Today I dialled into some inspiring professional development about applying for board roles. It made me feel more empowered to give paid governance a go. But by gosh it makes me squirm every time a recruitment professional extols the necessity of LinkedIn. How can we eliminate Microsoft's stranglehold on the entire recruitment industry and promote conversations among thought leaders about building a federated alternative?
@markdarb It might very well be that federation isn't the right tool for that job.
So often the drawbacks of a federated system make it plenty well suited for cases where content is not individually mission critical, like social media, but when you're doing something like using it to post and apply for job openings, a guarantee that messages will get through is a bit more important.
My hot take is there should be a regulatory requirement for Big Tech to adopt open standards for decentralisation and data migration so users aren't locked in.
For LinkedIn, maybe that would look like a federated social network, or maybe a search engine where correctly structured profiles on different websites are still searchable.
Agreed there's room for improvement on messaging in the Fediverse, but LinkedIn is also about "building a brand" which shouldn't be a single-vendor thing.
@markdarb It's really complicated, though, ranging from what the standards should be through what the goals are through how do you even enforce it?
Just for example, so many users don't value that at all. Why would we enforce it on them? Why would we take away platforms that don't have a feature that they don't even want to use in the first place?
But even more pointedly, Fediverse itself locks in users to individual instances. We would lose this platform to under such regulations, assuming they are even enforceable.
So it's one of those propositions that might sound great in theory, but really has serious issues in reality.
@markdarb the fundamental design choices behind the ActivityPub protocol lock users to individual instances, and there's really no way to improve on that without really ripping the whole core out and making major, likely incompatible changes to that core plumbing.
So here the devil is in the details, and I would never want to see any promotion of regulation at all without first seeing answers to those questions of what and how.
That those regulations would probably imply a shut down of Fediverse just highlights how important it is to get that right before even talking about moving forward.
@volkris
Fediverse migration isn't perfect but import/export and profile redirection are possible. I hope we can improve on this.
Most users value features and personal connections above all else, which allows Big Tech to lock them in and build monopolies. I think it is appropriate for governments to uphold user rights and prevent monopolistic behaviour. I appreciate the EU's tentative steps in that direction.
Agreed there are big questions about what regulations should achieve and how.