More on Exit: competition is just one click away, unless it threatens our Daily Active Users metric

Last week I explained how Exit (leaving), like a really good breakup song, is a powerful way to tell an organization that they did a bad job and things didn’t work out. This is usually so easy that we take it for granted, like buying a different food brand or going to a new hair salon. We get angry when a company deliberately makes exit more difficult, like burying the unsubscribe option.

The online world likes to portray itself as Exit good guys. Corporate lobbyists have spent 20 years telling antitrust regulators that competition is just one click away. If all you are doing is consuming, this is pretty true. Nothing stops you from switching between the New York Times and the Guardian, Google and Perplexity, or Amazon and Walmart.

This slogan is completely disingenuous when it comes to anything you create online, which is tied into that company’s platform. You can’t switch from Gmail to Proton Mail with one click (you can’t even take your @gmail.com email address with you). You either need to go through a complicated migration process or leave everything behind. Imagine if you had to physically take bags of cash out of your local Wells Fargo to move it to Citibank.

This isn’t new, exactly. Aging computer geeks will remember when each desktop word processor and spreadsheet had its own file format, and opening one with another was an adventure in weird renderings. You can get a feel for what this was like today by asking Google Workspace to convert an uploaded Word doc full of elaborate formatting. Wackiness may ensue.

Back when the app and files were stored locally, companies could study each other’s file formats to build conversion tools. Now, your online data is locked into platform cloud servers. There’s no file so to speak of, just a view of the data through a web browser or mobile app, and scraping is banned by policy and blocked with code.

To be fair, most productivity platforms give you ways to download files into a usable format (exporting a Google doc to PDF or a Canva design to JPG) and to upload files into their platform. Third party products will even let you do this in bulk. This makes sense, because these tools are basically just an evolution of those old desktop apps, so people expect and require the same ability to move stuff around.

Big tech is even making good-faith efforts to make this easier. Apple, Google, and Meta cofounded the Data Transfer Initiative in 2018, which is advocating for better portability. One big victory came in 2024 when Apple and Google teamed up to launch a data transfer tool for moving photos and video between Google Photos and iCloud Photos.

When you get to social media, however, all bets are off. You can check out your data any time you like, but you can never leave.

I can hear the howls of protest from Bay Area policy teams. Every major social media platform lets you download your data. If that’s not a commitment to Exit, what is?

Not so fast. These social media download services are a red herring, because there is no interoperability.

A copy of your social media posts and videos sitting on your local device is not social any more. It’s just media. It’s hard to go viral as a creator by walking around town asking people to look at a funny video on your phone. (It would also be kind of creepy. Don’t do this.)

To the best of my knowledge, no major social media platform lets you import media from a competitor, even though it would be a great way to win over their disgruntled users. I would have thought YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels would be eager to ingest TikTok downloaded videos. I suspect it’s a mutually assured destruction pact. They all remember when Facebook more or less killed the Vine short-video app by cutting off its access to their friend graph.

Without any place to upload your downloaded content, exiting a social media platform is like going into exile with nothing but souvenirs of the old country. To make Exit meaningful, we should require platforms to build functional import systems.

This lack of interoperability is a double whammy because you also can’t follow someone between social media platforms. Everyone who left X for Threads or Bluesky had to start over with zero followers and hope they could rebuild their community. To put it in the pseudo-technical language we product managers enjoy, social media lacks interoperability at the identity layer.

This infuriates me because platforms could easily make this much better. It would not be difficult for every social media platform to build Linktree-like functionality to let you know where else your friends and creators are posting. Platforms love to send you notifications, and could easily include an alert when someone sets up on a new platform. This could be extended to let you leave a forwarding link behind if you Exit, like the post office forwarding your mail, so people could follow you again with a click.

An even better solution would be for platforms to agree on a universal ID system like phone numbers or domain names, so following or friending someone once means you never have to worry about losing track of them again. [To be clear, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, this would need to be opt-in and sensitive to context.]

Of course, platforms will never do this voluntarily, because their goal is to make Exit unappealing to everyone but the most motivated. Competition is just one click away, unless it threatens our Daily Active Users metric. This is where we may need government intervention. After all, phone companies didn’t implement number portability out of altruism. Laws and regulations passed in 1996 (land lines) and 2003 (mobile) made it mandatory in the US, and it’s now required in much of the rest of the world as well.

There is cause for hope. A lot of people around the world want to make Exit a real option for social media. Governments are passing laws and drafting new regulations. Innovative decentralized platforms are built with protocols that support interoperability as a founding principle. And mission-driven organizations are launching tools that make it all work together. Stay tuned for next week, when I will give you an overview of some of the most promising efforts.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].