[HN Gopher] Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)
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Interoperability Can Save the Open Web (2023)
Author : janandonly
Score : 163 points
Date : 2026-03-26 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| > we can propose two different rules for Twitter ... an end-to-
| end principle ... If I follow someone, and they post something, I
| can see it. That rule makes it really hard for Twitter to
| overweight content from its preferred suppliers. On top of that
| we add the Right to Exit. This is the right to leave Twitter
| without losing your followers and followees. This would be a
| mandate to stand up an API,
|
| I don't even understand what the first point is even proposing,
| legislating use cases now? It's gotta be some dog whistle about
| Twitter pushing "fascism" and entirely hinges on the weasel word
| "overweight"
|
| The second statement just seems like a category error. In what
| way can you leave twitter yet still retain followers and
| followees. Those words only mean something in the context of
| Twitter. We have no relationship in the world. If I follow
| someone on twitter and then they exercise their "right to exit
| and retain" do i now follow them on tiktok and mastodon and
| telegram and etc. No of course not.
|
| Suppose I hate nazis and follow all the nazis on twitter. Now I
| exercise my right to exit. What data about the people I hate will
| Twitter be forced to provide me?
| lokar wrote:
| The use of overweight seems clear to me. You have a feed of
| items sorted by some score, when calculating scores you have to
| weight different factors.
|
| Seems pretty clear, and subject neutral
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| It's an observable metric. If I don't follow any "return to
| tradition" Statue PFP style posters, how often should the "for
| you" tab show you those style posts compared to posts by people
| I follow, who they follow, and who they interact with?
|
| Pre and post acquisition it was a clear shift. I would only see
| that style of poster when people I followed purposefully
| interacted with them. Post Acquisition, I began to get many
| more anti-immigrant, pro-white, pro-nationalism style posts in
| my feed.
| phlo wrote:
| (Published: 05 Sep 2023)
| tomhow wrote:
| Thanks! Title updated.
| sixothree wrote:
| If you look at the healthcare space, you will realize
| interoperability only exists because it was mandated by
| government programs that the patient owns their data and must be
| provided timely access to all of that data; and also defines
| specifies the format of that data (open source definitions).
|
| You might also define "exists" in some sort of way that makes
| sense. And you can also realize that payers are encroaching on
| every aspect of interoperability data exchange.
| skywal_l wrote:
| It was mandated because, in some cases, getting data from the
| patient is actually harmful. A CT scan is not benign. So to
| ensure that CT scans from manufacturer A could be read on a
| review station of manufacturer B, the DICOM standard was
| created.
|
| But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly
| agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives
| here are not as strong.
| taeric wrote:
| There are also similarly a lot of controls mandated on who
| they cannot give the data to. It isn't like health records
| are an open free for all.
| jabl wrote:
| I know nothing about IT project management for healthcare, but
| just the other day over here in the local news there was a
| mention that the all-singing-all-dancing healthcare application
| that the region (with ~1M inhabitants) has been spending years
| and around 800 million euros to get into production has been so
| poorly received that they're considering starting over from
| scratch. I'm so happy seeing my tax money well spent...
|
| This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is
| apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used.
|
| Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems
| like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys
| to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-
| step over time instead of the current system which seems to be
| a humongous monolith.
| sixothree wrote:
| Which sounds crazy to me considering how much involvement the
| US has with FHIR.
|
| http://hl7.org/fhir/
|
| Even if you don't care about this stuff, FHIR is definitely
| worth investigating.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be safe
| from government intrusions, from age checks, from encryption
| backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win this battle
| with big tech?
|
| I am deeply in self-host. For the self-host to succeed it needs
| to be better, unregulated, and free. It needs to be easily
| distributed. The data should be easily distributed. Import and
| export should be fast and easy.
|
| That is why most of my programs use JSONs that are human
| readable, or use SQLite tables that are just copy-paste away.
|
| I am from Poland. My ancestors were able to survive by hiding,
| and by fighting small partisan battles. My idea of software is
| "partisan". It battles big tech in small, distributed ways.
|
| I am not sure, but I think what I said is similar to
| interoperability.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I am nobody. I have little impact. I want my programs to be
| safe from government intrusions, from age checks, from
| encryption backdoors, from corporate surveillance. How do I win
| this battle with big tech?
