BYOC is why I'm so excited about decentralized social media.
I hate how we have to put up with whatever UI / algorithms each site gives us. Why can't we have access to the underlying data and choose how we wish to consume it?
Bring Your Own Client
221–230 of 262 posts
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#222Isn’t this just a reinvention of the idea of Open Standards?
The fundamental problem is not that no one has formalized the idea, but that the baseline incentives for commercial software do not include optimization for interoperability.
For that we need standards bodies or other regulation - RFCs and the like. And, hacker news, we need line engineers to recognize when their produce is suboptimal by these standards, and why.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#223I've got lots of small tweaks I'd love to incorporate into a Twitter client. Unfortunately, I think many of them would violate the developer TOS. For example: hiding avatars completely or generating replacement avatars using the username to remove any chance of internal bias associated with an account's avatar. Another one: hiding images by default and forcing you to click to expand/open to see them (no previews). A…
Twitter is actually working on a new BYOC model for their platform. Called Blue Sky: https://twitter.com/bluesky
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#224Interesting premise, but some of the examples given as BYOC wishlist is a little weird to me. Google doc (the main example) makes sense, sure. With others like Notion -- I recently started using Notion at a personal level and I feel like much of the draw about Notion is basically the UI (client). I don't use it to publish public pages or anything, only private notes. Most of its usefulness to me comes down to it havi…
Notion basically is the client. Everything can be exported as .csv or markdown, so the only thing that notion provides are the nice database features and the UI.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.
That view seems a little shoehorned because the parent comment specified "protocol", implying that it would be the connection between client and storage, thus not user-facing. Regardless, * Blender * Godot * Krita * GitLab * Olive * Firefox * Thunderbird * NextCloud * Amarok * Vital * and more The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX re…
What IS the contribution flow for a designer, anyway? If they can't submit a PR, it seems like the best they can do is submit an issue with a mockup. Are volunteer developers likely to jump on that and implement it?
Most developers I've worked with don't exactly love going back and forth with designers on UI stuff.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#226There is an app called Twetch which is basically Twitter on the blockchain with money. Recently, I wanted to share someone's feed to a friend, but Twetch requires you to login, and that friend didn't have an account. I then remembered a third-party app called bitsurf.network that essentially served this role, and sent him that instead. Similarly, before Twetch had its search feature, a random developer had built one, because the data was available. So long as you are OK with limited privacy, these are pretty magical experiences compared to the status quo. I wonder if the incentives will allow it to last.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#227The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…
(post author here) While I agree that commercial incentives are critical to consider, two caveats I'd add: 1) I think the nature and depth of the incentives problem varies a lot by industry. Social media is a really complex case, for example. But I'm most interested in collaborative productivity tools, where I think many companies are okay being incentivized to build the best product rather than build data moats. 2)…
Hey Geoffrey! We are building this in https://braid.org: a standard protocol and API for synchronizing state with realtime editing, conflict resolution, and a good offline mode. By building this into the web, we're creating the equivalent of a "web filesystem" as you put it, where every file (aka "resource") has full versioning, realtime updates, offline abilities, and merge resolution.
I know you're aware of Braid, but I'm not sure you see how much our work is actually aligned. In fact my deepest personal motivation in creating Braid is to enable the "BYOC" vision — but I've been calling it a "separation of UI from state", where each user can choose their own interface to interact with the world. In today's web, the data owner controls the interface. But this means that they control how way too many people interact with the world, because we increasingly have to interact with the world through computers.
The Braid abstraction makes it easier for developers to program with distributed state, and in the process also makes user-interfaces and back-ends interoperable, so that we can easily switch out different UIs for the same state.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#228Not having to ship your own client to every platform is the biggest selling point of web apps (or cloud apps). The border between app and client shifted to more low-level, but also more capable interfaces: HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS rather than single-purpose file formats like DOCX or PSD.
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate with a separate storage provider. And that storage provider has an obligation to make my data accessible and manageable by me. I think that is a bit much, I would m…
We can split the difference by mandating that whatever storage services are provided via "webapps" must also be provided via a plain API. Users shouldn't have their data locked behind proprietary javascript. This would create zero additional burden, as every webapp needs such an API for the front end to talk to anyway.
I'd like to see cold storage providers split from app providers.
Strict enforcement policy on cold storage data warehouses. And sensible policy for the app providers, like not caching PII.
Implement and enforce at the fed level using this division in a manner that is something akin to Glass-Steagall.
Owning data should not be something providers can ever exploit.
[edit]: I also think this could be used as a means to break apart Big Tech
Re: Bring Your Own Client
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I posited a similar point to a former colleague (mine was more about eventual market dominance due to excellent UI+UX), and he came back with Craigslist as a perfect example of a product that gained a massive user base well into an era where its UI felt very outdated. A few years after this exchange, I feel more like I was right about my point: FB Marketplace has almost completely taken over as far as a classified pr…
I think the problem with this analysis of Craigslist vs. Facebook is twofold. One, Craigslist had, in fact, a great UI. It was simple, clean and accessible to everyone, no matter whether you were using the newest desktop browser, a screen reader, a cheap phone or a potato. Craigslist is a success story of bullshit-free UI. It got beaten by FB Marketplace because Facebook has almost three billion captive users, and a…
Craigslist also got beaten because they fought becoming a unified marketplace--with lawyers.
Had they not fiercely destroyed all the various "Search all Craiglist" mechanisms, they might have had a chance at fighting FB Marketplace.