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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#71

Post by jrowen »

dgaffney wrote: post #69
jrowen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning? Why should people care about the abstract concept of data ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, bo…

idk if the normal user should necessarily care about data ownership, but I think the incentive structure it creates would be immediately legible to most people

I'm not sure what that means, can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?

Re: Open Social

#72

Post by paulryanrogers »

ceayo wrote: post #30

Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.

Does that mean there is a centralized identity service?

Re: Open Social

#73

Post by danabramov »

tantalor wrote: post #5

We already had that in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial It was a complete disaster

This doesn’t similar to atproto, which is what I discuss in the article. “Open social” isn’t an official term btw, I just like it enough to refer to this movement. I think recycling names from dead projects to refer to new concepts is fine. You’re welcome to ignore the article’s title.

Re: Open Social

#74

Post by danabramov »

nunobrito wrote: post #20

Good 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.

I probably won’t do it myself but this one should be helpful: https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html

Re: Open Social

#75

Post by dgaffney »

jrowen wrote: post #71
dgaffney wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk if the normal user should necessarily care about data ownership, but I think the incentive structure it creates would be immediately legible to most people

I'm not sure what that means, can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?

sure, https://x.com

Re: Open Social

#76

Post by steveklabnik »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #72
ceayo wrote: post #30

Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.

Does that mean there is a centralized identity service?

You have two choices of identity service: did:plc, which is, and did:web, which is not.

In theory additional dids could come into existence too, those are just the two that blueksy supports at the moment.

Re: Open Social

#77

Post by danabramov »

drnick1 wrote: post #44

This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have an online presence at all.

Personal websites are great. They don’t do large-scale aggregation which a lot of people enjoy and look for. The article is about an approach to large-scale aggregation with important properties of personal sites. For what it’s worth, you can host atproto repositories from your home too — some people run them on Raspberry Pi.

Re: Open Social

#78

Post by xnx »

I'm glad to see someone recognize the critical importance of authors owning their domain. Without that, you will alway be at the mercy of someone else. The rest is just technical detail.

Re: Open Social

#79

Post by danabramov »

brap wrote: post #42

I think we tend to do a lot of idealization. The vast majority of non-techies don’t care whatsoever about decentralization.

Yes, which is a point the article repeatedly makes. I totally agree with you. See also https://knotbin.leaflet.pub/3lx3uqveyj22f/ which I linked to close to the end of the article.

Re: Open Social

#80

Post by danabramov »

steveklabnik wrote: post #76
paulryanrogers wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean there is a centralized identity service?

You have two choices of identity service: did:plc, which is, and did:web, which is not. In theory additional dids could come into existence too, those are just the two that blueksy supports at the moment.

That’s correct. PLC is being split into an independent entity but that is ongoing: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org

It’s worth noting that PLC can’t fake your data because each edit is recursively signed. So you can verify a chain of updates. However, PLC can in theory deny you service or ignore your updates.

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