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A Social Filesystem

overreacted.io

151–160 of 243 posts

Re: A Social Filesystem

#152
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…

> a developer ecosystem tipping the incentive scales such that companies like the Googl/Msft/OpenAI/Anthropics of the world WANT to contribute/participate

I think Apache Arrow has achieved exactly that [1]. It's also very file-friendly, in that Arrow IPC files are self describing, zero-copy, and capable of representing almost any data structure.

[1] https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/apache-arrow/co...

Re: A Social Filesystem

#153
post #51

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…

I would not call the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and took it private "decent people". I think that Musk purchasing the company and running it in a way that a lot of previous userbase objected to was ultimately a huge boon for software freedom - because without that, the large number of people who stopped using Twitter and went to the ATProto ecosystem instead would have been happy to continue using completely-proprietary Twitter. A lot of people were suddenly and viscerally faced with the downsides of building a digital "home" on someone else's platform.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#154

POSSE 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…

You may want to take a look at India's ONDC (https://github.com/ONDC-Official).

Re: A Social Filesystem

#155

To share is to lose control. You can't undo, even once shared, it can't be undone. You can't retract a published novel. You can't retract a broadcast music or show. What makes you think you can do it over internet?

I don't think my article makes any claims that one can undo sharing. What I'm saying is that we benefit collectively from being able to untether data from applications. It's the same logic as https://stephango.com/file-over-app but applied to the aggregating web applications.

Share and you can't control what everyone else does with the data. Hence, untether is a non concept. In the sense that that data has now lost it's uniqueness. You can untether all you want. Copies of it will be subjected to any kind of tethering and transformation. So, if your point was about control, forget it.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#156
post #154

POSSE 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…

You may want to take a look at India's ONDC ( https://github.com/ONDC-Official ).

Sounds interesting, but I can't find any links to an actual live B2C storefront..

Re: A Social Filesystem

#157
I have always thought open file format > open source. My ideal web everyone has their own web file storage (get from anywhere e.g. email provider) and web apps use that to store things. Team collab etc. built on top of that e.g. sharing a file means share ann accept edits type flow. Everyone owns their file.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#158

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…

Posts feel less valuable as files as they are of the moment. I don't need this comment as a docx, thank you all the same.

So I agree.

Maybe building it that way opens possibilities I can't see?

But for functional apps it seems useful to have a file you can download and use somewhere else. Images and movies are a great example. I can record a video in Loom and chuck it on Youtube. Youtube can't lock me on that video. it is my file. Imagine if that was not the case. It would suck.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#159
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now . They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

yeah, I was one of them. developers are not the endgame, though. true social media needs people who are not going to do anything more complicated than "go to website, sign up". there's no world where setting up your own pds is that simple without an organized piece of software to do that kind of thing. personally, I could probably get behind recommending something like umbrel[0], if it included something like a "incl…

and you expect these “go to website, sign up” people to take the extra step to select a provider for repoing data? these people can barely pick a mastodon instance, what sort of data ownership integration work do you expect? it’s a consideration that’s more niche than the current status quo. unless you’re fine with people defaulting to onedrive or similar.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#160
I like the write-up of this idea. It's well presented. But I'd change one aspect: "We could leave author: 'dril' in the JSON but this is unnecessary too." - kind of. What the post lacks is the record of the identity at the time. What the user's username and the avatar was at the time can change the meaning of the post entirely. To really preserve the message, you need to reference what the displayed identity was used to post it - not just the account id.

There's a number of famous accounts that do it continuously. For example popehat today is "Fucking Bitch Hat" but will change to something else soon that may be related to the current events.

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