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Unfortunately this shouldn't be surprising: especially in this time of purse strings tightening and every Enshittification-powered company trying to grind out the last bits of "value" out of their hostage base, companies are bound to take measures to enforce their moats.
Migrating to services where the data is free and not captive was always the only long-term solution.
Next up: rather than inventing technical solutions to work around walled gardens, we need serious legislative efforts to mandate data freedom. It should be possible to export 100% of one's data stored in a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-parseable format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or maybe a SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate) and import it to a new service. Data moats must end, or we'll be doing this same stupid dance every few years when the next MySpaceBookTokDit enshittifies and takes everyone's social data with it.
> It should be possible to export 100% of one's data stored in a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-parseable format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or maybe a SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate)
You can do that. You've been able to download, directly from twitter, an archive of pretty much your entire account. It's not quite JSON - it's actually a .js file that declares a single variable, but it's close enough.
It's incomplete, though - my archive for my old accounts misses all media (including the profile of my long-deceased cats...), and it's a bit useless because while yes I could probably import it into some fork of Mastodon, that doesn't mean the "social web" still works as there is no federation between Twitter and Mastodon.
Expecting a best effort archive of data the platform still has archived is one thing, but expecting it to be complete and portable to a totally different service isn't realistic, especially when Twitter never claimed to support any protocols similar to WebMentions or ActivityPub.
You can do the same with reddit. They give you a bunch of CSVs in a zip file.
Regulations on data exports doesn't solve this problem at all, it just means an endless goose chase of exporting and importing. Additionally, we open people up to even larger data leaks if the entire export and import path isn't regulated. We already have a problem with this in regards to switching password managers.
Regulations on what data can even be collected will solve this problem, and negate the entire reason for using these front ends.
Agreed that we desperately need privacy legislation that makes surveillance-based software much less prevalent. In addition, stopping this bundling of proprietary javascript clients with service hosting seems like straightforward antitrust action that doesn't even need any new legislation. Any action that a user can do through a web browser should be required to be made available as an API for programmatic access.
I'd expect this kind of regulation to kill off many of the popular web apps once and for all. The would also be open questions like whether the API must be free to use, could have some legal freemium model, and how a "fair" price would be determined.
Companies aren't going to want to be forced to provide a fully functional API. Not only would that mean a large amount of extra cost to build, test, and maintain but they are also more open to issues from hacks and bots. It's be much easier to kill their web app and tell everyone to use a mobile app instead.
Regulations? Legislation? None of that means anything in this age of "it's only wrong/illegal if you get caught". What's needed is to kick these shitty anti-user services to the curb, and switch wholesale to ones that actually care about user agency, security, and privacy.
I alluded to this on Mastodon recently [1], and I strongly agree. Here's a copy of the toots:
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Thought that just crossed my mind: what if - a law that mandated any service accessed over the web must not interfere with any attempts to develop or use third party clients?
Not a software license. A law, with actual teeth and massive fines for companies (it's always companies) violating it.
Discord banning folks for using Ripcord? Yeah that'll be $(insert massive fine here) per user banned. Your credit union? Sure, write your own mobile app for it.
Like GDPR, but a hundred steps further.
To give it proper teeth, the fines for willful infringement should be basically company-ending events, because fuck abusing users. No $1000 slap on the wrist. Nah, "up to 5% of company net profit for the year of occurrence, or $X minimum amount, whichever is higher" (to handle unprofitable VC-backed entities) or something truly fear-inducing.
And no, I can't currently think of anything that should be excepted from this. If you think you can write a better GUI for the SaaS version of TurboTax and not land yourself with tax fines, go for it, dude. The law should allow you to do that, too.
Exports only help if new services support imports.
And some of those wouldn't be particularly helpful; @tags would lose a lot of meaning as you migrate, especially if others on the destination platform already have that handle.
>Exports only help if new services support imports.
Of course I can understand why a service wouldn't want you to be able to post thousands of posts in a matter of minutes, or to fake timestamps, or...
The whole idea of massively importing stuff is complete nonsense.
Fair-ish. Certainly some types of services have an incentive to allow you to import, as a way of making it easier to move to them. Like an email hosting service would want to make it easy for you to move your old emails to them when switching.
I could understand why a Twitter alternative might not want you to be able to import a ton of old posts at once. But this is why we need open standards and open source. Some random large Mastodon instance might not want to allow imports, but you should at the very least have the option to spin up your own instance, import all your old Twitter posts, and still participate in the ecosystem.
As others have pointed out, an @tag can still be useful by linking back to the original service. Or the importer can support a username mapping so it can rewrite names from the old service to names to the new service. Sure, all of this requires extra work, but it can be possible if people care enough.
Regardless, export functionality at the old service is the first necessary step. Even if there's no import on the other side now, someone might build one eventually. And even if that never happens, being able to archive your old data is useful by itself.
@tags are just one of many features, and the lack of a matching user on the import side isn't a critical issue: a link back to the original post instead suffices.
And regardless, Twitter-alikes aren't the only thing worth considering. Exporting all of one's video data from YouTube, or all of one's comments from Reddit, or all of one's search history (and Google Voice texts, and Docs documents, and etc.) from Google are all usecases that fall under these data moats that are useful to be able to take with you and move to another service. There's probably more usecases I'm not even thinking of, but the point is that by exposing all the data by mandate, we don't have to be limited by the imagination of today, we have the data, we can build whatever future frontends and replacement services and etc. we want.
Exports help always. Someone in the future could write a tool. Someone can finance writing a tool. AI could be used to create a tool.
