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Open Social

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351–360 of 409 posts

Re: Open Social

#351

The protocol is cool, but Bluesky continues to trend downward. My experience on it wasn’t positive. It could be interesting to see what other apps may be born out of the protocol though!

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Yes, down in every measure over the last 6 months. I think it's primarily used by a lot of people to organize sockpuppet-aided raids on twitter towards people who are instantly banned by mass-reporting the second they create an account on bluesky. It's basically old 4chan for unfunny people who think they're better than everybody else.

I'd be positive about any distributed social protocol, though, no matter who delivered it. The problem is that this was a Dorsey project that he already abandoned and denounced because it took a bunch of VC and is just waiting for the rugpull. Now you're supposed to trust a bunch of people you never heard of and a few famous paid evangelists.

Re: Open Social

#352
post #221

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 haven't worked with Fedify before, but what I'm talking about is the difference between a service that has a "translation layer" between their own internal data model and ActivityPub, and a server that actually stores full ActivityPub object's in the user's inbox and outbox, and displays them unchanged to clients. 90% of deployed ActivityPub applications—like yours!—are the former, not the latter.

A true "ActivityPub server" is almost as simple as a Bluesky PDS—all it's responsible for is 1) storing blobs of data, 2) fanning out subscriptions and 3) collecting incoming data for you to view. In the original way ActivityPub was designed, all of the actual data presentation layers—Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed—were designed to be specialized clients that could communicate with the user's generic server. However, the first popular implementations cut out the client-to-server part of the protocol, so now we're stuck in a place where everyone thinks ActivityPub means you need a separate identity for every client application.

So, what I would recommend for your own username/password site is implementing an ActivityPub client, and recommending that users use it to connect to a third-party ActivityPub server. That way, the user owns the data, and they simply use your service to get access to (filtered version of) it.

Unfortunately, since this is a less implemented part of the protocol, the client APIs necessary to make this a reality haven't seen much development. And you're facing an uphill battle for user adoption. In practice, users don't seem to mind having separate accounts and identities for different clients. It reminds me a bit of the "key management problem" in e2e cryptography. Having a stable cryptographic identity is doable if you're technically minded, but most people just muddle along and don't really care about it that much—they create new keys every time they get a new laptop instead of trying to figure out cross-signing, and everything works itself out more or less fine.

Re: Open Social

#353

It captures something that I think a lot of us in tech have been feeling but haven't quite articulated: that the social web feels increasingly rented, and the rent keeps going up

Check out Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, he really expands on the idea of web being mostly rent-seeking and not productive.

Re: Open Social

#355
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’d be lucky if the rent was paid in dollars but, instead, it’s paid in psychological manipulation

Psychological manipulation is only being performed because it generates dollars.

True of course that dollars is the end goal, but frankly it'd be better if they just took the dollars out of my pocket directly, instead of poisoning my brain first so that they can trick me into giving some dollars...

Obviously I'm being hyperbolic, but I think eventually if society survives past this phase, our descendants will look back and judge us for letting psychological manipulation be a valid economic process as a way to generate dollars, in much the same way we might judge our ancestors for ever building up a whole industry to hunt whales for oil for fuel (meaning, they might acknowledge that fuel is important and necessary to power an industrializing society, but they would mock us for not understanding how to refine petroleum sooner, and how silly going through the tech tree of fucking whale hunting is, just to get some fuel).

It is fucking silly/absurd/dangerous, that we go through the tech tree branch of psychological manipulation, just to be able to sell some ads or whatever.

Re: Open Social

#357
Awesome read!

Question:

> What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository.

I'm a bit confused by this. If a bluesky avatar contains an image, isn't that stored (at least by default) within bluesky? Meaning that Tangled will have to hit the Bluesky API?

Or maybe Dan is saying that his own repository is not hosted with Bluesky in which it would make sense, if wherever his repo is stored is getting hit to retrieve the image.

Re: Open Social

#358

Awesome read! Question: > What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository. I'm a bit confused by this. If a bluesky avatar contains an image, isn't that stored (at least by default) within bluesky? Meaning that Tangled will have to hit the Bluesky API? Or maybe Dan is say…

The “Bluesky API” is the appview, but the avatar is stored in your PDS. Even if you’re using a PDS hosted by Bluesky, it’s a different component that’s being asked to serve the avatar.

Re: Open Social

#359

Awesome read! Question: > What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository. I'm a bit confused by this. If a bluesky avatar contains an image, isn't that stored (at least by default) within bluesky? Meaning that Tangled will have to hit the Bluesky API? Or maybe Dan is say…

If I understand correctly it doesn’t matter where the user’s profile is hosted, the point is the user has a store of data that can be accessed by multiple apps via the AT protocol, only naming convention separates one app’s data from another’s within a given user’s profile.

Re: Open Social

#360
What is the incentive of someone to create an app and just pay for all the hosting involved?

Also, does everyone need to have their own domain name in order to have an identity cuz that seems like a non-starter.

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