8 ms·

Force interoperability. In 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? I suspect the EU will be the first regi

Force interoperability. In 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.

RajT88 1y ago
Or enforce antitrust. As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".
- TheCoelacanth 1y ago
  We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust. > No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly. Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle. Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective). >10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements >25% = serious interoperability requirements >35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.
    - calvinmorrison 1y ago
      well exactly, Verizon, Amazon, etc all LOVE more regulation. they have armies of lawyers who not only help in constructing the laws, they help pass, lobby and implement them. then the same law firms help amazon, verizon, etc execute it. It's regulatory capture now a small competitor wants to do something like get into the wifi game and they're look at huge fixed fees to get started.
      - marcosdumay 1y ago
        Fixed fees are nothing. If you want to make electronics with any complexity, you'll suddenly discover that you need to pay patent fees. And those come as a fixed share of your revenue. Add enough complexity and you can easily be required to pay more than 100% of your revenue in fees.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        I think 00s+ tech history has demonstrated that the free market is no longer sufficient to promote healthy competition. Partly a consequence of the biggest tech firms getting bigger. And partly because of newfound technical ability to achieve mass lock-in (e.g. vendor-controlled encryption, TPMs, vertical integration in platforms, first-party app stores, etc). The 'but regulatory capture' counter argument rings hollow when the government has given the market a lighter monopoly regulatory touch... and we've ended up with a more concentrated, less competitive market than when it was more heavily regulated.
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      Looks like market share is not a concern anymore: when one participant adopts a dark pattern others follow, because then consumer has nowhere to go. What Orwell called it, collectivist oligarchy?
LorenDB 1y ago
In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.
- breakingcups 1y ago
  You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.
  - LorenDB 1y ago
    Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.
    - taink 1y ago
      Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.
      - rw_grim 1y ago
        That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.
    - rw_grim 1y ago
      We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.
  - immibis 1y ago
    That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine. ... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.
cyberes 1y ago
They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything
gjsman-1000 1y ago
> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion. The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly. Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.
- immibis 1y ago
  I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways. Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it. Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this. Supposedly, DMA should enforce this already. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-steps-eu-messaging-interoperability/726385/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st... Haven't heard much about it lately though.
rw_grim 1y ago
The project is still alive and we're trying to finish our next major version to be able to better support modern protocols and features. We do monthly updates on the status of the project that we call State of the Bird and they can be found here https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.
- account42 1y ago
  Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol
account42 1y ago
Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.

RajT88 1y ago

Or enforce antitrust. As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".

TheCoelacanth 1y ago
We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust. > No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly. Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle. Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective). >10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements >25% = serious interoperability requirements >35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    well exactly, Verizon, Amazon, etc all LOVE more regulation. they have armies of lawyers who not only help in constructing the laws, they help pass, lobby and implement them. then the same law firms help amazon, verizon, etc execute it. It's regulatory capture now a small competitor wants to do something like get into the wifi game and they're look at huge fixed fees to get started.
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      Fixed fees are nothing. If you want to make electronics with any complexity, you'll suddenly discover that you need to pay patent fees. And those come as a fixed share of your revenue. Add enough complexity and you can easily be required to pay more than 100% of your revenue in fees.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      I think 00s+ tech history has demonstrated that the free market is no longer sufficient to promote healthy competition. Partly a consequence of the biggest tech firms getting bigger. And partly because of newfound technical ability to achieve mass lock-in (e.g. vendor-controlled encryption, TPMs, vertical integration in platforms, first-party app stores, etc). The 'but regulatory capture' counter argument rings hollow when the government has given the market a lighter monopoly regulatory touch... and we've ended up with a more concentrated, less competitive market than when it was more heavily regulated.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    Looks like market share is not a concern anymore: when one participant adopts a dark pattern others follow, because then consumer has nowhere to go. What Orwell called it, collectivist oligarchy?

LorenDB 1y ago

In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.

breakingcups 1y ago
You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.
- LorenDB 1y ago
  Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.
  - taink 1y ago
    Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.
    - rw_grim 1y ago
      That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.
  - rw_grim 1y ago
    We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.
- immibis 1y ago
  That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine. ... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.

cyberes 1y ago

They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion. The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly. Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.

immibis 1y ago
I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways. Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it. Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this. Supposedly, DMA should enforce this already. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-steps-eu-messaging-interoperability/726385/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st... Haven't heard much about it lately though.

rw_grim 1y ago

The project is still alive and we're trying to finish our next major version to be able to better support modern protocols and features. We do monthly updates on the status of the project that we call State of the Bird and they can be found here https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.

account42 1y ago
Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol

account42 1y ago

Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.