Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

> we can propose two different rules for Twitter ... an end-to-end principle ... If I follow someone, and they post something, I can see it. That rule makes it really hard for Twitter to overweight content from its preferred suppliers. On top of that we add the Right to Exit. This is the right to leave Twitter without losing your followers and followees. This would be a mandate to stand up an API,

I don't even understand what the first point is even proposing, legislating use cases now? It's gotta be some dog whistle about Twitter pushing "fascism" and entirely hinges on the weasel word "overweight"

The second statement just seems like a category error. In what way can you leave twitter yet still retain followers and followees. Those words only mean something in the context of Twitter. We have no relationship in the world. If I follow someone on twitter and then they exercise their "right to exit and retain" do i now follow them on tiktok and mastodon and telegram and etc. No of course not.

Suppose I hate nazis and follow all the nazis on twitter. Now I exercise my right to exit. What data about the people I hate will Twitter be forced to provide me?

The use of overweight seems clear to me. You have a feed of items sorted by some score, when calculating scores you have to weight different factors.

Seems pretty clear, and subject neutral

I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech?

I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and easy.

That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away.

I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding, and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways.

I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to interoperability.

> I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech?

If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.

If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here.

When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses.

Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.

In a world where big tech and governments are requiring user-facing things to do things (like age verification, etc) and be liable for what their users do with it, even the self-host becomes a problem unless you are your only user. There are plenty of people that are still doing it, but they're probably taking on liability they don't realize. For example if I stand up a self-hosted git forge and allow others to use it, and some user I don't know commits CSAM to their repo, to quote (paraphrased cause I don't remember exactly) Dijkstra from The Witcher: That's called being in the shit, and you're in the shit.