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12 hours agoBut here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.
One of the big turning points for Facebook for them to increase the difficulty of switching was cutting off RSS as a way to syndicate content into Facebook. After that, content had to be manually created in Facebook, instead of automatically imported from a third party source based on standard protocols. This forced people away from their chosen content authoring system into Facebook’s opinionated, inflexible, ad infested walled garden.