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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#11

Post by avsm »

lou1306 wrote: post #4
catapart wrote: post #3

yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub. if they were decent people, th…

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now . They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

Microblogging is also the least interesting part of the ATProto ecosystem. I've switched all my git hosting over to https://tangled.org and am loving it, not least of which is that my git server (a 'knot' in Tangled parlance) is under my control as a PDS and has no storage limits!

Re: A Social Filesystem

#12

Post by geokon »

This was a nice intro to AT (though I feel it could have been a bit shorter)

The whole things seems a bit over engineered with poor separation of concerns.

It feels like it'd be smarter to flatten the design and embed everything in the Records. And then other layers can be built on top of that

Making every record includes the author's public-key (or signature?). Anything you need to point at you'd either just give its hash, or hash + author-public-key. This way you completely eliminate this goofy filesystem hierarchy. Everything else is embed it in the Record.

Lexicons/Collections are just a field in the Record. Reverse looking up the hash to find what it is, also a separate problem.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#13

Post by skybrian »

This article goes into a lot of detail, more than is really needed to get the point across. Much of that could have been moved to an appendix? But it's a great metaphor. Someone should write a user-friendly file browser for PDS's so you can see it for yourself.

I'll add that, like a web server that's just serving up static files, a Bluesky PDS is a public filesystem. Furthermore it's designed to be replicated, like a Git repo. Replicating the data is an inherent part of how Bluesky works. Replication is out of your control. On the bright side, it's an automatic backup.

So, much like with a public git repo, you should be comfortable with the fact that anything you put there is public and will get indexed. Random people could find it in a search. Inevitably, AI will train on it. I believe you can delete stuff from your own PDS but it's effectively on your permanent record. That's just part of the deal.

So, try not to put anything there that you'll regret. The best you could do is pick an alias not associated with your real name and try to use good opsec, but that's perilous.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#14

Post by skybrian »

avsm wrote: post #11
lou1306 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now . They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

Microblogging is also the least interesting part of the ATProto ecosystem. I've switched all my git hosting over to https://tangled.org and am loving it, not least of which is that my git server (a 'knot' in Tangled parlance) is under my control as a PDS and has no storage limits!

Is it as easy for other people to read as a Github repo? Want to share?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#15

Post by evbogue »

geokon wrote: post #12

This was a nice intro to AT (though I feel it could have been a bit shorter) The whole things seems a bit over engineered with poor separation of concerns. It feels like it'd be smarter to flatten the design and embed everything in the Records. And then other layers can be built on top of that Making every record includes the author's public-key (or signature?). Anything you need to point at you'd either just give it…

Yes. SSB and ANProto do this. We actually can simply link to a hash of a pubkey+signature which opens to a timestamped hashlink to a record. Everything is a hash lookup this way and thus all nodes can store data.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#16

Post by noelwelsh »

This, Local-first Software [1], the Humane Web Manifesto [2], etc. make me optimistic that we're moving away from the era of "you are the product" dystopian enshittification to a more user-centric world. Here's hoping.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

[2]: https://humanewebmanifesto.com/

Re: A Social Filesystem

#18

Post by DustinBrett »

skybrian wrote: post #13

This article goes into a lot of detail, more than is really needed to get the point across. Much of that could have been moved to an appendix? But it's a great metaphor. Someone should write a user-friendly file browser for PDS's so you can see it for yourself. I'll add that, like a web server that's just serving up static files, a Bluesky PDS is a public filesystem. Furthermore it's designed to be replicated, like a…

I think that is the general style of overreacted.io posts.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#20

Post by seridescent »

skybrian wrote: post #13

This article goes into a lot of detail, more than is really needed to get the point across. Much of that could have been moved to an appendix? But it's a great metaphor. Someone should write a user-friendly file browser for PDS's so you can see it for yourself. I'll add that, like a web server that's just serving up static files, a Bluesky PDS is a public filesystem. Furthermore it's designed to be replicated, like a…

> Someone should write a user-friendly file browser for PDS's so you can see it for yourself.

https://pdsls.dev/ can serve this purpose IMO :) it's a pretty neat app, open source, and is totally client-side

edit: whoops, pdsls is already mentioned at the end of the article

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