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

141–150 of 409 posts

Re: Open Social

#141

Post by extraduder_ire »

verdverm wrote: post #91
steveklabnik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one reason why Bluesky has gained a lot of traction. All of this is under the surface, not something you need to care about unless you want to.

I would contend not all of it is under the surface The Bsky team regularly highlights other apps, custom feeds, and moderation choice

You don't need to know how any of those features or websites work to use them. I'd also argue that most users have no idea who the people working on the site are. (even if reading the replies under their personal posts gives a different impression)

The end user just sees they can subscribe to a moderation list that hides any post labelled as "Beans", or that they can have a feed next to their Discover feed that's an endless stream of people getting ligma'd.

Or that they can use their account to log into a seemingly unrelated site.

Re: Open Social

#142

Post by analogpixel »

all2 wrote: post #113
analogpixel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

So email threads but on a web page, and filtered by subscription instead of senders/receivers. Clever. How can I add this to my website? How do you facilitate discovery? IE, what if I want to know about replies people have made without subscribing to their /social page?

> How do you facilitate discovery? IE, what if I want to know about replies people have made without subscribing to their /social page?

That's what makes this system so great, you don't see what other people you don't even know say, and you should be ok with that. Don't look for validation from the trolls on the internet. Reading what random people you don't know say is how you get spam and harassment.

> How can I add this to my website?

currently this is a thought experiment, but if anyone wants to work on it, let me know, my contact info is on the post.

Also, this wasn't meant as "the solution" to the problem, more just maybe we should be looking for small solutions that don't require a huge amount of infrastructure to run.

Re: Open Social

#143

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Open Social

#144

Post by analogpixel »

dragonwriter wrote: post #130
all2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So email threads but on a web page, and filtered by subscription instead of senders/receivers. Clever. How can I add this to my website? How do you facilitate discovery? IE, what if I want to know about replies people have made without subscribing to their /social page?

Responding to the proposal (which is unjustly flagged to death, even if I agree that it isn’t a good idea): > I came up with a solution that eliminates centralized control, trolls, advertising, and really all forms of harassment, and it doesn't even require a special server. If it behaved as you describe (only followers see top-level updates and only followers of every person i the chain see replies; which I don’t th…

> there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.

based on the spam and harassment on most social sites, I'd call this a feature.

If you read something interesting you can email the person with your thoughts , and if they find it interesting they'll follow you. If you are a troll, they'll delete your message and they don't need to use their platform to support your comments. If everyone used this system, trolls wouldn't have a platform anymore.

Here is a great example of discoverability without comments : https://herman.bearblog.dev/misc-updates/

Herman from bear blog posted about a topic, a bunch of people emailed him their thoughts, and he created a follow up post with the best of those thoughts listed out.

This system definitely won't work for people that have FOMO, or need validation through votes on their comments.

Re: Open Social

#145

Post by extraduder_ire »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #139
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/W…

You can authenticate a handle via a file in ./well-known/ at the domain too, which is how bluesky does it for their default handles.

Re: Open Social

#146

Post by foltik »

jrowen wrote: post #98
dgaffney wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, https://x.com

So mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better, because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent idea.

Did we read the same article? It spends so many words answering these exact questions with examples and helpful illustrations!

Your question:

> why should they care that they don't "own" their Instagram post, whatever that means?

From the article:

> The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind. On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal. However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.

Your question:

> can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?

From the article:

> Maybe the app gets squeezed by investors, and every third post is an ad. Maybe it gets bought by a congolomerate that wanted to get rid of competition, and is now on life support. Maybe it runs out of funding, and your content goes down in two days. Maybe the founders get acquihired—an exciting new chapter. Maybe the app was bought by some guy, and now you’re slowly getting cooked by the algorithm.

> Luckily, web’s decentralized design avoids this. Because it’s easy to walk away, hosting providers are forced to compete, and hosting is now a commodity.

I think you’re right that the average person doesn’t care so much as they just want to be entertained or reach a large network, but apathy is not an argument in favor of the status quo.

Re: Open Social

#147

Post by simonw »

tantalor wrote: post #5

We already had that in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial It was a complete disaster

Yeah, the linked article did make me smile because the previous iteration of OpenSocial - which had a LOT of buzz around it back in 2007-2010 - was such an ambitious swing that completely missed.

Apparently I wrote about it a fair bit back then, mostly noting how confusing it all was: https://simonwillison.net/tags/opensocial/

Re: Open Social

#148

Post by HumanOstrich »

deadbabe wrote: post #21
notatoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

How about DNS on a blockchain?

That sounds like an unnecessarily overcomplicated nightmare.

Re: Open Social

#149

Post by kevinak »

danabramov wrote: post #114
kevinak wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and this is why Nostr is different! You can build basically anything on it. A blog, a Twitter like application, a streaming service, messaging apps, the sky is the limit! Here's a selection of things built on the protocol: https://nostrapps.com

Nostr is not different from atproto in that sense because atproto also supports arbitrary applications (the article uses Leaflet and Tangled as examples). There's a good comparison of atproto vs Nostr: https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html

Fair enough. But it is a more complicated protocol that, I feel, makes it a lot harder to diversify and build different applications on.

Re: Open Social

#150

Post by the_gipsy »

_cart wrote: post #137
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

Really nice analysis, thank you.
Post reply on HN