Why Facebook Keeps Beating Every Rival: It’s the Network

Re:Why Facebook Keeps Beating Every Rival: It’s the Network by dane-pgp on Thursday April 20, 2017 @06:00PM (#14161295)

Just as Microsoft was required to open up its Win32 APIs, one possible remedy here would be for Facebook to be forced to allow users to receive/make posts from/to their Facebook friends on any competing site, and allow people to log into those competing sites using their Facebook accounts (using a single sign-on system like OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0).

That way each competitor could offer its own interface and algorithm for filtering people's feeds, and show their own ads (or offer a competing business model). If users opted to have their posts on the competing site automatically sent to Facebook (so their Facebook-only friends could still see them) then Facebook would be free to data-mine those posts still.

The next question is, could someone code a browser extension or other tool which makes this possible without needing any changes from Facebook's side? If it would break the Facebook terms of service, would someone crowd-fund the anti-trust lawsuit to override those terms?

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Re:Why Facebook Keeps Beating Every Rival: It’s the Network by lelandbatey on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:32PM (#14162136)

People have tried to just "code around" these centralization issues, but Facebook/Google have a lot of developers that can put a lot of time into identifying/rate-limiting/blocking unauthorized use of their API's. Nothing has been able to get past the "but does it work almost all the time" barrier that those engineering efforts put in the way to technically circumventing centralizaiton.

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