulting threads?

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#30

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

Being able to take your data with you is good but most of the value in social media is due to the network effect. If you can't seamlessly being your connections with you, the incumbents will continue to have a huge advantage over newcomers to the market. In the context of social media, how could someone bring their connections with them to a new platform without compromising the rights of those connected to?

> most of the value in social media is due to the network effect

Global network effects require consolidation. But there are many local network effects that add value with less scale.

In the real world, these local networks emerge as friend circles, interest groups, block associations, companies and industry networks. These local networks are either subsets of or correlated with the global network. But they produce value relatively independently of it.

Starting such a social media company today is hard because surviving amidst Facebook is hard. (See Snapchat, which could be considered, at its start, a local network of a certain age group.) Portability lowers this barrier for new entrants.

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