> When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today, Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you.

> If we were to restore this “noble ancient art” of technological interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could not push around the governments that tried to hold them to account.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-tak...

Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention.

We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.

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.

Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.

You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on every aspect of interoperability data exchange.

Interoperability can save the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97 comments)

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?