nostr protocol and the client/relay model is one simple way to separate apps (clients) from the data (relays)
A Social Filesystem
121–130 of 243 posts
Re: A Social Filesystem
#122This 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…
You can use pdsfs[0] to mount a user's pds locally using FUSE read-only. It's mentioned in the blogpost. I remember seeing a tool posted for mounting them read-write, if you sign in, but can't remember where to find it.
Re: A Social Filesystem
#123I'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…
If truth social didn't remove all the federation code, posts from mastodon and many other ActivityPub sites would have appeared there.
Re: A Social Filesystem
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data is not transferring, but the user is. When I sign up for e.g. Twitter, I don't want to sign up for Mastodon, or Bluesky, or Truth Social, or whatever other platform someone might create later. Thus I would not choose to put my data in a PDS. I feel like that would actually leave me with less ownership and control than I have now. My point is that I don't believe the separation of frontend and data is desirab…
Do I understand correctly that your main concern is that some random service would serve a page when asked for /your-handle, and so, given a link, someone may assume that you actively use that service? Just trying to understand the exact scenario. Generally it's good practice for AT apps to treat you as not signed up if you have not explicitly signed up to this app before. So I think a well-behaved site you never use…
I think part of the issue is that humans are hyper conditioned to expect a certain UX and set of conditions thanks to the past 3 decades of the internet + legacy social media. It only feels weird that you could publish content on Bluesky and have it show up on some other app without your consent because of how we've been conditioned. There will be a lot of unconditioning and reconditioning that has to take place over a span of time if the ATmosphere (or any new vision of social media) wants to succeed.
https://anisota.net will display any Bluesky content and profiles without the consent of the user — no one cares at the moment though because either 1) they don't know about such a niche project, or 2) they aren't concerned cause I'm not a controversial figure.
If Truth Social was suddenly a part of the ATmosphere or a part of some other wide network of users, most people would catch on eventually and be hopefully conditioned to realize that the mere presence of someone's content on an app/site doesn't mean they use that app/site
Re: A Social Filesystem
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. It's an important problem, but I think this just isn't done at the Record layer. Nor can you? You'd probably want to do that on the person-key->username service (which would have some log-in and way to tie two keys to one username) 2. In a sense that's also not something you think about at the Record level either. It'd be at a different layer of the stack. I'll be honest, I haven't wrapped my head entirely around…
2. The point of the PLC is to avoid tying identity to keys, specifically for the point that if you lose your keys, you lose your identity. In reality, no body wants that as part of the system 3. The soup means you need to index everything. There is no Bluesky server to send things to, only your PDS. Your DID is how I know what PDS to talk to to get your records
We can have both a directory and use content addressable storage and give people the option of using their own keypairs. They are not mutually exclusive. Bluesky chooses to have a central directory and index.
Re: A Social Filesystem
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great question! Adding new features is usually not a problem because you can always add optional fields and extend open unions. So, you just change `media: Link | Picture | unknown` to `media: Link | Picture | Video | unknown`. You can't remove things true, so records do get some deprecated fields. Re: updating safely, the rule is that you can't change which records it would consider valid after it gets used…
Are these just guidelines or is this enforced in some way? I guess readers could validate and skip anything that doesn't match their schema.
Most apps reading records will validate a record against the schema for that type. e.g. there's nothing stopping you from making a app.bsky.feed.post record with more than 300 graphemes in the "text" field, but that post won't appear in the "official" app/website because it fails schema validation.
Similarly, there's nothing stopping you from adding another field in your post. It'll just get ignored because the app you're using doesn't know about it. e.g. posts bridged from mastodon by bridgy have an extra field containing the full original post's text, which you can display in your app if desired. reddwarf.app does this with these posts.
Here's the schema for bluesky posts, if you're interested: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:4v4y5r3lwsbtmsxhile2ljac/com....
Re: A Social Filesystem
#127POSSE and AT Protocol can be understood as interoperable marketplaces. Platforms like Reddit and Instagram already function this way: the product is user content, the payment is attention, and the platform’s cut is ads or behavioral data. Dan argues that this structure is not inevitable. If social data is treated as something people own and store themselves, applications stop being the owners of social graphs and bec…
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Re: A Social Filesystem
#128POSSE and AT Protocol can be understood as interoperable marketplaces. Platforms like Reddit and Instagram already function this way: the product is user content, the payment is attention, and the platform’s cut is ads or behavioral data. Dan argues that this structure is not inevitable. If social data is treated as something people own and store themselves, applications stop being the owners of social graphs and bec…
Was going to ask this but then I found openship in your profile. Will check it out. Thanks!
Re: A Social Filesystem
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it as easy for other people to read as a Github repo? Want to share?
Tangled founder here; it's just as easy! For example, here's the entire Tangled codebase monorepo: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core — you can clone this directly as you would a git repo anywhere else.
Looks nice!
New user sign up is a bit wonky. It asked for an email, login and password, then it's asking for a bsky sign-in too? This seems a little weird.
(Minor nit: for some reason, Google didn't auto-suggest a strong password for the password field.)
Then I got to the screen where it asks for full read-write access to my PDS and stopped there. It's kind of a lot to ask! I believe this is Bluesky's fault, but I don't think I can really use third-party bluesky apps until they implement finer-grained permissions.
Re: A Social Filesystem
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, part of it is that we have no power collectively against products turning their back on users because coordination to "export data all at once and then import it into specific other place" is near-impossible. So this creates a perverse cycle where once you capture enough of the market, competition has very little chance unless they change the category entirely. What AT enables is forking products with their d…
Thanks for your thoughts. I do feel like this is all very specifically connected to Twitter. Which tech people really adopted, but I never used much, so it is interesting that these different perspectives are somewhat tied to one's megaplatform(s) of choice. I don't know of another social network that has inspired such a consistent effort to be forked or cloned. I do kind of feel like "change the category" and create…
I don't this is tied to Twitter.
Just the other week, another service that people actively used called Bento announced shutdown: https://bento.me/. This sucks for the user.
Someone created an alternative called Blento (https://blento.app/) on AT. Of course, by itself, this doesn't mean they'll be successful. But the thing is that, if Blento shuts down, someone can put it right back up because (1) it's open source, and (2) the data is outside Blento. Any new app can kickstart with that data and get people's sites back up and running. And two platforms can even compete on top of the same data.
I agree content is tailed to the platform and resurrecting something doesn't necessarily makes sense. But that's the point of lexicons. You get the choice of what makes sense to resurrect (actively moving to an alternative) vs what doesn't (something with a style that doesn't work elsewhere) vs new recontextualizations we haven't even tried or thought of. I think it's early to dismiss before trying.