Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Social Filesystem

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 243 posts

Re: A Social Filesystem

#21

Post by dang »

ninkendo wrote: post #6

> When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests f…

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A Social Filesystem

#22

Post by jrm4 »

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea.

It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control.

Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentralized surveillance record.

This why I say that most of Mastodon's limitations and bugs in this regard (by leaving everything to the "servers") are actually features. The ability to forget and delete et al is actually important, and this makes that HARDER.

I'm just kind of like, JUST DO MASTODONS MODEL, like email. It's better and the kinks are more well thought about and/or solved.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#23

Post by plagiarist »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

Shouldn't the ability to forget and delete content that was ever public on the internet be considered fictional anyway?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#24

Post by bee_rider »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

This seems like tensions between normal/practical and “opsec” style privacy thinking… Really, we can never be sure anything that gets posted on the internet won’t be captured by somebody outside our control. So, if we want to be full paranoid, we should act like it will be.

But practically lots of people have spent a long time posting their opinions carelessly on the internet. Just protected by the fact that nobody really has (or had) space to back up every post or time to look at them too carefully. The former has probably not been the case for a long time (hard drives are cheap), and the latter is possibly not true anymore in the LLM era.

To some extent maybe we should be acting like everything is being put into a perfect distributed record. Then, the fact that one actually exists should serve as a good reminder of how we ought to think of our communications, right?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#25

Post by iameli »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

what if I want to publish something publicly on the internet though

Re: A Social Filesystem

#26

Post by case0x »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

>helping build a perfect decentralized surveillance record

a record of what? Posts I wish to share with the public anyway?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#27

Post by mozzius »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

This is a line of thinking that just supposes we shouldn’t post things on the internet at all. Which, sure, is probably the right move if you’re that concerned about OPSEC, but just because ActivityPub has a flakier model doesn’t mean it isn’t being watched

Re: A Social Filesystem

#28

Post by danabramov »

jrm4 wrote: post #22

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea. It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control. Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentral…

Author here. I think it's fair to say that AT protocol's model is "everyone is a scraper", including first party. Which has both bad and good. I share your concern here. For myself, I like the clarity of "treat everything you post as scraped" over "maybe someone is scraping but maybe not" security by obscurity. I also like that there is a way for me to at least guarantee that if I intentionally make something public, it doesn't get captured by the container I posted it into.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#29

Post by pegasus »

noelwelsh wrote: post #16

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/

Indeed. And we can get inspired and involved in bringing about that better world.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#30

Post by danabramov »

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…

My goal with writing is generally to move things out of my head in the shape that they existed in my head. If it's useful but too long, I trust other people to pick what they find valuable, riff on it, and so on.

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

You can skip to the end of the article where I do a few demos: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/#up-in-the-atmosp.... I suggest a file manager there:

>Open https://pdsls.dev. [...] It’s really like an old school file manager, except for the social stuff.

And yes, the paradigm is essentially "everyone is a scraper".

Post reply on HN