> Data moats must end, or we'll be doing this same stupid dance every few years when the next MySpaceBookTokDit enshittifies and takes everyone's social data with it.
Data moats haven't been a thing since GDPR passed and everyone implemented "data dump" features as a result.
The real problem is the lack of federation requirement. Say I'm a competitor to Facebook - what use has a potential customer of mine from an import feature when there is no way for my service to interface with the customer's Facebook friends?
The GDPR data dump requirement is pretty lame: the user can’t specify a format, so a PDF scan of a printout of your data would qualify as a “data export”, even though it’s basically useless.
It also only technically protects EU citizens/residents. Some companies extended that infrastructure to US folks willingly, but certainly not all.
EU courts generally don't just take the letter of the law but also its spirit into account.
data should be stored locally in the first place.
The recent WEI (aka user-agent discrimination) proposal might be the end-game of all this.
We shouldn't give up, but keep fighting to be able to use services with the software and hardware we choose. The whole "API" concept has always seemed like a power-grab since it was introduced.
> The whole "API" concept has always seemed like a power-grab since it was introduced
What do you mean? Do you mean a public, free API offered by these services?
I mean the idea of promoting a separate "API" that you need to specifically request access to ("API keys") and possibly agree to other conditions, just to get the same information you'd already be able to with the "normal" way using a browser, but in a possibly slightly easier to parse format.
That's why I like to say that all sites already have an API: HTTP + HTML.
Data is the life blood of AI algorithms. Hence the effort by Big Tech to silo their mega-platforms & impose WEI upon browsers so only their crawlers are able to scrap whatever data remains outside the silos. Its a race to the bottom and individual & smaller players are going to get crushed even before they can start.
While I wouldn't be surprised if it died soon, my personal Libreddit instance remains running perfectly fine, although it has a user count of one.
Teddit, my preferred Reddit frontend, still manages to have an updated frontpage, but clicking on anything gives HTTP 429 for several weeks now (I think, only use it intermittently).
If the frontends quit working though, I just won't go to those websites anymore.
you can go to one of the many other instances running the teddit code
go to this link (at bottom of main teddit.net page)
https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
and look under "instances"
just replace "reddit.com" with the instance name in your reddit url
I actually have a bookmark that does it automatically when I click on it.
javascript: (location.hostname="teddit.net")
or whatever instance you want
I believe it's the same for Libreddit.
I think HN took the site down? While i understand the pain, i think a little bit of a surge shouldnt be able to take down a public instance host. Another reason, perhaps?
site dead:
> curl -v https://tux.pizza
* Could not resolve host: tux.pizza
* Closing connection 0
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: tux.pizzaThe web is slowly being killed. The culprit? Capitalism.
Sorry, not sorry. Use Gemini, search with Marginalia, socialise with real people and reach your communities with email.
> socialise with real people
I have some real-life, non-internet-based hobbies for which I come together with other people. All the rest of those people frequently talk about social media, online influencers, DRM-controlled streaming, and WhatsApp groups, and I’m the weirdo because I don’t follow any of that. In fact, it is socializing with real people that convinces me that the world will just go along with tech companies’ nefarious plans, and ultimately it may no longer be very feasible for us nerds to just drop out.
My real friends use group text. Nothing fancy. Real names. Real numbers. No data collection. No cost.
Memes flow. Links get posted.
All is just a setup for the next IRL meeting.
I found the end of the internet in '99.
This is the last few sites that have a low bot ratio.
> [...] and reach your communities with email.
"office hours" / calls with random people where they can ask for advice, talk about their ideas (or just rant!) worked pretty well for me: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
This is fantastic and I may just take you up on it if you're still doing it!
Ayo I just recently started using the tux.pizza Nitter instance as my main
It's not just a privacy frontend. You're accessing content and services without helping the freely provided stuff be monetized. I get that you want to protect your identity. Then don't use these services or data. It's not public and not free - nor should it be.
Privacy is not piracy. This is piracy.
"Piracy" is a bit of a strong denouncement. If someone puts something on the internet, and their server responds to your request for data with... y'know... the data, then the you can display that data however you want.
Certainly the server owners can try to do tricky things to make it so you can only display the data in ways they want you to display it, but there's no natural right that makes it morally or ethically wrong for you to display things how you want.
RSS by its very nature is designed to not be restricted to the "way of presentation and ad earning of the producer".
Producer produces content and RSS syndicates it that can be read by clients IN WHATEVER MANNER OR FORM THEY DESIRE.
That's the whole idea of internet. Now, you go ahead and lament how this is piracy. Its not. YouTube provides RSS feeds. Same do other platforms so as long as they do, we can do whatever the hell we want with the feed
The article highlights several front ends most of which do not rely on the official RSS feeds provided by the service.
>That's the whole idea of internet.
No, the idea of the internet is to create a global scale network of computers.
>YouTube provides RSS feeds.
Which links you to a webpage that includes ads to monetize the video, the RSS feed, and the rest of the site.
But that's only if the producer wants to provide an RSS feed. While annoying, it's perfectly within their rights not to provide one.
> That's the whole idea of internet.
I think it's very hard to assert that anything is "the whole idea of the internet". If you want to go back to its roots, the "whole idea of the internet" was to have a reliable military/government communications system in the case of nuclear war.
These days the internet means different things for different people, and no one person can credibly assert that any particular purpose is valid or invalid.
Seeing as how this is hurting usage to the point that monetization is hurt, maybe they should actually just let the privacy-concious users be...
Surveillance capitalism is one of the most immoral things I can think of. Privacy and piracy are not only ethical but necessary
No it is not.