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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#321

Post by idiotsecant »

nairboon wrote: post #288
wsve wrote: post #278

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…

There are alternatives to DNS, like GNS (GNU Name System): https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html

Or, at the risk of saying the unpopular thing, Ethereum Name Service? (ENS) This sort of thing is pretty much exactly what ENS is for.

Re: Open Social

#322

Post by [deleted] »

jrowen wrote: post #125
tetrisgm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think a lot of people treat their own content as disposable also though. I don't know if most people would really care to save or dig through their entire Twitter history, for example. The rise of Stories is evidence of this. We're moving from a culture of preserving ancient pieces of paper to swimming in a never-ending river of data where there's so many things coming at you that you just move forward and don't ha…

[deleted]

Re: Open Social

#323

Post by js8 »

The thing I miss the most in social networks is the ability to verify the provenance of information through social graph (chain of trust).

Ideally, if I see a post or comment, a process that I control should be able to establish whether the user is trustworthy, by asking the intermediate nodes whether the next hop is trustworthy. Essentially, I should be able to walk that chain of trust to see whether the information comes from a trustworthy source (and possibly input user's own evaluation of the chain links and nodes).

Unfortunately, social media companies do not let users access the social graph, because not being able to ascertain provenance of information is what makes paid advertising possible. It would also greatly help to combat bots.

Re: Open Social

#324

Post by utopiah »

danabramov wrote: post #306
utopiah wrote: post #289

Any implementation if I don't care? Like if I want my Web application to support either ATProto, AP, and eventually whatever else is around the corner even if it means only have the lowest common denominator?

If you just care about the identity part, atproto uses a flavor of oauth.

Thanks. Well that's a good question, namely what do I actually expect out of federation.

In my case it's to remix pedagogical exercises. So I need :

- actual content (e.g. exercise and assets) to remix (imagine changing the language)

but also optionally

- author ID for attribution - a stable URL for provenance, again from attribution but possibly metadata (e.g. how many times played on origin server, language, etc)

Re: Open Social

#325

Post by danabramov »

linza wrote: post #264
steveklabnik wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you are really worried about this you’d want to regularly back that up.

I read your reply as the scenario from GP is unlikely to happen in practice or has low impact. To me it seems you need to make frequent backups of "your" data to have a copy of it. Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?

Ideally, a client app would make these backups for you automatically. I hope Bluesky official client will add automatic backups (in addition to the existing manual export flow that already exists). It's not hard to set it up as a GitHub action today if you're technical but making it accessible to non-technical users seems important.

>Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?

Not really since there has to be a source of truth where the writes happen. I guess you could manually replicate changes between multiple servers but there still has to be one that applications know to talk to. I'm not sure what problem it would solve. This seems similar to "can I have multiple deployments of my site" — you sure can, but you might as well deploy it elsewhere when you actually plan to point to it.

Re: Open Social

#326

Post by pmk1c »

rossy wrote: post #276
steveklabnik wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Protoco…

This I a valid point. But what‘s promising is: If this should happen, someone could easily decide to start Bluesky2 (maybe find a better name) and start at exactly the same point where rogue Bluesky left off ATProto.

Think about the Twitter exodus to Mastodon and Bluesky. Now imagine the same thing happening, but with one player saying: Come here, we have all the profiles, posts, feeds and likes and can promise, your data is still yours, when we decide to go rogue (maybe think about this marketing message again).

Re: Open Social

#327

Post by danabramov »

vollbrecht wrote: post #300

What would in practice happen in a two user scenario where user A replied to user B, and later user B's repository gets completely deleted. We have this cache thing via wss connections. Do they invalidate this messages from user B? Is user's A worldview now completely dead? Owning a thing in the internet is a complicated topic i guess. Preserving past information via copying what a user said so that it does not get l…

If the user chooses to delete their account, it is a separate event on the network, which well-behaved apps should respect (and update their caches accordingly). So an app like Bluesky would display this as a reply to a deleted post.

If the user's repo just goes down (e.g. the host is down), then indeed it won't be available upstream and only cached versions will remain. It might be that the user is having problems, and the repository will be up on a different host later. It's up to each application how to handle this, but it seems reasonable to keep serving cached content since there was no explicit deletion instruction. E.g. I presume Bluesky would keep showing both replies in the conversation.

>I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?

Yeah this is a tricky thing. The general guideline is that the user expresses intent (e.g. can delete post or entire repo) and well-behaved apps respect that intent. But of course there can be non-well-behaved apps that don't, or that permanently archive everything ever emitted.

Re: Open Social

#328

Post by danabramov »

NaomiLehman wrote: post #319

"Open source has clearly won." is this a joke?

Dominant programming languages, servers, package managers, UI libraries and components, and much development tooling (IDEs, language servers) is largely open source. This wasn't the case when I started programming.

Re: Open Social

#329

Post by danabramov »

rakoo wrote: post #318
danabramov wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just don’t believe that any solution where you don’t have full view of the network is aligned with what normal people want. Maybe AP is on a bigger mission to teach people that they’re “wanting wrong things” and actually you should enjoy a system where everyone sees a different like count and half the replies are missing. I think it’s a dead end.

That's a purely personal point of view but I don't think the AP people claim that "people want the wrong things", but rather that "the things you want have a cost and we're not hiding it". The fact that likes count and half the replies are missing is not specific to AP but to implementations not willing to actually follow the AP community: in fact the SocialHub ( https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ ) community is th…

Mastodon/AP is difficult to discuss because pointing to flaws of Mastodon leads to people saying "it's just a Mastodon problem", but AP doesn't by itself specify much so it's hard to critique it too. If there's a "flavor" of AP that's competitive with what atproto solves (can "walk away" without cooperation, can "revive" and "remix" data from other apps, can "fork" products with all their data), I'd like to read a condensed summary of that architecture.

Re: Open Social

#330

Post by danabramov »

wilt6269 wrote: post #285

I can’t help but cringe whenever I see a Bluesky fan stubbornly clinging to the past by calling X ‘Twitter.’ This one went even further - using the old logo and even the outdated URL.

My post retraces a historical progression of social media, and it was indeed called "Twitter" at the time. You can scroll a bit down and you'll see "X" a bit below. In general, actually reading the articles you comment on won't hurt you.
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