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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 t

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.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
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.
- klardotsh 3y ago
  @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.
  - arielcostas 3y ago
    To be fair, Google is one of the few services that best support taking your data away by using their "Google Takeout" tool. YouTube videos, Photos, whatever, downloaded from a single website in ZIPs, TARs or whatever. Microsoft doesn't have such tool for OneDrive, Outlook or their services in general, so downloading 1D docs means going to the website, selecting then and pressing "download". For Outlook emails... well, good luck
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      Yet even Google itself lacks import capabilities, even for the very portable export formats they generate. And this is understandable, because en masse imports are undoubtedly a security issue. As for OneDrive and Outlook exports, if only there were a way to synchronize data to a client. Oh well.
      - arielcostas 3y ago
        > Yet even Google itself lacks import capabilities, even for the very portable export formats they generate. And this is understandable, because en masse imports are undoubtedly a security issue. Depends... Under their POV, why would anyone want to import stuff to a Google account en masse if they already have it on their "original" acc? > As for OneDrive and Outlook exports, if only there were a way to synchronize data to a client. Oh well. There are OneDrive clients for Windows, Android (and I guess Apple systems too), but it's still less convenient than downloading a single ZIP. Using the official client means I need to copy the stuff to my local drive first, and then compress it if I want to store it in a more efficient way.
        NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        > why would anyone want to import stuff to a Google account I have 3 personal Google accounts, and that doesn't count my work and school Google accounts. It is conceivable that I'd want to move at least a few things around among them. Also, it is conceivable that someone could write up a utility that prepped arbitrary types of data for import into an arbitrary Google property. Whether it's JSON or XML or whatever, I could see there being use cases for importing data that has not yet been in a Google account at all.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  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.
- veave 3y ago
  >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.
- kelnos 3y ago
  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.
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gochi 3y ago
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.
- mindslight 3y ago
  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.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    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.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      > I'd expect this kind of regulation to kill off many of the popular web apps once and for all I wouldn't be so sure. This whole industry works on having defaults that most people just accept. It's quite easy to set up an ad blocker, and yet most people just don't. > 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. I phrased my proposal the way I did on purpose. There's no restrictions on what a company can charge for an account, just that "API access" is always included with it. If a company wants a freemium model, that's fine. If a company charges a subscription for all accounts, that's also fine. If a company bans an account for whatever reason, API access for that account goes away (the arbitrarity and capriciousness of bans is a separate topic though) > large amount of extra cost to build, test, and maintain but they are also more open to issues from hacks and bots This is the standard FUD about anything that's "different" or creates a modicum of requirements on companies. They're already publishing APIs for the proprietary apps to use. Nothing changes for "hacks" unless they're relying on the thinnest of obfuscation. And the whole point is that a user using a "bot" should be given the same consideration as a user using a proprietary front end - services should police user behavior rather than being lazy with method of access. > It's be much easier to kill their web app and tell everyone to use a mobile app instead. Except most "apps" are also just proprietary front ends to services hosted elsewhere, and thus run afoul of the same bundling.
madeofpalk 3y ago
> 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.
- voxic11 3y ago
  You can do the same with reddit. They give you a bunch of CSVs in a zip file.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  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.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    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.
rolph 3y ago
data should be stored locally in the first place.
mschuster91 3y ago
> 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?
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  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.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    EU courts generally don't just take the letter of the law but also its spirit into account.
  - klardotsh 3y ago
    It also only technically protects EU citizens/residents. Some companies extended that infrastructure to US folks willingly, but certainly not all.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
      I think California has a similar requirement under the CCPA

pavel_lishin 3y ago

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.

klardotsh 3y ago
@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.
- arielcostas 3y ago
  To be fair, Google is one of the few services that best support taking your data away by using their "Google Takeout" tool. YouTube videos, Photos, whatever, downloaded from a single website in ZIPs, TARs or whatever. Microsoft doesn't have such tool for OneDrive, Outlook or their services in general, so downloading 1D docs means going to the website, selecting then and pressing "download". For Outlook emails... well, good luck
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Yet even Google itself lacks import capabilities, even for the very portable export formats they generate. And this is understandable, because en masse imports are undoubtedly a security issue. As for OneDrive and Outlook exports, if only there were a way to synchronize data to a client. Oh well.
    - arielcostas 3y ago
      > Yet even Google itself lacks import capabilities, even for the very portable export formats they generate. And this is understandable, because en masse imports are undoubtedly a security issue. Depends... Under their POV, why would anyone want to import stuff to a Google account en masse if they already have it on their "original" acc? > As for OneDrive and Outlook exports, if only there were a way to synchronize data to a client. Oh well. There are OneDrive clients for Windows, Android (and I guess Apple systems too), but it's still less convenient than downloading a single ZIP. Using the official client means I need to copy the stuff to my local drive first, and then compress it if I want to store it in a more efficient way.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        > why would anyone want to import stuff to a Google account I have 3 personal Google accounts, and that doesn't count my work and school Google accounts. It is conceivable that I'd want to move at least a few things around among them. Also, it is conceivable that someone could write up a utility that prepped arbitrary types of data for import into an arbitrary Google property. Whether it's JSON or XML or whatever, I could see there being use cases for importing data that has not yet been in a Google account at all.
poisonborz 3y ago
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.
veave 3y ago
>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.
kelnos 3y ago
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.

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gochi 3y ago

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.

mindslight 3y ago
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.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  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.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > I'd expect this kind of regulation to kill off many of the popular web apps once and for all I wouldn't be so sure. This whole industry works on having defaults that most people just accept. It's quite easy to set up an ad blocker, and yet most people just don't. > 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. I phrased my proposal the way I did on purpose. There's no restrictions on what a company can charge for an account, just that "API access" is always included with it. If a company wants a freemium model, that's fine. If a company charges a subscription for all accounts, that's also fine. If a company bans an account for whatever reason, API access for that account goes away (the arbitrarity and capriciousness of bans is a separate topic though) > large amount of extra cost to build, test, and maintain but they are also more open to issues from hacks and bots This is the standard FUD about anything that's "different" or creates a modicum of requirements on companies. They're already publishing APIs for the proprietary apps to use. Nothing changes for "hacks" unless they're relying on the thinnest of obfuscation. And the whole point is that a user using a "bot" should be given the same consideration as a user using a proprietary front end - services should police user behavior rather than being lazy with method of access. > It's be much easier to kill their web app and tell everyone to use a mobile app instead. Except most "apps" are also just proprietary front ends to services hosted elsewhere, and thus run afoul of the same bundling.

madeofpalk 3y ago

> 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.

voxic11 3y ago
You can do the same with reddit. They give you a bunch of CSVs in a zip file.
mschuster91 3y ago
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.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  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.

rolph 3y ago

data should be stored locally in the first place.

mschuster91 3y ago

> 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?

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
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.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  EU courts generally don't just take the letter of the law but also its spirit into account.
- klardotsh 3y ago
  It also only technically protects EU citizens/residents. Some companies extended that infrastructure to US folks willingly, but certainly not all.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    I think California has a similar requirement under the CCPA