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> You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.

I will have to repeat myself: you don't need to self-host if you prefer another company providing you the service based on an open protocol, exactly like the web does, you could pay Twitter (via your attention, clicking on ads, whatever) and have that interact with other Feeds through a common protocol, whomever wants to self-host could do it, whomever wouldn't could use a Twitter-like platform.

> X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..

This falls apart when an entity gets large enough to completely feudalise a part of the web, that's the whole point of "Technofeudalism" (I question if you ever read the book since you do not understand this core principle). Amazon got so large that nowadays if you want to sell goods as a company in the web in some countries you cannot avoid also participating in their marketplace, so many customers use it for their purchases that if you stay away you are on the back foot against your competitors who are willing to sell through Amazon.

When Facebook dominates local groups for organising local activities (hobbies, student-parent groups, neighbourhood communications, etc.) there's no other option to jump to because the network effects locked in people, even if you dislike the platform you can't force all of the other dozens to hundreds of people using such groups to move over to a different one, the friction from network effects is too great. Instead if there was an open protocol that Facebook also implemented for the groups feature there wouldn't be any friction on just moving over to a different player if the Facebook experience didn't work well for you anymore.

> (One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )

That's not my point, I know what APIs and protocols are. The API example was just for illustrating the power that a closed platform has against all their users, be the users end-users or developers relying on the platform. No need for corrections, it just sounds very patronising trying to "correct" me while you completely missed the point I made...

After going around this thread of comments it feels like I'm discussing with people that have never experienced the web pre-2010s, you are so used to have massive services provided in the web being closed off by a few players that you think this is the only way they could exist. That was not how the web worked at all, there were visions for protocols springing to help those activities happening on the web to be interoperable between different platforms, to allow the movement of people between different services if one didn't work well anymore. These were killed by Big Tech fencing off their feuds, it was done on purpose to vacuum as much data as possible since data was the new gold rush after Google emerged in the 2000s.

And I see time and time again people in this thread ignoring how massive network effects are, thinking that "a new service will emerge and do things differently and just because they are better people will choose it", absolutely ignoring network effects and the friction of moving platforms when you can't take or port your data away to a new one. That's not how reality works, it's wishful thinking that a better service will inevitably attract enough people to move into them, if that happens it's also a very slow process, slower the larger the network is, as a corporation of course you need to care that in 10 years your users might migrate to a different platform if you fuck up but as an individual I don't have many 10 years slices in my life to wait for a shit product to die while I'm forced to use it due to its network effects.

Lastly to add to the last paragraph, you are also not considering that Big Tech just straight up acquires whatever appears that could be a potential competitor, most times to either kill the competition or to absorb it into their machines.

Please, go read "Technofeudalism".