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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#101

Post by charcircuit »

ramon156 wrote: post #7
mcny wrote: post #4

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 a…

I might not be fully understanding the idea, but the difference here is that a let's encrypt certificate can be generated on the fly. domains are considered branding, and getting a 5 letter domain nowadays is impossible. The cost here is that you're renting a domain that others might want aswell, people don't really want your LE cert

X lets people own a 5 letter username for free. Renting names is not even industry standard for platforms. It seems like it's only DNS that charges for names.

Re: Open Social

#102

Post by tetrisgm »

jrowen wrote: post #62
tetrisgm wrote: post #18

I 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…

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…

It matters because your posts aren’t just entertainment in the moment — they’re your history, your proof of existence online. Platforms treat them as disposable. If Instagram dies or bans you, your years of photos, writing, and connections vanish. Owning your data means your work and identity survive these issues, if you want.

Re: Open Social

#103

Post by charcircuit »

deadbabe wrote: post #21
notatoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

How about DNS on a blockchain?

They already work in Brave too or for other browsers if you install a webextention.

Re: Open Social

#104

Post by iameli »

jrm4 wrote: post #93
jpereira wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view the atproto approach asks the users to make fewer required complex decisions, but gives them the freedom to make many voluntary ones. If someone wants to use a particular application, they basically just need to sign in. If they don't have an existing ATProto account, they can just make one, in the flow of the application they're signing into. Later they can chose different clients, or different infrastruc…

I mean, this might depend on who your intended audience is? As perhaps pie-in-the-sky my desire is, I'd like to see one of these things replace twitter (as opposed to smaller communities.) And it seems to me that the more frictionless model is the one that looks like something people are used to; just "sign up with a thing." That does leave the interconnection to the servers and others, but that may be how it has to…

Bluesky is incredibly just "sign up with a thing." Except even easier, because you don't have to pick an instance first.

Re: Open Social

#105

Post by ireadmevs »

All of this is meant for 100% public data, right? Or is there a concept of visibility control? Can I create private communities, with data flowing just inside?

Re: Open Social

#106

Post by paxys »

emseetech wrote: post #63
numpad0 wrote: post #47

I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting whale. That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content p…

Social networks rarely come up by being "the same but..." They come up by doing something unique that can't be done on older platforms.

"Unique" is definitely not necessary. Look at the dominant social media platforms of the last two decades. MySpace -> Facebook -> Twitter -> Instagram -> Snapchat -> TikTok. Each of them was a minor evolution over the last, with the core feature set remaining basically the same. Lots of user-generated content, algorithmic recommendations, likes, comments, DMs, ads. There has really not been a revolution in the social media space since it was invented.

Re: Open Social

#107

Post by tynanpurdy »

tetrisgm wrote: post #97
knowtheory wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still some more work to do to make the developer experience simple enough that it's a no-brainer for people to pick ATProto up in anger. But there's a lot of work developing on that front, and the next 6-12 months will be super exciting to watch. The longer story is that most people don't understand that ATProto is more than just Bluesky, and the usecases are wayyyyyy broader. That's going to take more time t…

Absolutely. In fact I’d love for my startup to run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky, but it still looks like quite a lift. Lmk if you have some recommendations. Basically our thing would give that ecosystem the ability to have personal pages that can look like Patreon, YouTube, Instagram and others

It depends how much you want to replicate. All you really need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to your client app, and write them to people’s repos. I’ve been tinkering with the ‘personal website on AT’ idea space for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people already have implemented cool AT integrations in their sites!). Happy to chat ab it.

Re: Open Social

#108

Post by steveklabnik »

tetrisgm wrote: post #97
knowtheory wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still some more work to do to make the developer experience simple enough that it's a no-brainer for people to pick ATProto up in anger. But there's a lot of work developing on that front, and the next 6-12 months will be super exciting to watch. The longer story is that most people don't understand that ATProto is more than just Bluesky, and the usecases are wayyyyyy broader. That's going to take more time t…

Absolutely. In fact I’d love for my startup to run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky, but it still looks like quite a lift. Lmk if you have some recommendations. Basically our thing would give that ecosystem the ability to have personal pages that can look like Patreon, YouTube, Instagram and others

Are you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.

Re: Open Social

#109

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

verdverm wrote: post #61
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #12

I'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.

> a major issue with social media is network effects preventing better apps from becoming popular. One thing ATProto does is enable real competition in social apps, assuming they all run on the atproto fabric. One of the core hopes is that we can get everyone over to something like atproto once, to get them out of the silos, such that this is there last time they have to "move" their social network

The challenge will be that first move, yeah. Current social media companies have every incentive not to let users do that.

Re: Open Social

#110

Post by danabramov »

ireadmevs wrote: post #105

All of this is meant for 100% public data, right? Or is there a concept of visibility control? Can I create private communities, with data flowing just inside?

For now, yes, only 100% public data lives on the protocol (you can still, of course, augment protocol data with the stuff you hold in the DB).

In the future, the plan is to also enable some types of private data on the protocol. See these recent notes from Paul on the state of things:

- https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhmtognls2q

- https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b

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