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derg | 5 years ago

I would very much like the ability to transfer between services but also completely delete once I've backed up locally.

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dane-pgp|5 years ago

A more significant development, I think, would be if online services let you keep your various accounts permanently in synch. That way you could write a post on one platform and know that your followers on another platform would be able to see it.

Sadly that still wouldn't fix the problem that you have to visit each platform to see responses from users that don't similarly syndicate their own posts. That might lessen those platform's concerns about implementing this automatic synching feature, though, and take them a step closer to being properly federated.

wmf|5 years ago

That's why the solution is federation. Data portability is a kludge designed to draw attention away from federation.

ElFitz|5 years ago

Ben from Stratechery touched on that recently.

A good point he had is that this kind of thing would, seemingly counter-intuitively (but it makes sense) strengthen the incumbents and stifle both innovation and competition.

Innovation -> Interoperability has a (maintenance) cost and would probably quickly devolve to "lowest common denominator functionality" while raising yet another barrier to entry for new companies

Competition -> Incumbents could pretty much just exploit new companies as "market research" and gobble up all their features and data if they deem the experiment successful, at no cost

lostlogin|5 years ago

Me too. But the idea that FB could ever delete user data made me snort, and I’m not sure the others are an awful lot better.

satyrnein|5 years ago

Isn't Facebook legally obligated by GDPR (for example) to delete a user's data on request? Noncompliance is risky; it only takes one disgruntled employee to cause you a lot of pain.

bumbada|5 years ago

There is no way you can actually delete anything in the cloud, because once it is in the cloud, it is not under your control anymore.

The ability to "delete" something is only apparent. You can just tell the customer you have erased her data, but preserve it anyway, not to mention other parties like secret services or competitors, that could be interested on your data too.

If you have valuable data, people(like the Chinese or competitors) will offer your workers millions of dollars(or just threaten them or you like 3 letter agencies) for access to this data.