@stevetex 2 things:

1. Slow progress can be made (against the grain of the same-old mentality of corporations)

but

2. Corporations ARE GOVERNMENT to a large extent

2.1 = Governments create / maintain / do deal with their subsidiaries (kinda the whole military point of a 'company' is to recruit and register more people to do more contract work

2.2 = Gov and Company are on same team largely so feels better than free (imagine you get all the data eventually)

So it's a bit of a 50/50 for a feeling forever but people can push others to use it "free trial" or via 'less spending monthly' reasons etc to get them past the post of worry... into free / doing things slightly different,

Example: Microsoft Word

Imagine how long it too to get a MS Word equivalent or compatible program or docx type (I mean real 1;1 compatible not just mangles your formatting and whole look!...

And then the other way around in being able to *give people* your version without MS Word saying "eh? this isn't text"

So since we got better compatibility, tools and other stuff it might be ok... but also wasn't 1:1 or was too steroided up to begin with as proprietary and also let's face it a bit more classy 'looking' or idiot proof sometimes (icons etc).

Example - Mastodon
You cannot even export data to a human readable view! Twitter exports to same navigation look with all post and pics OFFLINE.
Mastodon didn't even make backup exports viewable!
I wouldn't have invested my time if i knew that... literally if my server goes I have to be a near programming genius to simply link a directory of pictures to a JSON file...

2024 UPDATE: Someone else had a go making a offline viewer for Mastodon export (compressed .tar.gz <---- I mean that's going to throw people off for a start but ok it's like zip of pics and JSON <--- wtf is json? Ok whatever back to Twitter!!(

So the answers I have for poor Mastodon people all these years of non-movable / almost not-viewable "backup" data is:

1/ #MeowViewer ➡️ @meowViewer
purr.neocities.org
(I think this links pics also because the one below was only text)

2/ #Bovine ➡️ https://bovine.social/mastodon/

Try the first with a backup - I'm trying mine out now... so ask me later if you want...

#Mastodon #Backup #Export
#Archive #Viewer 🏆 #HolyGrail ? 🏆