Not customers, partners

Over the weekend, Rusty Foster wrote up how things went migrating Today in Tabs off of substack: Tabs Migration Report.

There’s an observation towards the end that stuck with me all weekend:

All of us who make a living doing creative work on the internet inevitably find ourselves in a partnership with some kind of tech platform.

Whenever a platform starts acting the fool, there’s always a contingent of folks saying this is why you should run your own systems, and so on. And, speaking as someone who has literally run an entire website from a server in a closet, it’s great that option exists. It’s great that the structure of the internet is such that you can run your own webserver, or email system, or mastodon instance. But if you’re putting creative work out on the web shouldn’t have to, any more than writers shouldn’t have to know how to operate a printing press. Part of the web and personal computers “growing up”, is that you don’t have to be an all-in expert to use this stuff anymore.

There’s always a lot of chatter about whether big systems are “platforms” or ‘publishers”; what the responsibilities of those big systems are. In actual grown-up media, it’s understood that say, a writer and a publisher are in a partnership—a partnership with some asymmetry, but a partnership. It’s not a customer-service relationship with upside-down power dynamics.

I know it’s nowhere close to that simple, but maybe we need to start saying “partner” instead of “platform”.