 When we talk about the internet's problems and solutions, we tend to focus on Big Tech, the monopolizers who dominate our digital lives. That's only natural. But there's another internet, one that deserves our attention: The Public Interest Internet. https://www.eff.org/issues/public-interest-internet 1/ 13 comments
Tools like Adium and Pidgin let you talk to all of those services using a single tool, so you wouldn't have to juggle a half-dozen clients and keep track of which one you used to talk to whom. For a while there, it looked like we were going to be free of the need for this kind of tool - a time when even companies like Google and Facebook embraced a common messaging standard that let users talk to one another across their walled gardens. 4/ But the lure of locking in users trumped the user benefits of cross-platform communications, and today we live in a shattered messaging hellscape that includes Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, FB Messenger, Teams, Instagram, TikTok, Hangouts, Twitter DMs and Skype. 5/ The same toolsmiths who tackled messaging fragmentation in the 2000s are still at it in the 2020s, in a higher-stakes environment where laws like the DMCA and CFAA pose chilling legal risks. Nevertheless, they're plugging away at this unglamorous, essential work. Take Gary Kramlich, the sole full-time developer on Pidgin. Kramlich quit his job in 2019 and has been living frugally on his savings and a small grant while undertaking a top-to-bottom refactoring of Pidgin's venerable code-base. 6/ Kramlich describes his work in human terms: "It's all about communication and bringing people together, allowing them to talk on their terms. That's huge. You shouldn't need 30GB of RAM to run all your chat clients. Communications run on network effects. "If the majority of your friends use a tool and you don’t like it, your friends will have to take an extra step to include you in the conversation. That forces people to choose between their friends and the tools that suit them best." 8/ I agree with him about network effects and I want to add something here about switching costs. You might join an messaging service because of network effects (you want to talk to the users who are already there), but you *stay* because of switching costs. If you quit a service, you quit the friends who use it. If those friends matter a lot to you, then the service operator can do pretty terrible things to you (like invading your privacy) and you'll still stick around. 9/ Multiprotocol clients like Pidgin attack those switching costs head on, letting you escape a service provider's walled garden and still pass messages to the people who aren't ready to leave yet. Not only does this make your life better, it makes their life better, too. Because when it's easy to leave a service - when the switching costs are low - the service has to worry about losing users, and that limits how badly they can abuse the users that stay behind. 10/ As my colleague Danny O'Brien wrote, these are "a renewable resource that tech monopolies and individual users alike continue to draw from....' "When Big Tech is long gone, a better future will come from the seed of this public interest internet: seeds that are being planted now, and which need everyone to nurture them until they’re strong enough to sustain our future in a more open and free society. " eof/ @pluralistic Ok so making a recurring donation to Pidgin goes in my todo list. I didn't know he was refactoring the code, I'll try to contact Mozilla on Matrix🤞
@grishka You probably want to read this thread  Vercors, yeah I read Cory's articles on EFF a while ago and watched several of his talks. Adversarial interoperability is a beautiful thing. This world needs more of it, and governments should absolutely not grant those companies any protections against it. As in, if you're running Facebook in a headless browser on your server and interacting with it on behalf of a consenting user, Facebook shouldn't be able to sue you for doing this. |
Gregory's Server
The Public Interest Internet is a "wider, more diverse, more generous world. Often run by volunteers, frequently without institutional affiliation, sometimes tiny, often local, free for everyone online to use and contribute to, this internet preceded big tech."
EFF's ongoing series on Public Interest Internet highlights public, volunteer film scholarship:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/enclosure-public-interest-internet
Music utilities:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/outliving-outrage-public-interest-internet-cddb-story
and music recommendations and metadata:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/organizing-public-interest-musicbrainz
2/
The Public Interest Internet is a "wider, more diverse, more generous world. Often run by volunteers, frequently without institutional affiliation, sometimes tiny, often local, free for everyone online to use and contribute to, this internet preceded big tech."
EFF's ongoing series on Public Interest Internet highlights public, volunteer film scholarship: