Open Social

This is such an important idea -- and yet I feel like the hyper-individualized "bluesky" implementation pictured is a less good practical idea than Mastodons more "server/host" way of doing things.

I get that theoretically the two should be similar or even identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice in this style, in the form of good ol email.

Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.

And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway so you don't need to type the monstrosity.

Or is it a really bad idea™?

I've tried to lightly allude to Mastodon here:

>Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and search are non-negotiable in modern social products.

Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented user experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a full view of the network like they do.

The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and so on). Because it enables global aggregation, every atproto app has a consistent state of the world. There's no notion of "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation artifacts as you have in Mastodon.

I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or performance characteristics.

Shindig https://shindig.apache.org/ was the reference implementation of this spec. Was pretty novel at the time.

Sadly, it's hard to imagine a world where something like this will ever catch on. The target audience for "traditional" social media is very different from the niche of people who want decentralized social media. Most people just use social media as a means to an end and don't really care about the systems behind it.

If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account, that defeats the whole purpose because then everyone will still be on one or two large providers.