99% of social media users don't care about any of this. If it's one extra step or configuration they need to learn, or includes a word like "protocol" that they need to understand, they won't use it.
Open Social
11–20 of 409 posts
Re: Open Social
#12I'm a simple man, I see a Dan post and I click.
I'm a bit concerned that the open web only won because of first mover advantage. What gives me hope is OSS winning.
I'd love to see something like atproto win though. It's clear that a major issue with social media is network effects preventing better apps from becoming popular.
Re: Open Social
#13The bit about aggregation is interesting, but it's not clear to me what the performance characteristics will be for very popular accounts. Presumably Justin Beiber's repo cannot be expected to handle 100 million WebSocket connections, all of which push out a message the instant he posts something. Is it vital to have more centralized hosts which can implement the sort of hybrid push vs. pull models that Twitter famously needed to implement?
Re: Open Social
#14Does this article mention anywhere that Dan is a former employee of Bluesky and I just missed that disclosure?
Re: Open Social
#1599% of social media users don't care about any of this. If it's one extra step or configuration they need to learn, or includes a word like "protocol" that they need to understand, they won't use it.
That's one reason why Bluesky has gained a lot of traction. All of this is under the surface, not something you need to care about unless you want to.
Re: Open Social
#16Sadly, 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…
Unfortunately, yes. The problem is, basically, people.
Re: Open Social
#17Now 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 a…
There are some github project which offer free domains if you send them a issue asking them kindly for subdomain iirc
https://github.com/topics/free-domains
Another thing, the thing that you mention is really similar to how tor onion links work... Except they offer encryption and prevents MITM/any other ways while still having your ip hidden.
Another idea which I use sometimes is to use something like cloudflare tunnels or ssh forwarding with things like serveo.net or any ssh based remote forwarding in general like pinggy or even ngrok.
If you are using this in some internal thing, I can also suggest something like piping server which I really like and I want to build something like a web browser tor-onion links esque but on top of piping server, its really really cool
Re: Open Social
#18I feel very conflicted about this work.
On one side I find these ideas extremely compelling. This is aligned with the Indie web body of work, that pictures anyone having a personal website of their own content and ownership over that. And this page an article are beautifully put together.
On the other hand, we haven’t really seen a lot of developers adopting these standards for their own projects (like using this for their personal website or open source project). Nor from casual users (including people who make their own blogs and websites).
I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels.
I respect the vision and the work. Will personally see if we can use this for our work. But I wonder how we make this into something that’s not just a micro niche hobby.
Re: Open Social
#19The bit about aggregation is interesting, but it's not clear to me what the performance characteristics will be for very popular accounts. Presumably Justin Beiber's repo cannot be expected to handle 100 million WebSocket connections, all of which push out a message the instant he posts something. Is it vital to have more centralized hosts which can implement the sort of hybrid push vs. pull models that Twitter famou…
In atproto, those websocket connections aren't between users's repos, they're between an application and user's repos. Bieber has one connection per application doing aggregation, not per follower.
Re: Open Social
#20Good article, very clear.
Can you also do one for NOSTR?
The functioning is similar, albeit there is no need for hosting user data since it can be sent to multiple relays and live reachable to others from there.
Thanks in advance.