|
| If you're only talking specifically about _your_ program that
| no one else has access to, I don 't think there is any battle?
| Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about
| it.
|
| If you're talking about making software available for others,
| for free and open source, I also don't think there is any
| battles to be won here.
|
| When people talk about the web not being open, or "age checks"
| and "backdoors" and so on, they're mainly talking about for-
| profit platforms, that let users "use" their platform in
| exchange for something. These probably shouldn't be "do
| whatever you want, consequences be damned" but instead have
| some sort of checks against them, so we don't end up letting
| the business-people rush towards building torment nexuses.
|
| Even if platforms has to have age checks, encryption backdoors
| and a whole slew of other "bad stuff" or just "annoying stuff",
| I don't think the self-hosted ecosystem has much to worry
| about, we all run software "without warranties" already, and
| plenty of the stuff I'm running at home I've written myself, of
| course I won't care about age checks or whatever, even if it
| was regulated to be forced.
| freedomben wrote:
| In a world where big tech and governments are requiring user-
| facing things to do things (like age verification, etc) and
| be liable for what their _users_ do with it, even the self-
| host becomes a problem unless you are your only user. There
| are plenty of people that are still doing it, but they 're
| probably taking on liability they don't realize. For example
| if I stand up a self-hosted git forge and allow others to use
| it, and some user I don't know commits CSAM to their repo, to
| quote (paraphrased cause I don't remember exactly) Dijkstra
| from The Witcher: That's called being in the shit, and you're
| in the shit.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, this is the case for a lot of things? Has always
| been the case.
|
| If you host friends over for dinner at your house a lot,
| nobody will ever say you are subject to the same rules as a
| restaurant. You start letting other people host dinners at
| your house, and things could change. You start letting
| people solicit your place for paid dinners, similar
| outcome. Do it once, nobody will probably know or care.
| Continue to do it at scale, though, and I don't know why
| you would expect to not be subject to regulations.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The problem is obviously that the government shouldn't be
| regulating private speech. They pass these rules by
| saying "look how big Facebook is, they need to be
| regulated" when the actual problem is that they need to
| be decentralized. But then the rules don't apply only to
| Facebook, and worse, are designed under the assumption of
| a centralized service so that they entrench the thing
| that should be eliminated.
| taeric wrote:
| But there is nothing obvious about this? For one, this is
| speech that can only be done using otherwise regulated
| means. You couldn't claim "free speech" and build a radio
| tower that transmits long distances, as an easy example.
| For that matter, you can't claim free speech to allow
| concerts at your house. You similarly could not claim
| free speech to rent or loan out rooms of your house for
| storage.
|
| As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you want to take
| the effort to connect and verify the different parties
| that are going to communicate with your server, you are
| almost certainly going to remain free to do so.
|
| Do I think there are probably some concerning ways those
| burdens can be placed on folks? Certainly. But we already
| require inspections and other similar activities for
| things that individuals can do at home without an
| inspection. See the food industry.
| beeflet wrote:
| Anyone will be able to lob legal complaints against your
| self-hosted mastodon instance if they don't like you, which
| will bring cops to your door like milkshake brings boys to
| the yard.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, again, you run a public service, expect to have to
| follow regulations for public platforms, not sure why
| anyone would expect something else.
|
| I was talking about creating/running software for yourself,
| in a self-hosted scenario, not just "I run the software,
| but it's for others" but really "I run software and it's
| for myself and/or my family, no one else"./
| beeflet wrote:
| The point of a social network, or blogging or whatever is
| that it's for others. Furthermore, I think people have
| the right to free speech and should have the ability to
| reasonably address the public square (for example, with a
| blog, or a forum or something).
|
| What I'm saying in the previous comment is that
| regulations requiring "Age checks, encryption backdoors
| and other bad/annoying stuff" also apply to small hosts
| and can be abused like DMCA (unless you are hosting on
| tor/i2p with good opsec).
|
| It's this notion that any regulation is good because it's
| done on a "big bad public company" that is at the heart
| of what I disagree with. At what point do you become a
| "big bad company"? Does anna's archive count? they accept
| donations. It just doesn't seem like a fleshed-out
| worldview.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > What I'm saying in the previous comment is that
| regulations requiring "Age checks, encryption backdoors
| and other bad/annoying stuff" also apply to small hosts
| and can be abused like DMCA (unless you are hosting on
| tor/i2p with good opsec).
