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The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

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Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#51

Post by MichaelZuo »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #50
MichaelZuo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that the original proponents must have been confused or intentionally ignoring realistic factors… It’s like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone determine it was an overall net positive?

Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just because it's not always simultaneously a competitive advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom. I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net negative, but a competitive advantage. What has changed is that we've rece…

Privacy, reputation risk, etc., seem like huge disadvantages… so it’s not clear at all if it’s a net positive overall.

Someone has to actually do that analysis in the first place. It doesn’t just automatically become true.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#52

Post by Lammy »

mxmilkiib wrote: post #6
robertheadley wrote: post #3

I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.

for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :( but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?

> for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(

I agree with you in principle, but this is only half-true. You're right that Facebook's XMPP was always just a gateway into their proprietary messaging system, but Google did support XMPP federation. What Google did not support was server-to-server TLS, and thus it was “us” who killed Google XMPP federation.

In late 2013 there was an XMPP community manifesto calling for mandatory TLS (even STARTTLS) for XMPP server-to-server communication by a drop-dead date in mid 2014: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...

"The schedule we agree to is:

- January 4, 2014: first test day requiring encryption

- February 22, 2014: second test day

- March 22, 2014: third test day

- April 19, 2014: fourth test day

- May 19, 2014: permanent upgrade to encrypted network, coinciding with Open Discussion Day http://opendiscussionday.org/>"

Well-intentioned for sure, but the one XMPP provider with an actual critical mass of users (Google Talk) remained non-TLS-only, all Google Talk users dropped off the federated XMPP network after May 2014, and so XMPP effectively ceased to matter. I'm sure Google were very happy to let us do this.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#53

Post by zdragnar »

layer8 wrote: post #27
msgodel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.

People “have to have” an iPhone because it’s a status symbol. Not sure how AI is going to change that.

My brother's family and my parents all have iPhones and apple devices because the whole apple ecosystem Just Works for them, especially sharing pictures. They're far from tech saavy, and telling them to "just install this on your phone and this on your computer and this other thing on your other computer" is a non-starter.

None of them actually care that they are Apple products or iWhatevers. Most couldn't tell you what the difference is between what they use and windows or android. They just know to go to the apple store to get things that work for them.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#54

Post by pixl97 »

Y_Y wrote: post #47
veqq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely what kneecapped the semantic web. Why make it easier for the competition to take all of your data?

I remember when the internet was collaboratorative rather than competitive. I think then tech companies got so big that they ran out of scientists and engineers and had to hire fairground hucksters.

Yes and no.

The internet was collaborative when it was very small. You still had islands like AOL and Compuserve and such.

Then as it got bigger the big islands like AOL broke, and the views started going to larger and larger websites (think things like news sites). These sites had to work with vendors (Microsoft/Apache) to be able to support the load without crashing. While this is occurring hardware got a lot faster and databases more performant (along with things like K/V caching).

This lead to the last 'social media' wave where just a few large companies could host enough servers to serve everyone on the internet (within reason). These companies sucked a lot of wind out of the smaller companies that were successful. You could wake up one day and find out Google had implemented your entire business model and is giving it away for 'free'.

But free was never free. Those big companies need your eyeballs. They need your attention. And they will do anything regardless of the ethics to keep it (what are small fines between friends). There was not much more room to expand in to, you're only expanding into other companies. You take over/replace the ones that give their data away and 'compete/fight with' the ones that don't.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#55

Post by jandrewrogers »

veqq wrote: post #39
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

Precisely what kneecapped the semantic web. Why make it easier for the competition to take all of your data?

More precisely, one of several things that kneecapped the semantic web.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#56

Post by pixl97 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #49

Today, an external camera can record your computer screen and audio, AI can extract the data and metadata, and a 2D contraption can physically move your mouse to interact. In the future, these will probably become more effective and cheaper (eventually the AI becoming possible to run locally, though even today it’s possible with a good GPU on simple UIs). Lots of other comments argue for regulation mandating open API…

The biggest problem here is preventing said scraping from shutting down the sites with cost.

Over the years most of the problems I had with sites getting overloaded were from valid 'scrapers' like Google. Quite often providers were adding more memory/cpu just to ensure Google could index the site.

While hosting costs are cheaper than ever, being on the internet can still get very expensive very fast.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#57

Post by cryptonector »

skybrian wrote: post #37
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as popular webpages are usually archived somewhere. Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it, and worse, it’s digitally signed.

> Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed:

It's called an "analog hole". It's very difficult to prevent analog holes. By difficult I mean: impossible.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#58

Post by cryptonector »

skybrian wrote: post #46
pfraze wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We generally would characterize the monopolies as the bug, not the public nature of the data

Yeah, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision. Maybe I should have called it a design tradeoff. Edit: editing posts is nice to have.

> Yeah, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision. Maybe I should have called it a design tradeoff.

How would you design Bluesky to prevent analog holes?

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

bsenftner wrote: post #21

The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.

Yup, same here. But it's also super painful to watch it being neutered by people who tried to force-fit MCP to their usual smelly business models, and then started to make a fuss about "security issues" that are actually core features of MCP and LLMs in general. In most cases, it's not MCP that was a problem, it's someone's -as-a-Service business model they cling to.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

seydor wrote: post #10

I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone. If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into ano…

> but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever.

Can you actually even do that today? Not on iOS, I presume, definitely not on Android, at least not without hacking it six ways to Sunday with Tasker and Termux and API access to LLM providers.

(And no, firing Gemini and asking it to kindly maybe search your GMail doesn't count - because GMail is not the only e-mail provider, and GMail app is not the only e-mail client. If I want this to be possible with FastMail as provider and FairEmail as the app, it's hack o'clock again.)

Vendors all across the board really hate to give users useful features, because useful features tend to side-step their monetization efforts. And if history is any lesson, they'll find ways to constrain and shut down general-purpose use of LLMs. "Security" and "privacy" were the main fig leafs used in the past, so watch out for any new "improvements" there.

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