Cleave clients from servers

by Samir Talwar

Thursday, 12 February 2026 at 09:00 CET

I was once in an interview for a Silicon Valley job. The interviewer, an American, asked me how I found out about the job. I told them that a recruiter contacted me. They replied, “London is a city of middlemen.”

It’s true, London is full of people who will sell you their contact book. It’s their asset: who to talk to, and who not to bother with. But compared to Silicon Valley, we¹ are but tiny little babies.

I watch shows via Netflix, sometimes.

I like the shows. I fucking hate the Netflix app. I don’t like that it hides the controls behind random taps. I despise the constant pushing of new stuff.

But if I want to watch a show on Netflix on my phone, I have no choice. I must use the app. I may not use something which lets me, I don’t know, put the playback controls on the side of the screen.

I use Patreon a lot. I love that I can pay my favourite creators to get extras, like a comic strip a day early, or a show I like without adverts.

I fucking hate the Patreon app.

But I also hate newsletters via email, so I begrudgingly use it.

What I want is for my Patreon subscriptions to show up in my feed reader, NetNewsWire. But it’s locked down; Patreon does not and never will support RSS or Atom, or even a workable API.

There’s one exception: podcasts are delivered over RSS. They have to be: if it’s not RSS, it’s not a podcast. (A “Spotify exclusive” is not a podcast.) So they resort to dark patterns: the podcast shows up in the app as soon as it’s published, but only in the feed an hour or two later.

I like Apple Fitness. It helps me get off my bum.

I even like the app.

I do not like the Apple Watch. But I just replaced my 5-year-old one, because the battery was dying, and it’s the one thing that makes me get off my bum.

I’m beholden to the hardware. The software won’t work with another heart rate tracker. I need this one.

We shall not talk about Facebook.

And I’m lucky, because I don’t have to rely on a medical device with locked-down firmware, or a wheelchair that requires a paid subscription to drive. (And even though it was the future of juicing, I neglected to buy a Juicero.)

Everywhere I look, there is a “software” company, typically based in northern California, offering me something good with one hand, ready to handcuff me with the other, as soon as I reach forward.

They insert themselves in the middle, and leech until both sides are dry. They don’t sell software, they sell access, just like the recruiters in London, but on a scale so different, it’s barely recognisable.

Let’s get some fucking APIs instead. APIs that separate the client from the server, so that I can watch, or listen, or read, or live the way I choose.

And I know, you need to break the APIs to innovate. You can’t have an API for streaming music or video before you have streaming music or video. There’ll always be this tension. But we’ve swung too far the other way. Commodities that won’t commoditise because they lock in the consumption, force you to do it on their terms.

We at least need regulation to say that APIs must be available, and you can’t block clients with your Terms of Service. Any competition authority worth its paperwork needs to identify companies in dominant positions and force them to a higher standard, to provide fair access to any consumer.

With APIs come de facto standards. A market leader emerges, and others copy their API. One client, multiple services. That’s the beginning of federation.

Cleave clients from servers. Bring back user agents.

That’s the promise of the web, and it’s a broken promise.