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The Web’s Missing Interoperability

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Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#11
post #8

> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe And then goes on to > Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable d…

Simple proposal:

The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA.

Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#13
post #11
post #8

> One of the reasons why GDPR is such a disaster is that it makes it all but impossible for a new social media company to ever be started in Europe And then goes on to > Moreover, it’s a reasonable regulation: my friend on Facebook didn’t give permission for their information to be given to Snapchat, for example. It does, though, make it that much more difficult to bootstrap a Facebook competitor: the most valuable d…

Simple proposal: The data should be tightly controlled by the user, like HIPAA. Users can sell their own data for services, but they can't sell other people's data.

That is the situation under GDPR right now (at least legally). But then the problem is with moving my data to another platform, especially if my data involves other people. For example, can I take my contacts from Facebook and move them to Signal? What if you are in my contacts, do I need your permission to move your info to Signal?

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#14
a huge part of this article is about clubhouse & social networks means for virality, about how they can expand. taking contacts & pushing to them is the kind of main model that Clubhouse is doing.

> I get the argument around banning contact exports; unsurprisingly, there are calls that Apple do exactly that in the wake of Clubhouse’s rise (never mind the fact that contacts have been accessible — and thus have been accessed! — in this way for years). What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition.

what seems awkward, missing, to me is that all these virality systems are push model. each would be social network has to bootstrap, and it does it by making new users push a bunch of invites out to their friends.

where is the pull model? where can I go see my friend Cable's activity, see what networks he is most social on these days? Instagram posts to Twitter are mentioned in the article, but that's such a special purpose form, such a one off, made in part possible by the very general share-whatever nature of twitter.

some standards for social network users to be able too interlink & declare their other networks would be great, as a start. second, I want some activity monitor to be standardized, so I can get a quick heads-up cross network view of where I should be looking at my associates.

we lack the means to ambientlu explore each other socially, and social networking lacks a pull model of networking: we have to explicitly rendezvous on each network, owing to the lack of cross-network systems. re inter- the internet please, & let's standardize some good base level cross-social systems.

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#16

See also: Semantic web. RDF, OWL, https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol . It's the original intent of Tim-Berners Lee, the man who invented the web.

In my view the lack of authentication in the original semantic web concept made it a SEO gaming vector for years and years.

Knowing who to trust is as hard a problem as basic understanding / semantics.

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#17

This is true, the web is in essence[0] what we, as a collective society, make of it. Many of the points he brings up I never even thought of, and I like to consider myself a staunch privacy advocate. Namely, the points on how small businesses are affected by GDPR and anti-tracking / anti-cookie measures are fresh perspectives I've never thought of. To his point, all this is going to do is drive people to where the ey…

The solution, as it often is, is to create reasonable exemptions for small businesses. How do people expect a single person to start a business among all of these rules? Obviously there shouldn't be no rules, but they need to be easier to comply with. Right now it all kind of works, because there's a lack of enforcement. But we don't know how many people have given up, because they were uncertain of the regulations.

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#18
Heh, I published a post in a similar vein just today[1]. Lately I've been thinking the way to do it is have everyone publish a (paginated) Atom feed with all their public content interactions. So each item in the feed would be something like "published this blog post", "liked this tweet", "thinks this comment was written in bad faith", etc. And "follows this person" with a link to that person's atom feed. Then if you want to build a search engine/social network/recommender system, you can get started by crawling and indexing a bunch of feeds.

I'd like to make a web app (probably on replit since it makes self-hosting dead easy) that has plugins for a bunch of other sites. so you connect to all your other accounts, and then this app imports your data and publishes it to a single feed for you.

Obviously starting audience would be programmers, but I bet it could expand to a general audience too.

[1] https://news.findka.com/p/we-need-user-centric-data

Re: The Web’s Missing Interoperability

#19
Seeing Tim O'Reilly speaking at one of his web 2.0 summits around 2009 about the urgency of preventing a few companies/people monopolizing everything comes into my mind regularly when I see tech monopolist oligarchs swaggering around and being feted by a fawning media.

We ignored the need to regulate to enable open innovation and interoperability and allowed walled gardens of unprecedented size to be imposed on smaller businesses, from Apple, Amazon & Alphabet and on, unfair advantage and a disaster for smaller business evolution

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