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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#181

Post by danabramov »

immibis wrote: post #178
danabramov wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a long road but the plan is to standardize AT. See https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf for ongoing first steps. >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. I don’t know how this is related to what my article talks about. The data we’re…

Isn't this the design idea behind ATProto?

Yes, which is what my article is about :)

Re: A Social Filesystem

#182

Post by danabramov »

theturtletalks wrote: post #175
articsputnik wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if you understood the article, isn't the whole point to own your data as "it's just a filesystem". Reddit, Instagram, etc. are the total opposite.

Yes, I should have been clearer. Reddit and Instagram do not operate this way today, but open social alternatives to them could. The idea is that people create personal websites where posting, commenting, and other social actions live, and that becomes the filesystem they own. Open social networks would simply index or pull from those sites using agreed-upon lexicons and protocols. Existing platforms could either ado…

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with the article. And this is not theoretical, all of these apps work this way: https://bsky.app/, https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, https://semble.so/, https://blento.app/ (new one). It's definitely possible!

Re: A Social Filesystem

#183

Post by danabramov »

ximeng wrote: post #134
verdverm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private data will come to ATProto, it's not a finished protocol

What’s the plan for this? Sharing with a specific group (DM, group chat, feeds from people you follow) are critical to social media.

See https://www.pfrazee.com/leaflets/3lzhui2zbxk2b for some recent thoughts from a team member.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#184

Post by danabramov »

mike_hearn wrote: post #166
danabramov wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

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 simpl…

>A unified data format is actually a hindrance for meeting that need because it boils it all down to a lowest common denominator.

Exactly, which is what I'm saying in the article:

We could try to put every app developer in the same room until they all agree on a perfect lexicon for a post. That would be an interesting use of everyone’s time.

(That's meant to be slightly sarcastic.) Then the article says:

For some use cases, like cross-site syndication, a standard-ish jointly governed lexicon makes sense. For other cases, you really want the app to be in charge. It’s actually good that different products can disagree about what a post is! Different products, different vibes. We’d want to support that, not to fight it.

The point isn't having a lowest common denominator format. It's to enable precisely the granularity of formats that app developers want. The default one is "each app has its own formats". But what changes is that

1. Other apps can still read/write in other apps' formats. This makes the landscape competitive: if some app is going down a bad road, it's easy to fork their product with all the data already in there.

2. It is possible for multiple app developers to use the same format where it makes sense. As linked from the article, https://standard.site/ is a good example of that.

>More generally I feel like you kinda missed the point of filing systems in your first writeup.

I'll admit that I used the metaphor to highlight a specific thing, and names in particular don't play a big role in that thing (what plays a big role is links). The reason I picked filesystem as a metaphor is because it highlights how file formats mediate interactions between apps. This is exactly how lexicons mediate interactions between social apps. That felt like the backbone of the argument.

It's true this isn't describing a filesystem exactly. Maybe a web of identity-addressed hyperlinked JSON is a more precise way to say it. But then nobody knows what that means. I'm happy with my choice of metaphor.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#185

Post by danabramov »

danabramov wrote: post #130
jrowen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Adding more to this, what's wild to me is that Blento can already show public data from other AT apps on the homepage. For example, your teal.fm plays. It's just one of the block types: https://bsky.app/profile/flo-bit.dev/post/3mcqx5pwrrk26. Despite teal.fm not really even "existing"!

Re: A Social Filesystem

#186

Post by isodev »

danabramov wrote: post #179
isodev wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meaningfully better products That are yet to become monetised. It's all fun and games until Bluesky announced how users and developers will pay for all this and what happens with your "social file system" when you stop paying.

I mean, I can literally already self-host my personal data if I want to. And there are also already forks of Bluesky (not just the client, but the server and the database ) that can participate without fragmenting the network. It is not a perfect system but it's so far from where you are when you just rely on a closed app.

That's great, but also Mastodon is just there and has been for quite some time. I see no added value in Bluesky/ATProto beyond the layer of that "social as a service" which looks like a walled garden / app store of sorts in the making. I may be wrong, of course...

Re: A Social Filesystem

#187

Post by theturtletalks »

danabramov wrote: post #182
theturtletalks wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I should have been clearer. Reddit and Instagram do not operate this way today, but open social alternatives to them could. The idea is that people create personal websites where posting, commenting, and other social actions live, and that becomes the filesystem they own. Open social networks would simply index or pull from those sites using agreed-upon lexicons and protocols. Existing platforms could either ado…

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with the article. And this is not theoretical, all of these apps work this way: https://bsky.app/ , https://leaflet.pub/ , https://tangled.org/ , https://semble.so/ , https://blento.app/ (new one). It's definitely possible!

Yes I'm loving the growth in this space. I'd also throw Standard.site[0] into the mix, it seems to be the lexicons Leaflet and some other apps are using.

0. https://standard.site/

Re: A Social Filesystem

#188

Post by wink »

japanuspus wrote: post #162

> 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 alwa…

So you're simply not interested in reading any random website by random people who don't see a benefit of establishing any form of trust, especially if should not be connected to their official government IDs?

Or to put it differently: Where should this come from, and which issuer would you trust? And why should anyone else agree with you that this is good?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#189

Post by voidUpdate »

How does this system determine the amount of likes a post has? Since there is no back reference on a post to people who have liked it, don't you have to iterate over every single person, iterate over their likes, to see if one of them is the post you are viewing, and add all them up?

Re: A Social Filesystem

#190

Post by danabramov »

Melatonic wrote: post #150
jrv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 platf…

It makes the landscape competitive. There isn't really a notion of "moving" to a "platform". It's more like if Twitter sucks, some team can spin out an alternative that has the existing content but takes different product decisions. And then some people can try this alternative and use it without leaving the existing network. So, it allows more experimentation in the market without having to solve the cold start problem. The lifecycle of products becomes more fluid. It's easy to spin something up, and you can also shut things down without permanently killing them.
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