The big lesson to me has been for a platform to be open, there must be both third party clients and third party servers. A service that has only one backend server that no one else can run (looking at you Signal) isn't ok anymore. Even worse, Twitter or Reddit being "open" because they have an API: that's all bullshit, and you are setting yourself up to be rug pulled. We don't need to hear these lies anymore and it's time to move on from the services making either of those claims. I'm waiting for a little more progress and third party control to make a judgement on Bluesky.
Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.
I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.
Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.
It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.
Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.
I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.
Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.
It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.