Is anyone else really curious about how this might positively impact software/the web? I’m sure people can come up with efficiency bogeymen, but I can see
- local stuff adapted for local needs/cultures
- federated software getting a real boost to whatever extent it can avoid caching other servers’ data[1] to be compliant–then you can just have your stuff live in your Lithuanian provider and pull across dank Canadian memes
- broadly better practices around cellular / partitioned infrastructure
We should all be skeptical of markets as a force for good in any situation, but I can’t help thinking some shattering (nay, might I say… “disruption”?) of “natural monopolies” will lead to there being local demand that can spur innovation for cooler things.
I believe Pleroma doesn’t store images, for instance, just pulls them from the origin server. Lots of perf concerns with these approaches but perhaps potential ↩︎
I read a Finnish news article about the subject where Aura Salla, Facebook’s manager of EU relations, was interviewed. She told that the discussion about the subject has gotten off the rails and that the company isn’t considering leaving EU as a relevant scenario due to over 25 million enterprise customers. According to her, it’s more about access to the data which getting restricted may cause problems for all companies. Also the company’s manager of societal relations, Nick Clegg told in European Business Summit that they are not leaving EU.
If Facebook doesn’t wuss out and really leaves EU, the timing couldn’t get any better for alternative social media platforms (especially federated ones) to break in and rise in popularity.