5 ms·

Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)

177 points by janandonly 7mo ago

nh23423fefe 7mo ago
> we can propose two different rules for Twitter ... an end-to-end principle ... If I follow someone, and they post something, I can see it. That rule makes it really hard for Twitter to overweight content from its preferred suppliers. On top of that we add the Right to Exit. This is the right to leave Twitter without losing your followers and followees. This would be a mandate to stand up an API, I don't even understand what the first point is even proposing, legislating use cases now? It's gotta be some dog whistle about Twitter pushing "fascism" and entirely hinges on the weasel word "overweight" The second statement just seems like a category error. In what way can you leave twitter yet still retain followers and followees. Those words only mean something in the context of Twitter. We have no relationship in the world. If I follow someone on twitter and then they exercise their "right to exit and retain" do i now follow them on tiktok and mastodon and telegram and etc. No of course not. Suppose I hate nazis and follow all the nazis on twitter. Now I exercise my right to exit. What data about the people I hate will Twitter be forced to provide me?
- lokar 7mo ago
  The use of overweight seems clear to me. You have a feed of items sorted by some score, when calculating scores you have to weight different factors. Seems pretty clear, and subject neutral
- MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
  It's an observable metric. If I don't follow any "return to tradition" Statue PFP style posters, how often should the "for you" tab show you those style posts compared to posts by people I follow, who they follow, and who they interact with? Pre and post acquisition it was a clear shift. I would only see that style of poster when people I followed purposefully interacted with them. Post Acquisition, I began to get many more anti-immigrant, pro-white, pro-nationalism style posts in my feed.
phlo 7mo ago
(Published: 05 Sep 2023)
- tomhow 7mo ago
  Thanks! Title updated.
sixothree 7mo ago
If you look at the healthcare space, you will realize interoperability only exists because it was mandated by government programs that the patient owns their data and must be provided timely access to all of that data; and also defines specifies the format of that data (open source definitions). You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on every aspect of interoperability data exchange.
- skywal_l 7mo ago
  It was mandated because, in some cases, getting data from the patient is actually harmful. A CT scan is not benign. So to ensure that CT scans from manufacturer A could be read on a review station of manufacturer B, the DICOM standard was created. But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives here are not as strong.
  - taeric 7mo ago
    There are also similarly a lot of controls mandated on who they cannot give the data to. It isn't like health records are an open free for all.
- jabl 7mo ago
  I know nothing about IT project management for healthcare, but just the other day over here in the local news there was a mention that the all-singing-all-dancing healthcare application that the region (with ~1M inhabitants) has been spending years and around 800 million euros to get into production has been so poorly received that they're considering starting over from scratch. I'm so happy seeing my tax money well spent... This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used. Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-step over time instead of the current system which seems to be a humongous monolith.
  - 7mo ago
renegat0x0 7mo ago
I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech? I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and easy. That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away. I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding, and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways. I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to interoperability.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech? If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it. If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here. When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses. Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.
  - freedomben 7mo ago
    In a world where big tech and governments are requiring user-facing things to do things (like age verification, etc) and be liable for what their users do with it, even the self-host becomes a problem unless you are your only user. There are plenty of people that are still doing it, but they're probably taking on liability they don't realize. For example if I stand up a self-hosted git forge and allow others to use it, and some user I don't know commits CSAM to their repo, to quote (paraphrased cause I don't remember exactly) Dijkstra from The Witcher: That's called being in the shit, and you're in the shit.
L_Rahman 7mo ago
One of the things we got really lucky with is that Claude Code and not the ChatGPT app won the war for the defining AI product and it runs on your filesystem. There's a different reality where everything had to go through the API on a closed app layer and we're all begging OpenAI to add XYZ endpoint to their platform. Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention. We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.
- zoogeny 7mo ago
  I don't think this can last, because whatever advantage structured text files in a file tree provides over an API will be maximized by some format that is better than a file system. That might mean leaning into SQLite or some other open format. My own thought is that a graph-like structure of documents will be ultimately more valuable than either a tree-like structure or a database-like structure. But if a proprietary implementation of whatever usurps structured text in a file-system becomes popular, that company will have significant leverage.
  - good-idea 7mo ago
    Two advantages I see to files in folders are the ability to browse and the ability to easily read - by both LLMs and humans. But I also agree that this has limitations. If I were to challenge you and say that Obsidian solves this, or gets close to solving it, what gaps would you say were left unfulfilled? I am because I'm working on something in this space and your comment touches on my three main ingredients: text files, SQLite, and graphs.
    - zoogeny 7mo ago
      Very good point and question. I am not intimately familiar with Obsidian because I haven't used it. My understanding is that it indexes directories of .md files to provide a graph-like interface over them, using the contents of the files themselves to store meta-data (e.g. in the form of links and YAML frontmatter). Let's imagine a .zip file format that combines: - A directory of .md and/or .xml files (there is more to structured text than markdown) - A sqlite db in the root for some metadata - A graph representation (RDF, triples, whatever) of the files That is directionally what I am talking about, but with a standard spec so that someone receiving a project bundle knows how to parse it all. You can still have all of the Obsidian stuff over the contents of the directory. But you can also store much more interesting meta-data in the db that may not be appropriate to put in any individual file (or in some kind of pure data .md file). It is something that can be sent over the network a bit more conveniently than a directory. And if you standardize the db schema and the graph you can have immediate interoperability between systems. In fact, given advanced enough LLMs, you could just have an README.md or something in the root that sketches out the directory structure and files, the db schema for the metadata, and then just expect that the agent, knowing how to load and query a SQLite db, will be able to work with it. But I think there is value in having some loose standards around the db schema, some YAML frontmatter conventions, some well known graph representation, etc.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
amelius 7mo ago
At some point this will be solved by AI, where you can just say: hey chatgpt, turn this powerpoint file into a keynote file.
- goldenarm 7mo ago
  AI is poisoning the well of scraping and automation really fast. It generates so much spam, everyone is starting to block robots now.
  - wslh 7mo ago
    [dead]
rhaksw 7mo ago
[dead]
strangattractor 7mo ago
Interoperability is what made the Web possible. Not sure I buy that it will save it without a fundamental change in people's behavior. Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.
uwagar 7mo ago
offtopic: i've always read cory doctorow as cory dotcrow. anybody else?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
irishcoffee 7mo ago
> Cory Doctorow: Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing
tomhow 7mo ago
Previously: Interoperability can save the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97 comments)
mentalgear 7mo ago
This explains it best: > When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today, Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you. > If we were to restore this “noble ancient art” of technological interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could not push around the governments that tried to hold them to account. https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-take-back-the-internet/ https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-tak...
- bitwize 7mo ago
  B-but... muh unicorn-like growth...!
- julianlam 7mo ago
  Doctorow recently spoke (remotely) at FediMTL in Montreal. He laid out the stakes as usual, but added that in Canada, we are legally not allowed to reverse engineer competitor APIs, and we gave up this right as part of some free trade negotiation.
  - xorcist 7mo ago
    "Free trade" is one of those euphemisms that seldom is free and only sometimes concerns trade. It's mostly about leverage to create a stronger position for negotiations.

177 points by janandonly 7mo ago

> we can propose two different rules for Twitter ... an end-to-end principle ... If I follow someone, and they post something, I can see it. That rule makes it really hard for Twitter to overweight content from its preferred suppliers. On top of that we add the Right to Exit. This is the right to leave Twitter without losing your followers and followees. This would be a mandate to stand up an API, I don't even understand what the first point is even proposing, legislating use cases now? It's gotta be some dog whistle about Twitter pushing "fascism" and entirely hinges on the weasel word "overweight" The second statement just seems like a category error. In what way can you leave twitter yet still retain followers and followees. Those words only mean something in the context of Twitter. We have no relationship in the world. If I follow someone on twitter and then they exercise their "right to exit and retain" do i now follow them on tiktok and mastodon and telegram and etc. No of course not. Suppose I hate nazis and follow all the nazis on twitter. Now I exercise my right to exit. What data about the people I hate will Twitter be forced to provide me?

lokar 7mo ago
The use of overweight seems clear to me. You have a feed of items sorted by some score, when calculating scores you have to weight different factors. Seems pretty clear, and subject neutral
MSFT_Edging 7mo ago
It's an observable metric. If I don't follow any "return to tradition" Statue PFP style posters, how often should the "for you" tab show you those style posts compared to posts by people I follow, who they follow, and who they interact with? Pre and post acquisition it was a clear shift. I would only see that style of poster when people I followed purposefully interacted with them. Post Acquisition, I began to get many more anti-immigrant, pro-white, pro-nationalism style posts in my feed.

phlo 7mo ago

(Published: 05 Sep 2023)

tomhow 7mo ago
Thanks! Title updated.

sixothree 7mo ago

If you look at the healthcare space, you will realize interoperability only exists because it was mandated by government programs that the patient owns their data and must be provided timely access to all of that data; and also defines specifies the format of that data (open source definitions). You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on every aspect of interoperability data exchange.

