Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Social

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 409 posts

Re: Open Social

#131

Post by hn_acc1 »

tetrisgm wrote: post #102
jrowen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels. Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning? Why should people care about the abstract concept of data ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, bo…

It matters because your posts aren’t just entertainment in the moment — they’re your history, your proof of existence online. Platforms treat them as disposable. If Instagram dies or bans you, your years of photos, writing, and connections vanish. Owning your data means your work and identity survive these issues, if you want.

I mean.. if you can still find the archives (pretty sure they're out there, but getting harder and harder to find), I have my name on lots of usenet posts from the 90s. But I'm pretty sure all my BBS posts, GEnie posts, etc from before that are gone - they would stretch back as far as December '84, IIRC. And there's probably very little left from before 2000.

And yet, I don't lament that 10-15 years of my online life have "vanished" - I was an ignorant little snot back then, and actually, am VERY glad they HAVE vanished. And thankfully I've generally used aliases / usernames instead of my actual name in most places (other than the usenet posts that were from my university account) so that wayback can't be used against me easily. Heck - I wish I could assert/enforce a "right to be forgotten" (vanish) on some websites. Rarely have I wished (especially in this current administration) that I was MORE visible / persistent online.

Re: Open Social

#132

Post by extraduder_ire »

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #12

I'm a simple man, I see a Dan post and I click. I'm a bit concerned that the open web only won because of first mover advantage. What gives me hope is OSS winning. I'd love to see something like atproto win though. It's clear that a major issue with social media is network effects preventing better apps from becoming popular.

AIUI, HTML won because it was free. There were competing paid for online hypermedia standards at the time, but many cost money. Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.

Re: Open Social

#134

Post by BigTuna »

isodev wrote: post #118

Yes, it’s interesting but there is no way the instantiation of the protocol (Bluesky) remains free of investor influences. It would require a great deal of capital for anyone to recreate the “network” in such an eventuality. So yes, it’s cool but not really Open.

There are already working alternate implementations of every protocol component.

Re: Open Social

#135

Post by arjie »

That was very well written. I have to admit that because AT Protocol was Bluesky's I thought it was some corpo version of ActivityPub, but based on this post it makes a lot of sense. The data is in a 'repository' of my choice. I think I like that very much and it aligns with the kind of general principle I have where it's better to apply filtering etc. on the read side rather than on the write side so that I can publish all sorts of things that I want into my repo and others can then read etc. that stuff.

The arrows do seem to imply that commenting on my posts goes into my repo, but I'm sure that's just an imprecision trying to express an idea. The whole thing seems very cool and decentralized.

When I went to see what it takes to run a separate PDS on AT, though, I see that it's all nice and packaged up and has certain assumptions:

1. It takes care of SSL etc.

2. It will stand up HTTPS/WSS servers to handle a bunch of RPC

So in practice, you don't get https://roshangeorge.dev and at://roshangeorge.dev because for the latter you kind of need https://roshangeorge.dev/xrpc and wss://roshangeorge.dev

Therefore, you probably end up with https://roshangeorge.dev and at://at.roshangeorge.dev and then you can run https://at.roshangeorge.dev and wss://at.roshangeorge.dev

All minor stuff and doesn't take away from the main point, but it was a thing.

Re: Open Social

#136

Post by verdverm »

tetrisgm wrote: post #127
verdverm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "instance"? There are several protocol components you can run independently, each filling a different role and having different complexity levels If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Blu…

So it sounds like multiple things then

1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting, handles)

2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on if you want to intermingle Bsky data

3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation and algorithms, among the many other things.

Re: Open Social

#137

Post by _cart »

ceayo wrote: post #30

Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.

The AT vs AP issue is full of nuance. Our community has gone back and forth on this: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/18302

Re: Open Social

#139

Post by whyrusleeping »

arjie wrote: post #135

That was very well written. I have to admit that because AT Protocol was Bluesky's I thought it was some corpo version of ActivityPub, but based on this post it makes a lot of sense. The data is in a 'repository' of my choice. I think I like that very much and it aligns with the kind of general principle I have where it's better to apply filtering etc. on the read side rather than on the write side so that I can publ…

The default pds packaging takes care of SSL, but thats not a requirement, just something we try to make easy for users.

Also at:// URIs are of the form at://DID/..., and your human readable handle is bound to your DID through DNS TXT records _atproto.roshangeorge.dev, but applications all know to render that as just roshangeorge.dev. That DID points to a document that specifies where your server lives, so the HTTPS/WSS routes can live wherever you want them to.

Also likes/replies/etc on your posts go in their authors repos not yours, your intuition is correct there.

Re: Open Social

#140

Post by eigencoder »

Loved the breakdown of a topic I wasn't familiar with.

I just can't help but think that the whole ethos of Open Social Media is misguided. I think that social media isn't good for us -- not just because of the big companies making it worse, but because the technology itself doesn't promote health.

It feels like trying to make cigarettes open-source. Sure you can stick it to big tobacco but at the end of the day you're still making cigarettes.

Post reply on HN