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Top-level
 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/ 6 comments
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
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.
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