skywal_l 7mo ago
It was mandated because, in some cases, getting data from the patient is actually harmful. A CT scan is not benign. So to ensure that CT scans from manufacturer A could be read on a review station of manufacturer B, the DICOM standard was created. But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives here are not as strong.
- taeric 7mo ago
  There are also similarly a lot of controls mandated on who they cannot give the data to. It isn't like health records are an open free for all.
jabl 7mo ago
I know nothing about IT project management for healthcare, but just the other day over here in the local news there was a mention that the all-singing-all-dancing healthcare application that the region (with ~1M inhabitants) has been spending years and around 800 million euros to get into production has been so poorly received that they're considering starting over from scratch. I'm so happy seeing my tax money well spent... This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used. Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-step over time instead of the current system which seems to be a humongous monolith.
- 7mo ago

renegat0x0 7mo ago

I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech? I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and export should be fast and easy. That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away. I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding, and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways. I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to interoperability.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle with big tech? If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it. If you're talking about making software available for others, for free and open source, I also don't think there is any battles to be won here. When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks" and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses. Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff", I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it was regulated to be forced.
- freedomben 7mo ago
  In a world where big tech and governments are requiring user-facing things to do things (like age verification, etc) and be liable for what their users do with it, even the self-host becomes a problem unless you are your only user. There are plenty of people that are still doing it, but they're probably taking on liability they don't realize. For example if I stand up a self-hosted git forge and allow others to use it, and some user I don't know commits CSAM to their repo, to quote (paraphrased cause I don't remember exactly) Dijkstra from The Witcher: That's called being in the shit, and you're in the shit.

L_Rahman 7mo ago

One of the things we got really lucky with is that Claude Code and not the ChatGPT app won the war for the defining AI product and it runs on your filesystem. There's a different reality where everything had to go through the API on a closed app layer and we're all begging OpenAI to add XYZ endpoint to their platform. Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by intention. We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that they'll attempt in the next 18 months.

zoogeny 7mo ago
I don't think this can last, because whatever advantage structured text files in a file tree provides over an API will be maximized by some format that is better than a file system. That might mean leaning into SQLite or some other open format. My own thought is that a graph-like structure of documents will be ultimately more valuable than either a tree-like structure or a database-like structure. But if a proprietary implementation of whatever usurps structured text in a file-system becomes popular, that company will have significant leverage.
- good-idea 7mo ago
  Two advantages I see to files in folders are the ability to browse and the ability to easily read - by both LLMs and humans. But I also agree that this has limitations. If I were to challenge you and say that Obsidian solves this, or gets close to solving it, what gaps would you say were left unfulfilled? I am because I'm working on something in this space and your comment touches on my three main ingredients: text files, SQLite, and graphs.
  - zoogeny 7mo ago
    Very good point and question. I am not intimately familiar with Obsidian because I haven't used it. My understanding is that it indexes directories of .md files to provide a graph-like interface over them, using the contents of the files themselves to store meta-data (e.g. in the form of links and YAML frontmatter). Let's imagine a .zip file format that combines: - A directory of .md and/or .xml files (there is more to structured text than markdown) - A sqlite db in the root for some metadata - A graph representation (RDF, triples, whatever) of the files That is directionally what I am talking about, but with a standard spec so that someone receiving a project bundle knows how to parse it all. You can still have all of the Obsidian stuff over the contents of the directory. But you can also store much more interesting meta-data in the db that may not be appropriate to put in any individual file (or in some kind of pure data .md file). It is something that can be sent over the network a bit more conveniently than a directory. And if you standardize the db schema and the graph you can have immediate interoperability between systems. In fact, given advanced enough LLMs, you could just have an README.md or something in the root that sketches out the directory structure and files, the db schema for the metadata, and then just expect that the agent, knowing how to load and query a SQLite db, will be able to work with it. But I think there is value in having some loose standards around the db schema, some YAML frontmatter conventions, some well known graph representation, etc.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

amelius 7mo ago

At some point this will be solved by AI, where you can just say: hey chatgpt, turn this powerpoint file into a keynote file.

goldenarm 7mo ago
AI is poisoning the well of scraping and automation really fast. It generates so much spam, everyone is starting to block robots now.
- wslh 7mo ago
  [dead]

rhaksw 7mo ago

[dead]

strangattractor 7mo ago

Interoperability is what made the Web possible. Not sure I buy that it will save it without a fundamental change in people's behavior. Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire industry hasn't happened before.

uwagar 7mo ago

offtopic: i've always read cory doctorow as cory dotcrow. anybody else?

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

irishcoffee 7mo ago

> Cory Doctorow: Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing

tomhow 7mo ago

Previously: Interoperability can save the open web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97 comments)

mentalgear 7mo ago

This explains it best: > When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today, Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you. > If we were to restore this “noble ancient art” of technological interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could not push around the governments that tried to hold them to account. https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-take-back-the-internet/ https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-tak...

bitwize 7mo ago
B-but... muh unicorn-like growth...!
julianlam 7mo ago
Doctorow recently spoke (remotely) at FediMTL in Montreal. He laid out the stakes as usual, but added that in Canada, we are legally not allowed to reverse engineer competitor APIs, and we gave up this right as part of some free trade negotiation.
- xorcist 7mo ago
  "Free trade" is one of those euphemisms that seldom is free and only sometimes concerns trade. It's mostly about leverage to create a stronger position for negotiations.