|
| Yes, just like even if it's just you and your bakery, you
| still have to follow a bunch of health and food safety
| regulations, as you're providing something people can be
| harmed by.
|
| I don't think it's so out of this world to require
| similar things for platforms and services available to
| the public on the internet. Although I wouldn't maybe say
| it should be straight up illegal, I wouldn't mind more
| research and understanding of how we could prevent the
| biggest harms, without infringing on what people do in
| private. But then is a self-hosted Mastodon instance
| connected to the public internet and other instances in
| public or in private? Personally I'd lean towards the
| first.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > At what point do you become a "big bad company"?
|
| Revenue exceeds 0.1% of US GDP or market share exceeds
| 10% of their own market.
| chromacity wrote:
| > If you're only talking specifically about your program that
| no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle?
| Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about
| it.
|
| Can I do it on my phone?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| If you buy a google pixel 9 (the last version for which
| google released device trees), you can do anything you want
| on your phone. My pixel runs a version of android I built
| myself
| beeflet wrote:
| No because a phone, despite being made from the same parts
| as a computer is actually a completely different thing.
|
| You can't just run programs on your phone. You have to run
| apps, which require approved by the government and the
| company that made the phone, which tacks on additional fees
| as well. The phone also has constant cellular/GPS/wifi/bt-
| mesh location tracking, and it can never be completely
| turned off by the user without destroying the phone because
| even the batteries are glued in.
|
| It's basicially the perfect slave device for your average
| goy. And everyone will need one to to access your bank
| account, recieve insecure SMS authentication, talk to other
| NPCs, and generally participate in the neo-economy.
|
| If you don't think this is right, you are literally going
| to empty the bank account of my dumb ass grandma who can't
| stop installing malware, and in every way is better served
| by a flip phone from the early 2000's.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If you don't think this is right, you are literally
| going to empty the bank account of my dumb ass grandma
| who can't stop installing malware, and in every way is
| better served by a flip phone from the early 2000's.
|
| Then why are you demanding that _everyone else 's_ mobile
| computers have to be locked down instead of demanding
| that somebody make a mobile phone that only makes phone
| calls?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I am talking about many things. Also about my programs, but
| also data. Programs are not that important for me. They are
| just vehicles to get the job done.
|
| All my programs and data are open. It is something that
| anybody can pick up, and use as they wish
|
| - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database -
| domains I found
|
| - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - feeds I found
|
| - https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - news
| from 2026
|
| - https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - news
| from 2025, etc.
|
| Does make any change? I don't know. I run web crawlers. It is
| interesting for me to see what my crawlers pick up from the
| Internet. It did change my life, these project changed how I
| see the Internet. More pro-activly.
|
| I think there are many projects which can be useful for niche
| groups. I suppose I have 390 stars on one repo. I hope at
| least my projects were useful for them. That is a hopeful
| thought.
| fsflover wrote:
| > How do I win this battle with big tech?
|
| Support https://edri.org and https://noyb.eu
| hermitShell wrote:
| What do you think of the pace of hardware level freedoms? My
| context is also from Corey Doctorow:
| https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=RjmADE5pQ3s7fBIk
|
| For me the freedom to own my computer means I can run any
| software I want on it.
|
| Self hosting is predicated on some openness of computing in
| general. Interestingly it still does not practically allow you
| to use certain services like Google Maps, where even if the end
| user has great benefit, they get it for free because they give
| back their data.
| beeflet wrote:
| There are the openstreetmap mapping apps (OSMand, organic
| maps)
| fsflover wrote:
| Organic maps should be used instead of OSMand,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343121
|
| Or maybe Comaps,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961908
| handedness wrote:
| I share your preference for Organic Maps over OsmAnd, and
| while I haven't been daily-driving CoMaps for long (nor
| has anyone, really) I already significantly prefer it
| over Organic Maps. I need to use it long enough to see
| what the edge cases are like, but after using it three
| time zones worth of rural places and dense cities, it has
| worked well.
| bullen wrote:
| I would say:
|
| 1) Use HTTP (secure is not the way to decentralize).
|
| 2) Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
|
| 3) Selfhost SMTP server (also tricky).
|
| 4) Know and backup your router (dd-wrt or iptables).
|
| JSON over HTTP is the way.
