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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#51

Post by jrv »

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 think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation.

Twitter was my home on the web for almost 15 years when it got taken over by a ... - well you know the story. At the time I wished I could have taken my identity, my posts, my likes, and my entire social graph over to a compatible app that was run by decent people. Instead, I had to start completely new. But with ATProto, you can do exactly that - someone else can just fork the entire app, and you can keep your identity, your posts, your likes, your social graph. It all just transfers over, as long as the other app is using the same ATProto lexicon (so it's basically the same kind of app).

Re: A Social Filesystem

#52

Post by skybrian »

danabramov wrote: post #47
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 t…

There's also a risk of adversarial cross-site syndication: your stuff can and probably will show up on websites you don't control.

That's just how it works and I accept the risk.

People concerned about that probably shouldn't publish on Bluesky. Private chat makes more sense for a lot of things.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#53

Post by geokon »

danabramov wrote: post #33
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…

I'm not sure I understand your proposal. Do you taking my example (a Twitter post) and showing how it would be stored in your system?

Sure, you'd have something like:

    {:record   {:person-key **public-key** 
                :type :twitter-post
                :message "My friend {:person-key **danabramov-public-key**} suggested I make this on this HN post {:link **record-of-hn-post-hash**}. Look at his latest post {:link **danabramov-newtwitter-post-hash** :person-key **danabramov-public-key**} it's very cool!"}
    :hash      **hash-of-the-record**
    :signature **signature-by-author**}
So everything is self-contained. The other features you'd build on top of this basic primitive

- Getting the @danabramov username would be done by having some lookup service that does person-key->username. You could have several. Usernames can be changed with the service.. But you can have your own map if you want, or infer it from github commits :)) There are some interesting ideas about usernames about. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

- Lexicon is also done separately. This is some validation step that's either done by a consumer app/editor of the record or by a server which distributes records (could be based on the :type or something else). Such a server can check if you have less than 300 graphemes and reject the record if it fails. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

- Collection.. This I think is just organizational? How this is done isn't specified by the Record. It's just aggregating all records of the same type from the same author I guess?

- Hashes.. they can point at anything. You can point at a webpage or an image or another record (where you can indicate the author). For dynamic content you'd need to point at webpage that points at a static URL which has the dynamic content. You'd also need to have a hash->content mapping. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

This kind of setup makes the Record completely decoupled from rest of the "stack". It becomes much more of independent moveable "file" (in the original sense that you have at the top) than the interconnected setup you end up with at the end.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#54

Post by dameis »

heliumtera wrote: post #45
iameli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe some could want to publish something publicly but anonymously?

You can do that already — just don't post under an account that has your real identity

Re: A Social Filesystem

#55

Post by danabramov »

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…

Author here! I grew up reading Joel's blog and am familiar with this post. Do you have a more pointed criticism?

I agree something like "hyperlinked JSON" maybe sounds too abstract, but so does "hyperlinked HTML". But I doubt you see web as being vague? This is basically web for data.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#56

Post by skeledrew »

I've been thinking of this for some time, conceptually, but perhaps from a more fundamental angle. I think the idea of "files" is pretty dated and can be thrown out. Treat everything as data blobs (inspired by PerKeep[0]) addressed by their hashes and many of the issues described in the article just aren't even a thing. If it really makes sense, or for compatibility sake, relevant blobs can be exposed through a filesystem abstraction.

Also, users don't really want apps. What users want are capabilities. So not Bluesky, or YouTube for example, but the capability to easily share a life update with interested parties, or the capability to access yoga tutorial videos. The primary issue with apps is that they bundle capabilities, but many times particular combinations of capabilities are desired, which would do well to be wired together.

Something in particular that's been popping up fairly often for me is I'm in a messaging app, and I'd like to lookup certain words in some of the messages, then perhaps share something relevant from it. Currently I have to copy those words over to a browser app for that lookup, then copy content and/or URL and return to the messaging app to share. What I'd really love is the capability to do lookups in the same window that I'm chatting with others. Like it'd be awesome if I could embed browser controls alongside the message bubbles with the lookup material, and optionally make some of those controls directly accessible to the other part(y|ies), which may even potentially lead to some kind of adhoc content collaboration as they make their own updates.

