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I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is propr

I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?

danmaz74 11y ago
One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.
- asmosoinio 11y ago
  But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
    - stanleydrew 11y ago
      Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?
      - ex3ndr 11y ago
        We are trying to make so at Actor (https://actor.im https://actor.im).
        oddvar 11y ago
        cool! we should interoperate :) (we being https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) ps. your https://actor.im/platform https://actor.im/platform page 404s
      - oddvar 11y ago
        that's exactly what https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is trying to do!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  Good point. Maybe Salesforce is a better example. Or Github. Don't people build tons of integrations on it?
- chinathrow 11y ago
  Same as with Twitter; remember Meerkat and firehose access as examples.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes. You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
  - jclulow 11y ago
    A trustworthy company is always one "being acquired by Oracle" away from becoming an untrustworthy, belligerent rent-seeker. Any dependency on another company for your own business must be considered a risk to be managed.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous. But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy? It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)
  - the_ancient 11y ago

danmaz74 11y ago

One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.

asmosoinio 11y ago
But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
- cromwellian 11y ago
  Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
  - stanleydrew 11y ago
    Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?
    - ex3ndr 11y ago
      We are trying to make so at Actor (https://actor.im https://actor.im).
      - oddvar 11y ago
        cool! we should interoperate :) (we being https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) ps. your https://actor.im/platform https://actor.im/platform page 404s
    - oddvar 11y ago
      that's exactly what https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is trying to do!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
stanleydrew 11y ago
Good point. Maybe Salesforce is a better example. Or Github. Don't people build tons of integrations on it?
chinathrow 11y ago
Same as with Twitter; remember Meerkat and firehose access as examples.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes. You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.

stanleydrew 11y ago
Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
- jclulow 11y ago
  A trustworthy company is always one "being acquired by Oracle" away from becoming an untrustworthy, belligerent rent-seeker. Any dependency on another company for your own business must be considered a risk to be managed.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous. But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy? It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)
- the_ancient 11y ago