Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical.
Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.
Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.
Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.
This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.
Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.
Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.
That’s fair, but then why are they receiving any sort of praise for this? Neither of those goals benefit anyone who doesn’t work for or own stock in Twitter.
> If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter.
I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
Maybe I misunderstand the scope of the technical details, but if the underlying flow of messages across social media was forcibly abstracted to a universal master hub, then could not individual clients (or sub-platforms) not then exert control over capabilities (filtering, censorship, etc) that is currently controlled entirely by the individual social media platforms who own the networks and userbase?
> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs - obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.
I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.
EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.
> Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.
To be clear, this is roughly what I'm arguing. In theory, I openly welcome Twitter and Facebook adopting an open standard and giving users the option of easily moving their content to another service, but I don't think it will pan out that way in practice due to the current state of affairs. For one, brand recognition is very powerful, and I think Twitter knows this and is banking on momentum keeping users on their platform regardless of the technical ability to move to another service. Also, most people simply won't understand the implications of this standard or why they should care. ("Why would I use XYZ when I can just use Twitter/Facebook?")
well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives.
i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I'm skeptical that whatever "open standard" Twitter is working on will achieve that utopian future you're dreaming of. In practice, I think the vast majority of people won't even know it exists and will continue to exclusively use their preferred platform (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) despite all the issues with it. The idea of being able to move all of your content to another social network at a whim, with all your connections undisturbed, is (IMO) simply never going to be something that your average user does, no matter how technically feasible it is.
Hopefully I'm wrong and I'm not giving enough credit to social media users in aggregate.
yeah i mean honestly you're probably right. But in reality, the whole point of advocating for something that skeptics call "utopian" isn't to achieve that specific utopia per se. IT is to make improvements towards that "utopia". Like for example, if this social media interoperability and open standard world is our utopia, that would rely on having at least a framework for inter-network communication and migration from one to another.
What im saying is you probably never get to the utopia, but maybe building some of the requirements for that utopia will be beneficial in an ever imperfect world.
You actually describe yet another benefit of decentralisation.
Because this would certainly happen when the current movement of email into two major silo's (Gmail, Outlook) goes forward. When those two (or three, or four) have a majority of email-users on board, governments will start discouraging or forbidding usage of other mailservers. And will start making demands of those few leftover mailserver monopolists.
Indeed. If they aren't working on an open standard, what are they working on, and what's the point then? It won't solve any of the problems open standard is supposed to solve.
i feel like the function of success would be pushed into other areas like the actual value of the feature being made available to competitors. or speed of competitors adoption of said feature. basically, sharing a foundational open standard could make everything thats distinct about a feature's implementation, or that companies policies / mission, the decider about what differentiates success.
now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.
i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?
Completely agree; commercial services prefer to use their own protocol over a common protocol for technical and commercial reasons. For example XMPP is a federated messaging protocol but Facebook Chat moved off XMPP, AOL AIM moved off XMPP, Google Talk moved of XMPP., even Twitter moved off XMPP at one point, because they all implemented custom features and eventually devolve from the base protocol.
I read this as a trivial 'truth' that I've internalized myself as well; but the way you worded it... makes me naively ask:
doesn't it speak to the limitations or choices of XMPP itself then, not the idea of a common protocol, if businesses can't reliably extend the protocol (only custom fork, and somehow barring eventual upstream contrib, whatever)?
I can think of an extensible protocol paradigm, with 'extensions' (really just libraries, packages, like those we fetch with `apt` or `npm` and optionally push to clients as well). Down to first principles, that's how we structured UNIX/Linux, most modern programming languages, the web itself (well, at least the Js and now wasm part of it).
I actually don't think it has anything to do with technology or problems with XMPP. Corporations can move standards better than anyone (look at web and chrome/google). If Google and Facebook had scale problems then they would just build better implementation.
Facebook messages happened when FB didn't have so many users and in chat space there were XMPP services like ICQ/Jabber. Network effect was against FB so it made lot of sense to federate. When FB was convinced that by killing federation more people come to FB instead of leaving they just pulled the plug.
I am sure that if 80% of email users were using gmail Google would do the same thing. There is a chance of that happening... First gmail adds some amazing but nonstandard features, people start relying on those features and in time gmail becomes the one. Only thing thats keeping that from happening is actually other big businesses.
I'm not sure what you would want from a standard. The basic idea is very simple, crawl the entire web starting from a few known points and visiting every single url you see on every page. Now you have an index of the internet you can run searches on.
The only problem is meaningfully ordering those results and having the computing power to do it. An open standard doesn't solve those.
Operational: activitypub can be extended with proprietary vocabulary without any issues, so they can develop features quietly before proposing them for inclusion in the spec, if they even do that.
Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?
Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.
Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.
Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.
Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.