It's time to break down all these barriers that keep us from creating personalized workflows on demand. Both at the intra-device level where apps dominate, and at the inter-device level where API'd services do.

[0] https://perkeep.org/

Re: A Social Filesystem

#57

Post by jrowen »

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 agree. I don't understand the driving force here.

I have all of the raw image files that I've uploaded to Instagram. I can screenshot or download the versions that I created in their editor. Likewise for any text I've published anywhere. I prefer this arrangement, where I have the raw data in my personal filesystem and I (to an extent) choose which projections of it are published where on the internet. An IG follow or HN upvote has zero value to me outside of that platform. I don't feel like I want this stuff aggregated in weird ways that I don't know about.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#58

Post by danabramov »

geokon wrote: post #53
danabramov wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your proposal. Do you taking my example (a Twitter post) and showing how it would be stored in your system?

Sure, you'd have something like: {:record {:person-key **public-key** :type :twitter-post :message "My friend {:person-key **danabramov-public-key**} suggested I make this on this HN post {:link **record-of-hn-post-hash**}. Look at his latest post {:link **danabramov-newtwitter-post-hash** :person-key **danabramov-public-key**} it's very cool!"} :hash **hash-of-the-record** :signature **signature-by-author**} So ever…

I have a few questions:

- How do you rotate keys? In AT, the user updates the identity document. That doesn't break their old identity or links.

- When you have a link, how do you find its content? In AT, the URL has identity, which resolves to hosting, which you can ask for stuff.

- When aggregating, how do you find all records an application can understand? E.g. how would Bluesky keep track of "Bluesky posts". Does it validate every record just in case? Is there some convention or grouping?

Btw, you might enjoy https://nostr.com/, it seems closer to what you're describing!

Re: A Social Filesystem

#59

Post by James_K »

AT Proto seems very overengineered. We already have websites with RSS feeds, which more or less covers the publishing end in a way far more distributed and reliable than what AT offers. Then all you need is a kind of indexer to provide people with notifications and discovery and you're done. But I suppose you can't sell that to shareholders because real decentralised technology probably isn't going to turn as much of a profit as a Twitter knockoff with a vague decentralised vibe to it that most users don't understand or care about.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#60

Post by EGreg »

As someone who explicitly designed social protocols since 2011, who met Tim Berners-Lee and his team when they were building SOLID (before he left MIT and got funded to turn it into a for-profit Inrupt) I can tell you that files are NOT the best approach. (And neither is SPARQL by the way, Tim :) SOLID was publishing ACLs for example as web resources. Presumably you’d manage all this with CalDAV-type semantics.

But one good thing did come out of that effort. Dmitri Zagidulin, the chief architect on the team, worked hard at the W3C to get departments together to create the DID standard (decentralized IDs) which were then used in everything from Sidetree Protocol (thanks Dan Buchner for spearheading that) to Jack Dorsey’s “Web5”.

Having said all this… what protocol is better for social? Feeds. Who owns the feeds? Well that depends on what politics you want. Think dat / hypercore / holepunch (same thing). SLEEP protocol is used in that ecosystem to sync feeds. Or remember scuttlebutt? Stuff like that.

Multi-writer feeds were hard to do and abandoned in hypercore but you can layer them on top of single-writer. That’s where you get info join ownership and consensus.

ps: Dan, if you read this, visit my profile and reach out. I would love to have a discussion, either privately or publicly, about these protocols. I am a huge believer in decentralized social networking and build systems that reach millions of community leaders in over 100 countries. Most people don’t know who I am and I’m happy w that. Occasionally I have people on my channel to discuss distributed social networking and its implications. Here are a few:

Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, probably the first decentralized (not just federated) social network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

Noam Chomsky, about Free Speech and Capitalism (met him same day I met TimBL at MIT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc

Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman on freedom of speech and online networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgil1M9tAXU

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