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"Facebook was better in the Platform era (2007-2011), when third-party developers could add widgets to profile pages, and in-stream interactive experiences."

This was interesting. I remember this time as being wildly creative, exponentially viral, and voraciously capitalistic. I'd love to recapture that energy and growth on the fediverse, without the predatory client add-ons. I'm not sure it's possible, though.

@evan Talk to FBers and their internal story is that it was essentially impossible to do this in a way that complied with their own sense of impending EU privacy rules. I’m not sure that was their primary motivation, but Cambridge Analytica really was an abuse of this vector so it isn’t completely implausible.

@luis_in_brief really? I had assumed it was just generally clawing back control of the user experience, which we saw happen on Twitter's platform, too. The platform providers benefited from third-party apps to help with growth, and when they hit saturation rates, they got more value from owning the full experience.

@evan Yeah. I’m sure the “we and only we can monetize” played a role too (especially at the exec level), but many rank and file genuinely believe a story that goes something like: 3rd-party extensions require data access; data access to FB-like data (more sensitive than Twitter!) at FB-like scale means some 3rd-party will inevitably abuse; FB will inevitably get blamed for that abuse no matter what safeguards were in place; so the risk is too high. And that is hard to argue with!

@luis_in_brief I wonder how this maps to the fediverse. I'm honestly not sure why Mastodon doesn't have a plug-in architecture, either for server behaviour or client experience. I haven't seen other fediverse servers that allow a Facebook-Platform-like Web experience.

@evan The other interesting question about how it maps to fediverse is who gets blamed for privacy problems more generally. We all know email is a privacy mess but no one blames “the email company”; when Fedi inevitably has problems, will people blame ActivityPub, Eugen, Zuck, …?

@luis_in_brief my primary villain in this situation is our terrible system for choosing instances. A network run mostly by individual volunteer admins for people they don't know or care about is a recipe for trouble. We should have a lot more affinity between users and their servers, but right now it's like "I live in this area, kind of" or "I am interested in this hobby". We need more businesses providing instances for their teams, universities for their students, cities for their residents.

@evan @luis_in_brief I'd personally want much better support for migrating accounts between instances before leaning too hard on university/employer-run hosts

I need to be able to migrate my post history, not just my followers

I also have trouble with the fact that I'm interested in a LOT of different things, so picking a host that aligns with just one aspect of my personality feels limiting

@simon @evan The lack of post migration is… honestly bizarre. Evan, do you know if that’s a protocol problem or “just” a Mastodon problem?

@luis_in_brief @simon Mastodon led the way with migration. Good intro doc here. We are spinning up a data portability task force in the SocialCG.

w3c.github.io/activitypub/data

w3c.github.ioData Portability in ActivityPub
Colby Russell

@evan why does the "Latest editor's draft" link in this report just point to the ActivityPub draft?

cc @luis_in_brief @simon

@colby @luis_in_brief @simon because I didn't structure the respec correctly. Do you know how to do it better?

@colby @luis_in_brief @simon Cool. I'll make sure we get to it before that becomes an "official" draft report.