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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#271

Post by xigoi »

gdulli wrote: post #153
eigencoder wrote: post #140

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'r…

As long as the Eternal September remains on Twitter, there's nothing unhealthy about being on Bluesky. The format isn't the problem, it's the people who use it as a stupid culture war battlefield. Those people seem content to remain on Twitter.

There is a lot of “culture war battlefield” stuff on Bluesky too.

Re: Open Social

#272

Post by lowkeyokay »

hollowonepl wrote: post #269

I think it would be better articulated if comparisons to ActivityPub were made. Those are I believe two competing visions of Open Social defined as communication protocol, not a platform. Otherwise it just sounds like evangelizing employer and that compromises the whole “open” concept of the article, fairly.

The author surely knows about competing protocols but prefers at. It would be just as easy to argue the author is biased if a comparison was made. Maybe more informative though.

Re: Open Social

#273

Post by swiftcoder »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #241
saghm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand what you're saying; I just don't agree with it. For starters, people can be complex and have more than one goal. The effect of making an open source project isn't necessarily just the utility of the project itself, and if some of those other potential effects are desired, the best way to do things won't necessarily be the same as if there's only one output that someone cares about. For another thin…

Okay… Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than Bevy, but are much better game engines. They will be shipping more great games every day than Bevy will in the next year, including beloved meaningful ones, like Silksong and Indiecute and Cuddlygame or whatever. And hardly anyone there, like most big corpo employees, is directly benefitted from the better games, they get paid the same amount of money, but the rub is…

> Okay… Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than Bevy

Unity and Unreal also have billions of dollars in funding

Re: Open Social

#274

Post by tjpnz »

dangus wrote: post #239
LightChaser wrote: post #10

Sadly, it's hard to imagine a world where something like this will ever catch on. The target audience for "traditional" social media is very different from the niche of people who want decentralized social media. Most people just use social media as a means to an end and don't really care about the systems behind it. If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account, that defeats the whole purpose…

I think the other issue here is that there's a serious question of why bother "upgrading" your social media from closed to open when we've all figured out that it's bad for you, worsens your mood, and generally wastes your time? If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?

Those products are both owned by an ad company, they're incentivized to push all your buttons so they can maximize the time you spend looking at ads. Similar offerings exist which don't, and as a result have a very different vibe.

Re: Open Social

#275

Post by vermilingua »

danabramov wrote: post #198
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 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. The way I used arrows might’ve been a bit confusing because I use two types of them. The solid ones pointing from @alice.com downwards indicate ownership. They’re the same thing as grouping by color. All blue stuff is Alice’s.…

This makes sense but doesn’t this imply that displaying comments under a post is a very expensive operation?

Also not totally clear to me (apologies if I missed it in the post) is where repositories live, I have a bsky account with my own domain, but I am not running anything to host a repo. Am I correct in assuming that bsky is hosting my repo, but I would have the option to self host or move it elsewhere and continue using bsky?

Re: Open Social

#276

Post by rossy »

steveklabnik wrote: post #163
popcar2 wrote: post #155

I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance o…

> considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically, stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows the details of) and so talking about the structure of things ends up working differently. > what's stopping them from…

I don't think being able to migrate your account addresses the rugpull concern. The rugpull scenario is that one day, in five years or so, bsky.app drops all AT Protocol support and transforms into a Twitter-like centralized social media website. The problem isn't that the account will stop "existing" but that Bluesky users will stop seeing it. The average non-techie Bluesky user who doesn't know about the AT Protocol won't even notice the change, except that, from their perspective, a tiny percentage of nerdy users have stopped posting. For you, "migrating" your account away is effectively just deleting it from the now-centralized Bluesky and willfully decreasing your audience by 100-fold or more.

The problem is a social not a technical one. It doesn't matter how good AT Protocol is at account migration. The vast majority of AT Protocol users think of themselves as Bluesky users and don't even know what the AT Protocol is. If the official Bluesky clients move away from the AT Protocol, the majority of users are moving with Bluesky.

For all the UX concerns people have with Mastodon/ActivityPub, at least they make it obvious that different users are hosted on different instances, and no one instance has more to gain than it does to lose by defederating.

Re: Open Social

#277

Post by 1dom »

zenmac wrote: post #221
nightpool wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every one of these "How AT proto works" explainers focuses on data ownership—which is where ATProto shines—and glosses over data processing, where ATProto is decidedly weaker than ActivityPub. ATProto is built on a global, public view of the world, where all events are visible to a trusted global "AppServer" that can make all of the decisions for you—how to create your feed, who can see who's posts, etc—all of those…

Wow thanks for the valuable info. Would you recommend, for people who wants to add AP to their existing username/password application? We are currently working on something based on https://fedify.dev Would you consider that can provide more complete AP functionality?

I mess around with fedify a lot, it's great. It's fun to integrate with existing websites.

I've thought a lot about ATProto and integrating it in similar ways. I'd love to have a look at what you're doing and how. The struggle I have is that I think the ATProto repos have a fairly strong cryptographic structure compared to AP

If someone requests an object over AP, that object contents can come from anywhere easily, and can be signed easy. So for me, when someone requests an activitypub object of one of my notes via fedify, it just reads the truth from my markdown note files and returns it. If I edit my markdown files, it's no real issue, the next request gets the latest version of that markdown (there's some signing nuances in places, but it's generally straightforward)

With ATProto PDS and repositories use things like Merkle Search Trees and other things which I assume means the backend data needs to be a lot more... consistent. Like the data has to live in the PDS, and that has to become the source of truth to maintain the merkle structures, including updates.

But with AP via fedify, it feels super easy and nice for my source of truth to be whatever backend store I like (markdown notes).

I've done enough with crypto to see the benefits provided by the transparent verifiable history of merkle like structures, but honestly, this is social media not cash: I don't care if someone wants to subtly change something to manage how they come across with their own social media. In that respect, I feel the ATProto repositories overcomplicate things a bit.

Re: Open Social

#278

Post by wsve »

The author is talking about owning a domain and how having that domain gives you ownership over your data... But I can't but think that, at least in the US, domain names are rented from private Internet service providers. There is no ownership involved. One way or another, we are still paying a company.

The assumption of the article is that ISPs are stable and net neutral enough that one would not worry about the ISP going under or seeking some personal vendetta against you and booting your domain. A separate entity may no longer be hosting our data, but a private entity is the gatekeeper of whether anyone is able to see your data.

All that to say, if we want true ownership of domains, ISPs need to be a nationalized, democratized service.

Re: Open Social

#279

Post by small_scombrus »

AlienRobot wrote: post #195
popcar2 wrote: post #155

I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance o…

What irks me is that in the end of the day if you go to Bluesky it's all American politics and if you go to literally any mastodon instance it's all American politics. Maybe it's because I don't like monster of the week political drama, but I still don't see a reason to use them instead of Tumblr, Pinterest, or even TikTok.

I feel like I get ${local_country} politics* because I follow people from ${local_country} and most the other people I follow who do post about US politics tend to spoiler their posts with USPOL, so I can just scroll past if I'm not feeling it.

* Usually spoilered with "${local_country_code}POL"

Re: Open Social

#280

Post by suyash »

darkamaul wrote: post #258

I’m really impressed by the quality of this post, as others have mentioned. It’s very well written, and the clarity of the drawings adds a lot to the overall explanation. It perfectly illustrates the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. I had never heard of this protocol before (even though I’ve been using Bluesky since the Twitter/X takeover), but after reading this, I feel even more confident that the m…

I'm curious how did he create those illustrations - by hand or AI generated?
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