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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#141

Post by danabramov »

skybrian wrote: post #109
danabramov wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

Yeah, look for this part in the the article:

Lexicon validation works the same way. The com.tumblr in com.tumblr.post signals who designed the lexicon, but the records themselves could have been created by any app at all. This is why apps always treat records as untrusted input, similar to POST request bodies. When you generate type definitions from a lexicon, you also get a function that will do the validation for you. If some record passes the check, great—you get a typed object. If not, fine, ignore that record.

So, validate on read, just like files.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#143

Post by danabramov »

ninkendo wrote: post #120
danabramov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there was a bit of a communication failure between us. You took the article as a random "what if X was Y" exploration. However, what I tried to communicate something more like: 1. File-first paradigm has some valuable properties. One property is apps can't lock data out of each other. So the user can always change which apps they use. 2. Web social app paradigm doesn't have these properties. And we observe th…

The problems with social media are not at all the fact that things are “locked up in apps”. Again, you missed my point. Data sharing is the least interesting thing imaginable, has already been solved countless times, and is not the reason social media sinks or swims. Social media sinks or swims based on one thing and one thing only: is it enjoyable to use. Are all the people on here assholes or do they have something…

I actually agree with you on a lot of these things, I just think that they do relate to the technological shape.

To give you an example, Blacksky is in setting up their alternative server that is effectively forking the product, which gives them ability to make different moderation decisions (they've restored the account of a user that is banned from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...).

However, unlike Mastodon and such, anyone on the Blacksky server will continue living in the same "world" as the Bluesky users, it's effectively just a different "filter" on the global data.

Before AT, it was not possible to do that.

You couldn't "fork" moderation of an existing product. If you wanted different rules, you had to create an entire social network from scratch. All past data used to stay within the original product.

AT enables anyone motivated to spin up a whole new product that works with existing data, and to make different decisions on the product level about all of the things you mentioned people care about. How algorithms run, how moderation runs, what the standards are, what the platform affordances are.

What AT creates here is competition because normally you can't compete until you convince everyone to move. Whereas with AT, everybody is always "already there" so you can create or pick the best-run prism over the global data.

Does this make more sense? It's all in service of the things you're talking about. We just need to make it possible to try different things without always starting from scratch.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#144

Post by its_ethan »

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…

Hi, so I generally actually agree with you and your criticisms of this blog post (in your thread with the author). I think there's something pretty true in the blog post you shared from Joel (true in that it applies to more than just the software world) and looked at some of his more recent posts.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/12/19/progress-on-the-bl...

This one in particular reads similar to what this comment section is about, it looks like Joel is basically becoming an architecture astronaut himself? Not sure if that's actually an accurate understanding of what his "block protocol" is, but I'm curious to hear from you what you think of that? In the 25 years since that post, has he basically become the thing he once criticized, and is that the result of just becoming a more and more senior/thinker within the industry?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#145

Post by Esophagus4 »

skybrian wrote: post #52
danabramov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That also seems to be a risk with most centralized social networks these days as well.

Our LinkedIn profiles have been scanned by scrapers, Instagram photos used for facial recognition training, Twitter / FB posts replicated in a bunch of downstream places, archives, and search indexes. Not to mention data being sold to third parties.

At this point, I assume if I post it publicly online, it is no longer in my control where it ends up downstream and I assume it will be online somewhere forever.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#146

Post by imglorp »

Vinnl wrote: post #50
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 popula…

Yes Solid is another idea that's clearly the right thing, especially now. It might mlnit be easy to convince everyone they need it though, and the economics will be uphill given the trillions in entrenched, incumbent opposition.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#147

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Ever heard of the World Wide Web?

It was great. Anyone could host web pages, anyone could access and read anyone’s web pages with a tool called a web browser, of which there used to be several compatible implementations.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#148

Post by jimbokun »

nonethewiser wrote: post #34

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

“You know how much it sucked when Elon bought Twitter and it became a cesspool? Wouldn’t it have been great if you could easily take your entire post history to some other platform?”

Re: A Social Filesystem

#149

Post by isodev »

swyx wrote: post #92

> Apps may come and go, but files stay—at least, as long as our apps think in files. yes: https://www.swyx.io/data-outlasts-code-but all lasting work is done in files/data (can be parsed permissionlessly, still useful if partially corrupted), but economic incentives keep pushing us to keep things in code (brittle, dies basically when one of maintainer|buildtools|hardware substrate dies). when standards emerge (forcin…

> At the same time we shoudl also watch out for companies extending/embracing/extinguishing standards

Is ATProto actually a standard? But regardless, nothing prevents Bluesky from enschitifying.

I’m somewhat concerned that the “file system” or the storage where all of our things are supposed to be stored is now suddenly in the cloud. We actually have a real file system … it backs itself up on iPhone even.

It feels like the entire pitch is based on some FOMO factor “oh but my posts” - do people really care that much about their short form outbursts? I mean the whole point of twitter was to post and forget but maybe not for everybody.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#150

Post by Melatonic »

jrv wrote: post #51
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…

But.... why ? Is this assuming a huge portion of the people you interact with on Twitter are also all moving identities to the new platform ?

I can see for something like artistic expression it being useful to export and and move over to a new platform (like moving a whole photography portfolio, short story writing samples, or similar). But who cares about your "likes" on a totally new and separate social media platform ?

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