| I'm not sure about Urbit as a solution, but they have identified a very real problem around the issues of identity and information that is connected to identity. This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate. One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your social news feeds from different services. Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook? One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use the provided API, to present any response to posts. The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup their own system to do the same thing? I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do appreciate the services they provide. |
Yep. As far as I'm aware they don't allow you to display Facebook content next to content of competing sites, like Twitter. But if everyone's doing that locally on their own machines, how will Facebook know? And what can they do to stop them?
If the API is being used, they can take that away. But website scraping will remain as a viable (if slightly sub-optimal) way of getting the data out. Facebook won't stop its users from using its website, after all.