A Social Filesystem

> Identity -- This is a difficult problem.

My hope is that in 5 years, I will not have anything in my feeds that have not been signed in a way that I can assign a trust level.

Here in the Nordics, we are already seeing messaging apps such as [hudd] that require government issued ID to sign in. I want this to spread to everything from podcasts and old-school journalism to the soccer-club newsletter, so that I can always connect a piece of information back to a responsible source.

[hudd]: (https://about.hudd.dk/))

It's bold to say users don't want apps when the expressed preferences are so strongly for apps that "App Store" is a well known brand.

The word app is short for application, which in this context is just a synonym for capability. People have tried breaking apps apart into more fine grained capabilities before and it never worked (OpenDoc and OLE being two well known examples). Brand names matter, they have value to people. YouTube isn't an abstract collection of decomposable capabilities, it's a brand that summarizes numerous unarticulated pieces of information, like its commenting culture, what kind of content is allowed and what isn't, etc.

> I'd like to lookup certain words in some of the messages, then perhaps share something relevant from it.

This is already a built-in feature on macOS. If I right click in your message "Look up PerKeep" is literally the first command, and if I click it I get a nice info window telling me what it is that I can copy/paste from. There is nothing to solve here.

It feels like file formats and protocols is the wrong prism through which to view this. What users actually want is the ability to move as much data as possible from point A to point B, whilst remapping it as much as possible to meet the different features and identities of point B. A unified data format is actually a hindrance for meeting that need because it boils it all down to a lowest common denominator. A simple data pump utility that just copies data back and forth, with lots of special case logic like "X has a character limit of 5000, Y has a character limit of 500 so I'll truncate and add a link to the original post on X", is going to work far better for this use case.

More generally I feel like you kinda missed the point of filing systems in your first writeup. The moment you say "posts don't have natural names", ok, that's a serious problem that should put a halt to the entire concept. A file is nothing but a natural name for a byte array and a little bit of metadata. That's why we think of file managers and explorers when we think of what files are all about: lists of names. It's also why people directly use files for relatively few things - they were a big deal in the early days of personal computing because the killer apps for it were direct translation of physical office tasks. It's mostly but not entirely possible to come up with natural names for office documents (the gap is in suffixes like "draft final v3__real final draft.docx"). That's why we use analogies for 1950s paperful office objects like files and manila folders to begin with. But most computing tasks even back then weren't oriented around documents, they were oriented around database records and the user interface was just screens, or possibly direct SQL. It's a remarkable gap in our infrastructure that there is no agreed on file format for a SQL result set. Maybe Arrow is that format.

Amazing write-up. Owing to your data, a standardized protocol (such as the AT Protocol) is so great! It's like markdown, everything is basically built on files (but cleverly architected so that it works decentralized across the web too!).

I wrote a little along the same lines on «Well Being in Times of Algorithms» at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/well-being-algorithms/ (or HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352747).

That's true if you define the problem as "does my parser crash" and not whether the app is perceived as working correctly. If some platform adds support for video posts, then the next thing that happens is people start making posts that are only video. Meaning that in every other client, users see what appears to be an entirely empty post. Which will be considered a bug.

This is the core argument of Moxie's seminal essay, The Ecosystem Is Moving:

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

One of the controversial things we did with Signal early on was to build it as an unfederated service. Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

That was written in 2016 but it was true then and continues to be true today. Users reject federated open platforms because the coordination costs mean they don't move as fast as proprietary centralized platforms, and they often appear broken even if technically working as designed.

Nothing about that analysis is unique to social media. It is also true of file formats. OpenOffice never took off because new features got added to Office first, so files that used those features would open in semi-corrupted ways in OpenOffice. The fact that OO represented things internally using open unions didn't matter at all.