Practical exit part 2: groups and identity (again)

BREAKING: I’m on another podcast! I spoke with Michael Oliver Weinberg, host of the Improving Alpha podcast, about the impact of the Platformocracy on business outcomes and investing. Michael asked great questions that led to a novel angle on the topics I cover here. Give it a listen!

Last week I proposed that we require social platforms make it easier to bring your friends and followers with you when you leave. Ideally, this would extend to letting you publicly link your social accounts, like the Discord and Twitch Connections features.

As promised, this week I am covering two key questions I skipped:

How can you trust that a group’s moving announcement is not a scam? Linking to a new platform is a handy vector for abuse if you can’t trust it. Profiles have logins as a proxy for trust, but groups don’t. There is no common mechanism like OAuth to ensure that a link to rejoin the group on a new platform belongs to a real Facebook group, subreddit, Discord server, Mastodon instance, or so forth.

We would need to define a minimum common standard for what constitutes a group, and a way to be sure that it’s really associated with a given platform. There is an old W3C Activity Vocabulary proposal from 2017 that includes both Group as an object, and Join as an activity. That doesn’t solve the authentication part of the problem, but would be a good place to start.

Who can declare that a group is moving? A community of people will have different opinions, and might even have decision-making processes of their own to follow before such an announcement. How can an online platform reflect this?

There is a practical answer, even though it kind of sucks. On platforms like Facebook and Discord, the user who creates the group has absolute control over it, for better or worse. [See “Implicit Feudalism” is why online communities feel like warring kingdoms for my own struggles with this rule.]

So, letting the group owner (and only the group owner) declare a move would at least be consistent with current practice. Something more inclusive and democratic would certainly be better, but we could make moving easier without solving it.

Even if authentication and authorization are solved, should this even be allowed? When does a group belong to its members, and when does it belong to the platform?

Regular readers know my core thesis: online platforms should be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners. Doesn’t that imply every community should have the right to move wherever it wants? I am not as sure of this as I once was.

The clearest case for community ownership is an online group formed by the leaders of a real-world organization. For example, a business that establishes a Discord server for customers to get support and give feedback, or the coach of a kids’ soccer team who sets up a WhatsApp group for parents and caregivers.

In these cases, the platform should be nothing but a service provider, and the group should have full freedom (and assistance) to move to another provider, without undue lock-in. I think we lose track of this because these platforms are free. If you were paying for a Slack instance for your team, iyou would be outraged if Slack refused to give you a useful data export or to set up links to help your team migrate to your new solution. Lock-in is a bad price to pay for free service.

On the other hand, though, what about platforms like Reddit that are designed to host a network of public interest groups? I am not sure that being the person who created something common like, say, r/ArsenalFC or r/glp1, should give you eternal control over that topic and namespace.

And, indeed, the creator of a subreddit cannot delete it. This is not a new corporate land grab, either. It dates back to Usenet, the original decentralized network of communities, where the structure of the primary newsgroups in the network was reorganized top-down in 1987, and has been managed by a governing body since 2005.

There’s no simple answer because these two extremes blend into each other. There isn’t a strict hierarchy of one subreddit per topic. Consider that r/Gunners (Arsenal’s team nickname) is an even bigger fan group than r/ArsenalFC, and there are many other Arsenal-focused subreddits, some which only have a few dozen members. Should that belong to Reddit, or should the founder be able to move it elsewhere?

A compromise solution would be to require open cross-linking, without the obligation to support a full move. Take r/Fallout, for fans of the post-apocalyptic game series and TV show. They do have a link to a Discord server, but it is limited to a one-line “Community Bookmark,” which on mobile is buried two links deep. If Reddit allowed admins to prominently link and explain related communities on other platforms, it would be easier for people to explore, and to make a change if they aren’t satisfied where they are.

Linking accounts as a practical path to Exit is a big improvement over the status quo, but the extra friction would probably keep it from being used as broadly as it ought to be. For example, there are good account portability solutions today (see Exit and Interoperability Exist Today, If You Know Where To Look), but they are still pretty niche.

Imagine how much better it would be if you could use something like Sign in with Google everywhere on the Internet, but instead of being locked to one huge platform, you owned and controlled it yourself. Your social graph could exist outside any platform, because your friends and followers could connect their independent identity directly with yours. Your whole social network would be accessible on any platform you chose to visit.

This is the promise of decentralized identity, which I wrote about last year in The First Person Project could be the future of online identity. A solution like the FPP would give you one identity, which you control, and could bring with you to any other platform you choose.

While this would be ideal in a lot of ways, there are two big downsides today.

First, it is not clear that everyone wants to have their entire network follow them everywhere. Do you really want your LinkedIn contacts to see all of the photos you post on Instagram? The FPP does have the notion of one person adopting different personas for different contexts, but managing this would be another point of friction. Google’s failed social network, Google+, tried to do this with a UI called Circles (grouping connections by category so you could post only to colleagues or only to family, etc), but setting it up and managing it was more of a hassle than a benefit.

The second downside of decentralized identity is that it only becomes generally valuable if it’s adopted at scale. Project Liberty poured a small fortune into the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (see Can we regulate or spend our way to Exit?), but only a small platform called MeWe adopted it, so there’s nothing to interoperate with. The First Person Project has a great initial use case in Linux kernel developers, but that’s a very small community, and isn’t fully rolled out yet. We are years or longer away from a practical solution for billions of users.

I hope that decentralized identity does take off and solve the persona problem, but for a goal of practical Exit in the near term, we need to accept account fragmentation and the need for linkages. Even with that constraint, regulation to force platforms to allow account linkages and information about alternative groups could do a lot of good in the short term.

———

NEXT WEEK: the one-year anniversary of Platformocracy! Over the next few weeks, look for celebrations, reflections, data about the most popular issues, and restating my core thesis for new readers. This is a great time to share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues. Please encourage them to subscribe!

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].