|
| XML is not bad for certain things too; even if I understand the
| legacy of abuse.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 1) so how do you validate the http the client receives is the
| http you sent?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Validate it yourself with hashing and PKI. Yes, it needs
| bootstrapping, just like centralized HTTPS needs
| bootstrapping.
| bullen wrote:
| Wow, thanks!
|
| Also if people need more food for (decentralized)
| thought:
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289
| zrm wrote:
| > Use HTTP (secure is not the way to decentralize).
|
| This doesn't seem like useful advice. If you're going to use
| HTTP at all there is essentially zero practical advantage in
| not using Let's Encrypt.
|
| The better alternative would be to use new protocols that
| support alternative methods of key distribution (e.g. QR
| codes, trust on first use) instead of none.
|
| > Selfhost DNS server (hard to scale in practice).
|
| This is actually very easy to do.
| bullen wrote:
| Let's Encrypt is not part of our friends here.
|
| DNS is easy for yourself, but if you host it for others
| (1000+ of people) and it needs to have all domains in the
| world, then it becomes a struggle.
| zrm wrote:
| Let's Encrypt is a non-profit that defeated the
| certificate cartel. The main thing you get from using
| HTTP without it is bad security.
|
| DNS can answer thousands of queries per second on a
| Raspberry Pi and crazy numbers on a single piece of old
| server hardware that costs less than $500.
| bullen wrote:
| No root certificate is decentralized.
|
| If your DNS port is closed by your ISP, you can't have
| people use your DNS server from the outside and then you
| need Google or Amazon which are not decentralized.
|
| Also to be selfhosted you can't just forward what root
| DNS servers say, you need to store all domains and their
| IPs in a huge database.
| almatia wrote:
| There are bridges for Matrix (JSON)-ActivityPub (XML), one in
| Elixir: https://github.com/technostructures/kazarma/
| L_Rahman wrote:
| One of the things we got really lucky with is that Claude Code
| and not the ChatGPT app won the war for the defining AI product
| and it runs on your filesystem. There's a different reality where
| everything had to go through the API on a closed app layer and
| we're all begging OpenAI to add XYZ endpoint to their platform.
|
| Anthropic is now racing to close this gap because they realize
| there's no lock-in. If the product is just .md files with
| hierarchy, you can drop any harness and intelligence on top of
| it. It is interoperable by default, possibly not even by
| intention.
|
| We should do everything possible to stop the great lock-in that
| they'll attempt in the next 18 months.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I don't think this can last, because whatever advantage
| structured text files in a file tree provides over an API will
| be maximized by some format that is better than a file system.
|
| That might mean leaning into SQLite or some other open format.
| My own thought is that a graph-like structure of documents will
| be ultimately more valuable than either a tree-like structure
| or a database-like structure.
|
| But if a proprietary implementation of whatever usurps
| structured text in a file-system becomes popular, that company
| will have significant leverage.
| amelius wrote:
| At some point this will be solved by AI, where you can just say:
| hey chatgpt, turn this powerpoint file into a keynote file.
| goldenarm wrote:
| AI is poisoning the well of scraping and automation really
| fast. It generates so much spam, everyone is starting to block
| robots now.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Interoperability is what made the Web possible. Not sure I buy
| that it will save it without a fundamental change in people's
| behavior.
|
| Image you are a 1960s household and RCA tries to sell you a TV to
| only watch ABC and Zenith has a TV to only watch CBS. 60 years
| later linear TV is unwatchable by normal humans IMO. It's not
| like "let advertising pay for this" enshittifying an entire
| industry hasn't happened before.
| uwagar wrote:
| offtopic: i've always read cory doctorow as cory dotcrow. anybody
| else?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > Cory Doctorow: Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and
| science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing
| Boing
| tomhow wrote:
| Previously:
|
| _Interoperability can save the open web_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37399799 - Sept 2023 (97
| comments)
| mentalgear wrote:
| This explains it best:
|
| > When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using
| MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace,
| collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and
| put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there,
| and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your
| friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to
| take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what
| interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today,
| Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or
| did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you.
|
| > If we were to restore this "noble ancient art" of technological
| interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with
| the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to
| leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be
| smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could
| not push around the governments that tried to hold them to
| account.
|
| https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/cory-doctorow-how-to-tak...
| bitwize wrote:
| B-but... muh unicorn-like growth...!
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