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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#121

Post by tetrisgm »

tynanpurdy wrote: post #107
tetrisgm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HMU! I’m “shokunin.” on discord, leshokunin on TG / Twitter.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.

Re: Open Social

#122

Post by pessimizer »

isodev wrote: post #118

Yes, it’s interesting but there is no way the instantiation of the protocol (Bluesky) remains free of investor influences. It would require a great deal of capital for anyone to recreate the “network” in such an eventuality. So yes, it’s cool but not really Open.

They took VC a long time ago.

Re: Open Social

#123

Post by verdverm »

tetrisgm wrote: post #99
nunobrito wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, and yet depends on ourselves to popularize and make this tech happen. Maybe, just maybe a newer startup out there will have a CEO/CTO that is deeply influenced by open social and delivers a success app that reaches the masses. One never knows, but for sure it won't happen when we do nothing.

Has the experience of spinning up an instance been simplified?

What do you mean by "instance"?

There are several protocol components you can run independently, each filling a different role and having different complexity levels

If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip

Re: Open Social

#124

Post by tetrisgm »

steveklabnik wrote: post #108
tetrisgm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.

Re: Open Social

#125

Post by jrowen »

tetrisgm wrote: post #102
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…

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.

I think a lot of people treat their own content as disposable also though. I don't know if most people would really care to save or dig through their entire Twitter history, for example. The rise of Stories is evidence of this. We're moving from a culture of preserving ancient pieces of paper to swimming in a never-ending river of data where there's so many things coming at you that you just move forward and don't have a ton of time to look back.

People that really want to preserve and archive their content find a way to do it and manage it separately. I have all the pictures that I've posted to Instagram. I have anything I've written that I cared enough to keep. If and when IG dies or I move onto the next thing, am I really going to want to meaningfully preserve and transfer the specific contents of that walled garden somewhere else? Maybe. I can definitely see the value, but it doesn't seem super compelling to me yet.

There is something to be said for the uniquely curated walled gardens and the centralized trust and organization and opinions they bring. When I started an Instagram account, I didn't want to transfer my Facebook world, it's a new world with a fresh start. I didn't want the same friends, the same voice for myself, etc. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to dig through all of that to figure out what made sense to carry over.

Re: Open Social

#126

Post by verdverm »

danabramov wrote: post #119
verdverm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://github.com/lexicon-community for the effort towards common lexicon

Yeah, atproto pushes this down to be a community/governance issue. Nobody is preventing apps from working out a common standard and supporting it. However, nobody is forcing them to do that either. So it will play out with natural dynamics. What atproto ensures is that there's a convention for strongly-typed foward-evolving schemas and how they get validated (and reverse domains specify the authority). But ultimately…

For anyone who wants to read up more on this, another of Paul's (non-math) Notes (also, not the same Paul :)

https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance

Re: Open Social

#127

Post by tetrisgm »

verdverm wrote: post #123
tetrisgm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the experience of spinning up an instance been simplified?

What do you mean by "instance"? There are several protocol components you can run independently, each filling a different role and having different complexity levels If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.

Re: Open Social

#128

Post by dgaffney »

jrowen wrote: post #98
dgaffney wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, https://x.com

So mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better, because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent idea.

It’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to survive, which will in turn read legibly to users as less exploitative (you decide your feed, you can switch providers, you can choose moderation layers, etc)

Re: Open Social

#129

Post by verdverm »

isodev wrote: post #118

Yes, it’s interesting but there is no way the instantiation of the protocol (Bluesky) remains free of investor influences. It would require a great deal of capital for anyone to recreate the “network” in such an eventuality. So yes, it’s cool but not really Open.

for clarity, Bluesky is an app and ATProtocol is an Open Social fabric they built along with it and what Bluesky is built on top of

In the long-term, ATProtocol will be separated from Bluesky the company and end up as a standards and in some shared governance structure

Re: Open Social

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

all2 wrote: post #113
analogpixel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

So email threads but on a web page, and filtered by subscription instead of senders/receivers. Clever. How can I add this to my website? How do you facilitate discovery? IE, what if I want to know about replies people have made without subscribing to their /social page?

Responding to the proposal (which is unjustly flagged to death, even if I agree that it isn’t a good idea):

> I came up with a solution that eliminates centralized control, trolls, advertising, and really all forms of harassment, and it doesn't even require a special server.

If it behaved as you describe (only followers see top-level updates and only followers of every person i the chain see replies; which I don’t think the concrete features you describe actually support, but I’ll get to that next), then it also eliminates the thing that makes social media work for both audiences and the people looking for audiences—there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.

Of course, with public outgoing feeds where visibility limits are a decision of the viewer’s client (to which all the visibility-deciding work of a server is outsourced, to avoid having a dedicated social server and just rely on regular web pages), it can’t be guaranteed to work that way. It can work that way for a viewer who wants to see that restrictive of a view, but that doesn’t prevent other people from having a more expansive view.

You can choose what you see, but not who can see your stuff or who can engage with it (if you have a client that behaves in the described restrictive manner, you won’t see engagement from people you don’t follow, but they can engage and others with a permissive client can see that engagement.)

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