(2022-04-25) Brander Credible Exit

Gordon Brander: Credible exit. Amplifying the angst is the fact that the structure of Twitter is fundamentally feudal. This town square is owned and controlled by a single company, now by a single person. There is lofty talk about democracy and free speech but there are no mechanisms for self-governance, no procedures for holding power to account, no checks and balances, no due process, no bill of rights. (Musk Buys Twitter)

But does it have to be this way? What if you weren’t locked in?

There are examples of credible exit in the wild today.

DNS offers credible exit for your domain name

Email offers credible exit for your social graph. It’s all there in your address book. The protocol is federated, so you can change between competing providers. You can even save your emails to your computer, or move them between services

Podcasts offer credible exit for subscriptions

Mirror.xyz offers credible exit over distributed protocols

The value of on-chain (blockchain) exit isn’t totally theoretical. When the on-chain service Hic et Nunc went down, it was mostly resurrected just days later

Github offers credible exit for code — a byproduct of building GitHub on top of Git, which is a distributed protocol... (but you can’t clone issues, or GH-actions, or accounts, or many of the other services on top that make GitHub so effective).

Mastodon offers credible exit for communities.

Apps can evolve quickly, but protocols must evolve slowly. It is difficult to reify all of the behavior of an app in a protocol.

Still, we might choose an axis of exit that aligns with the most important thing about the app. Perfect credible exit for everything might not be feasible, but at least we might offer a protocol for the most important things.

At a glance, I see two broad buckets of data that seem worth thinking about, and possibly approaching differently:

Basic data: this is the content you create by hand.

Generated data: the frosting on top that makes the app interesting. Likes, retweets, bookmarks, comments.

I think there may be multiple dimensions along which to think about credible exit

I can export my data

I can sync my data, or at least export and re-import it multiple times

My data is in a useful format:

This is one reason we’ve been prioritizing Lindy formats like plain text in Subconscious.

My data lives in local files. iTunes is a standout example.

Multiple apps can share the same data over a permissionless API.

The app is open source.

Aiming for credible exit is why Subconscious writes plain text files. It’s also the reason we’re experimenting with distributed protocols like IPFS for sync and multiplayer.