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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#41

Post by skybrian »

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…

It's true that Mastodon is somewhat better if you don't want to be found, though it's hardly a guarantee. From a "seeing like a state" perspective, Bluesky is more "legible" and that has downsides.

But I think there's room for both models. There are upsides to more legibility too. Sometimes we want to be found. Sometimes we're even engaging in self-promotion.

Also, I'll point out that Hacker News is also very legible. Everything is immutable after the first hour and you can download it. We just live with it.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#42

Post by danabramov »

clnhlzmn wrote: post #19

Seems similar to remoteStorage [0]. What happened to that anyway? [0]: https://remotestorage.io/

This doesn't look similar to me.

remoteStorage seems aimed at apps that don't aggregate data across users.

AT aims to solve aggregation, which is when many users own their own data, but what you want to display is something computed from many of them. Like social media or even HN itself.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#43

Post by eduction »

Unpopular opinion: this should be done with xml, not json. XML can have types, be self describing, and be extended (the X in XML).

That said it’s a very elegant way to describe AT protocol.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#44

Post by danabramov »

nonethewiser wrote: post #34

But how do you get people to actually want this? This stuff is pretty niche even within tech.

Bluesky is not huge, but 40M users is not nothing either. You don't get people to want this, you just try to build better products. The hope is that this enables us all to build better products by making them more interoperable by default. Whether this pans out remains to be seen.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#45

Post by heliumtera »

iameli wrote: post #25
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

Maybe some could want to publish something publicly but anonymously?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#46

Post by dameis »

motoxpro wrote: post #40

I've always thought walled gardens are the effect of consumer preferences, not the cause. The effect of the internet (everything open to everyone) was to create smaller pockets around a specific idea or culture. Just like you have group chats with different people, thats what IG and Snap are. Segmentation all the way down. I am so happy that my IG posts arent available on my HN or that my IG posts arent being easily…

>I am so happy that my IG posts arent available on my HN or that my IG posts arent being easily cross posted to a service I dont want to use like truth social.

ATProto apps don't automatically work like this and don't support all types of "files" by default. The app's creator has to built support for a specific "file type". My app https://anisota.net supports both Bluesky "files" and Leaflet "files", so my users can see Bluesky posts, Leaflet posts, and Anisota posts. But this is because I've designed it that way.

Anyone can make a frontend that displays the contents of users PDSs.

Here's an example...

Bluesky Post on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dame.is/post/3m36cqrwfsm24

Bluesky Post on Anisota: https://anisota.net/profile/dame.is/post/3m36cqrwfsm24)

Leaflet post on Leaflet: https://dame.leaflet.pub/3m36ccn5kis2x

Leaflet post on Anisota: https://anisota.net/profile/dame.is/document/3m36ccn5kis2x

I also have a little side project called Aturi that helps provide "universal links" so that you can open ATProto-based content on the client/frontend of your choice: https://aturi.to/anisota.net

Re: A Social Filesystem

#47

Post by danabramov »

motoxpro wrote: post #40

I've always thought walled gardens are the effect of consumer preferences, not the cause. The effect of the internet (everything open to everyone) was to create smaller pockets around a specific idea or culture. Just like you have group chats with different people, thats what IG and Snap are. Segmentation all the way down. I am so happy that my IG posts arent available on my HN or that my IG posts arent being easily…

>The effect of the internet (everything open to everyone) was to create smaller pockets around a specific idea or culture. Just like you have group chats with different people, thats what IG and Snap are. Segmentation all the way down.

I actually agree with that. See from the post:

>For some use cases, like cross-site syndication, a standard-ish jointly governed lexicon makes sense. For other cases, you really want the app to be in charge. It’s actually good that different products can disagree about what a post is! Different products, different vibes. We’d want to support that, not to fight it.

AT doesn't make posts from one app appear in all apps by default, or anything like that. It just makes it possible for products to interoperate where that makes sense. It is up to whoever's designing the products to decide which data from the network to show. E.g. HN would have no reason to show Instagram posts. However, if I'm making my own aggregator app, I might want to process HN stuff together with Reddit stuff. AT gives me that ability.

To give you a concrete example where this makes sense. Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub/) is a macroblogging platform, but it ingests Bluesky posts to keep track of quotes from the Leaflets on the network, and display those quotes in a Leaflet's sidebar. This didn't require Leaflet and Bluesky to collaborate, it's just naturally possible.

Another reason to support this is that it allows products to be "forked" when someone is motivated enough. Since data is on the open network, nothing is stopping from a product fork from being perfectly interoperable with the original network (meaning it both sees "original" data and can contribute to it). So the fork doesn't have to solve the "convince everyone to move" problem, it just needs to be good enough to be worth running and growing organically. This makes the space much more competitive. To give an example, Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky that takes different moderation decisions (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...) but remains interoperable with the network.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#49

Post by doctorflan »

I was hoping this was literally just going to be some safe version of a BBS/Usenet sort of filesharing that was peer-based king of like torrents, but just simple and straightforward, with no porn, infected warez, randomware, crypto-mining, racist/terrorist/nazi/maga/communist/etc. crap, where I could just find old computing magazines, homebrew games, recipes, and things like that.

Why can’t we have nice things?

I guess that’s what Internet Archive is for.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#50

Post by Vinnl »

clnhlzmn wrote: post #19

Seems similar to remoteStorage [0]. What happened to that anyway? [0]: https://remotestorage.io/

remoteStorage is still occasionally getting updates. https://solidproject.org is a somewhat newer, similar project backed by Tim Berners-Lee. (With its own baggage.)

I think of those projects as working relatively well for private data, but public data is kinda awkward. ATProto is the other way around: it has a lot of infra to make public data feasible, but private data is still pretty awkward.

It's a lot more popular though, so maybe has a bigger chance of solving those issues? Alternatively, Bluesky keeps its own extensions for that, and starts walling those bits off more and more as the VCs amp up the pressure. That said, I know very little about Bluesky, so this speculation might all be nonsense.

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