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Adam Dalliance

Imagine if you started a blog somewhere and were posting to it for years, gathering an audience, expressing your ideas.

And then one day the service provider just locked your blog behind a login-wall, removing your blog from the digital commons and enclosing is as part of their digital capital.

That'd really suck wouldn't it?

#twitter

8 comments
Adam Dalliance

I didn't think they'd raise the walls on *my* garden, sobs the woman who registered at the walled-garden website.

Adam Dalliance

Today
* Reddit ends free API access.
* Twitter turns off anonymous reading.
* Youtube is talking about banning ad-blocking users.

The tech industry was living on cheep money and low interest rates, and now they're all afraid to let their precious content get used for AI training.

The walls are going up, the lawful corporate web is collapsing in on itself.

Adam Dalliance

@grishka I think you might be right that it's the app-stores.

If you build a Reddit client that Reddit don't like they'll get you removed from the only two places you can sell your software now.

Gregory

@pre but that's for iOS. And it's in desperate need of regulation. Mandated sideloading can't come soon enough.

For Android, no single party has control over app distribution. Google Play is a *preferred* channel, sure, but no one's stopping you distributing self-updating apks from your own website or github or whatever.

Adam Dalliance

@grishka Nobody's stopping you doing that but also more than 90% of people won't stray from the store.

I doubt anyone in my family other than me even knows fdroid is a thing.

Gregory

@pre most people I know who use Android do install apks from time to time. It's never a big deal for them. They don't consider phones any different from computers.

Either way, these kinds of non-approved third-party client apps have always been for the tech-savvy first and foremost.

Adam Dalliance

@grishka Yeah. I would think it would be possible to release Appolo in such a way that it uses the user's API keys and Apollo has nothing to do with the transaction.

So I dunno why that didn't happen. Too much effort I guess.

I don't really like apps anyway. I like the web :)

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