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> Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. I have some sympathy with this point of view. I would like to see a

> Government should have no say what a private entity can/can't do in their walled garden. I have some sympathy with this point of view. I would like to see a world where anyone can build whatever website they want, and the amount of attention the website gets is determined by its "worth" as defined by how many people choose to use it. However... > The fact that over a billion people use it is a different issue. ...there's the rub. The usefulness of a social network depends on how many people are already on it. Network effects mean that its very vary hard to build a competitor to Facebook or Twitter. One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them. This would make it a lot easier for anyone to piggyback a service on top of Facebook/Twitter/etc and if their censorship or other policies got too cumbersome, there would be much less stickyness preventing people from moving to sa competing service.

palerdot 10y ago
> One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them. I'm genuinely glad that someone had made this point of putting public data accessible to other people after reaching critical mass. I'm equally sad that it might never happen. PS: There are other discussions going on having a common standard/protocol for social media communications so that it can be picked up by anyone like an email provider without locking out the people using a particular service. I'm now wondering what is stopping this from happening. FB and other private monopolies can be forced to adopt the protocol and data from them can be shared between other services like FB. How FB would react to this is whole another matter.
- red_admiral 10y ago
  Considering how hard they push people on mobile to use the messenger app rather than the basic facebook app, they're unlikely to be happy. After all, opening up their API would completely defeat their current business model.

palerdot 10y ago

> One possibility might be if social networks, one they reach a certain size (say >10 million users) be required to put all their public data on standard APIs (such as RSS feeds) under terms that allow anyone to re-use them. I'm genuinely glad that someone had made this point of putting public data accessible to other people after reaching critical mass. I'm equally sad that it might never happen. PS: There are other discussions going on having a common standard/protocol for social media communications so that it can be picked up by anyone like an email provider without locking out the people using a particular service. I'm now wondering what is stopping this from happening. FB and other private monopolies can be forced to adopt the protocol and data from them can be shared between other services like FB. How FB would react to this is whole another matter.

red_admiral 10y ago
Considering how hard they push people on mobile to use the messenger app rather than the basic facebook app, they're unlikely to be happy. After all, opening up their API would completely defeat their current business model.