This article seems pretty far detached from the problems that people experience using technology. It’s the kind of thing that only deeply technical people consider.
When someone uses a service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive or Google Drive, they really aren’t experiencing any kind of problem where their data “isn’t theirs” or is “trapped.” It’s not that hard to migrate to something else and the services themselves are reasonably low-friction.
In terms of social data, users don’t really have a major issue with the status quo, and those who do have already developed relatively popular solutions like Mastodon and BlueSky.
Even “proprietary” photos applications like Apple Photos and Google Photos have very easy migration paths to other services.
So what exactly is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Giving me an @Bob handle? Did I want that or need that?
> In terms of social data, users don’t really have a major issue with the status quo
That's exactly it. And with social media (unlike files and photo storage) migration isn't really something people care about, because it's about the present not the past.
If you move from Twitter to Bluesky, does anyone care about moving their tweet history? They just want their list of followers to migrate over as much as possible, which happens relatively organically anyways.