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Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

If I recall properly, a new EU directive requires interop for discord/whatsapp/etc. But it does not solve the account creation issue.

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I didn't know about this, and was curious about it, so went to look it up. It's part of the Digital Markets Act:

> ... EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request.

Small nitpick, while it would definitely apply to Whatsapp (it is mentioned by name in the press release), I am not sure if this applies to Discord? IIRC it is not a "gatekeeper".

Gatekeeper definition from press release:

> market capitalisation of at least 75 billion euro or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion. To be designated as “gatekeepers”, these companies must also provide certain services such as browsers, messengers or social media, which have at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU.and 10 000 annual business users.

Full press release: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220315IP...

Someone mentioned this directive on slidge's MUC* yesterday, but I haven't looked into it too much yet. I guess slidge's plugins should be easier to maintain once this is directive is in application. I should focus on improving slidge's core more then.

* xmpp:slidge@conference.nicoco.fr?join

This is a very shy attempt at, finally, regulate big tech: interop with protocols which are stable in time and simple enough to do a good enough job. Big tech dreads something that would disable software/network protocols planned obsolescence (it is much less true for hardware), don't forget, those ppl are scammers: if they cannot "embrace and extend" anymore...

In their directive, they forgot noscript/basic (x)html interop, and for the messaging protocols, the account creation which is actually a big issue.

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