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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#381

Post by dark_mode »

tomgag wrote: post #371
dark_mode wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the skepticism against Bluesky, and I agree that where VC money is involved things are mostly sketchy. However, this post was about the at protocol, which seems like you just hand-waved in one sentence: > The AT Protocol used by Bluesky has some interesting features, although to be honest I don't know how many of these are just impossible to achieve on ActivityPub or are just WIP lagging behind due to funding…

> I don't think the debate between them is super useful because their architectures are very different. Sure, that's true, but I, personally, care mostly about one question: Who holds the keys to the kingdom? In this respect, I think the AT Protocol fails spectacularly, mainly due to the lack of a credible strategy to implement really self-custodian identities. > You also mentioned an issue with the bluesky relay, bu…

I agree with the sentiment and I wouldn't call Bluesky "open social"- I don't trust them either. But I still don't find these to be arguments to be against the protocol per se, which I find really interesting.

> Who holds the keys to the kingdom? In this respect, I think the AT Protocol fails spectacularly, mainly due to the lack of a credible strategy to implement really self-custodian identities

From what I've read, you can still own the entire stack from top to bottom, none of it is necessarily tied to bluesky. Even the identity managed being discussed only applies to bluesky, and whatever ecosystem subscribed to it; but in theory, you could create your own social platform with a new one (you'd obviously lose that ecosystem). But then again, this would also apply to Mastodon, since whoever owns the instance could always nuke it, and if you own your own instance, you need to build an network that trusts you. There's always an authority involved.

> The difference being, last time I checked (and of course things might have changed in the meantime) with AT Protocol it was only possible to self-host part of the infrastructure (and hosting the relay is insanely demanding).

Well it's definitely not the "50TB" you mentioned e.g here is someone running a relay on a $34/month vps and isn't going to accumulate more disk: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l But it's importance is overblown anyway, it's just a json transmitter for signed data. I think the pds and identity managements are the better concern, and I hope there's a better way to decentralize those (if that makes sense).

EDIT: You're still correct that to fully spin up a new bluesky on your own you'd need an insane amount of storage for hosting all that data that's currently stored on bluesky (especially the did:plc and pds). All good arguments against the company, but that's only because people are choosing to store their pds repositories on bluesky. You could just as well point your repo to your own server and use a different social media. They could go under and someone else can create a new app view. I find that really cool; still leaves the identity issue open.

Re: Open Social

#382

Post by krapp »

dangus wrote: post #378
krapp wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is just a paradigm for multimedia communication and networking over the internet. It isn't inherently good or bad, any more than telephones, television, radio or the internet itself. I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry and addicted all the time.

It is quite debatable whether it is inherently good or bad. There is not a whole lot of scientific evidence for it being good from what I understand. I would also argue that if you broaden the definition of social media too far you’re not really talking about social media anymore. Calling your friends on Signal isn’t “social media.”

"good" and "bad" aren't objective or quantifiable, so there can't be scientific evidence that social media is either.

And the definition of social media is broad. I would argue Signal is social media. It lets you form social networks, chat and share different kinds of media. That's all social media is. Social media is more than Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. And I have trouble with the argument that being able to form social networks and share different kind of media is somehow ontologically evil. There are hundreds of social media platforms around the world and countless apps integrating social features, but only a few American platforms seem to be a problem. So maybe it isn't "social media," maybe it's American culture and Silicon Valley capitalism.

The addiction loops, surveillance, data mining, radicalization through algorithms promoting extremist content, etc. aren't fundamental to what social media is, they're aspects of how specific social media platforms have been implemented. It is possible to have social media without all of those negative externalities.

Re: Open Social

#383

Post by BrenBarn »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #132
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.

> Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.

Oh how times have changed. . .

Re: Open Social

#384

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> 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".

I think that's a great way of putting it, and it it's at the root of a lot of problems we have today. Our society increasingly encourages people to make money by coaxing other people into doing things whose costs are hidden.

Re: Open Social

#385

Post by xigoi »

BrenBarn wrote: post #380
styanax wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree, but why not also apply the same logic to the other two communication platforms you are using (Discord and GitHub)? Aside, this infuriates me - "here's our open source project/website, join our Discord!" (even Lemmy instances). sigh

There aren't many realistic alternatives.

The Janet community uses Zulip and it works well.

Re: Open Social

#386

Post by wilt6269 »

danabramov wrote: post #330
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.

I did read the thread — and I’m specifically referring to the third (and final) diagram where it still literally labels X as “Twitter.” No amount of timeline layout gymnastics explains that. It feels less like faithful documentation and more like a pretext to take a swipe at the acquisition by “some guy,” which then segues into the whole “getting cooked by the algorithm” bit.

Re: Open Social

#387

Post by steveklabnik »

fogzen wrote: post #377

AT seems cool — but it’s not built on the web. That’s a dealbreaker for me. I can’t link to a Bluesky post. I can’t use Bluesky from the browser. It’s a silo’d network. The indie web has the right idea: Use the web, build ontop of blogs, degrade gracefully. We could have central aggregators just like Bluesky crawling the web with microformats. The polished experience with Bluesky has little to do with the tech and ev…

> I can’t link to a Bluesky post. I can’t use Bluesky from the browser.

What do you mean? Both of these things are trivial.

Here is a link to my most recent post on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lztkahefs225

You can sign into bsky.app (or deer.social, or anisota.net, or...) in your browser and post just fine.

Re: Open Social

#388

Post by jazzyjackson »

verdverm wrote: post #367
psionides wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there are tens of thousands of records referencing a PDS with a certain… controversial president's name in the hostname, which doesn't actually exist at all. Also someone from Nostr made a tool that let you upload image files and encode them (split into parts) into plc directory records…

Oh is Nostr the other one, why do these groups feel the need to try and ruin what other people enjoy?

Blessed are the troublemakers, for they expose your vulnerabilities

Re: Open Social

#389

Post by geokon »

danabramov wrote: post #361
geokon wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah okay, i hadnt come across this. seems like a potentially viable strategy > Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a nudge towards future extension (eg open unions are default). unions of schemas? Doesnt that lead to a facebook-ized kitchen sink app that does everything? you can effectivelt filter to .. say .. only photos with a photo-only app. But that doesnt form a app/schema culture

See here for how schemas are defined: https://atproto.com/specs/lexicon I meant specifically that “unions” default to open. Let me give you an example. A Bluesky post may contain different types of attachments. Image, gallery, video, etc. That’s a union of known schemas. However, that union is open. That means that generated type will include “or unknown” as the last possible value. Apps are expected to ignore that c…

Thank you for the links. Learned a lot

It does kind of sound like the app that recognizes the most schemas will likely win. It seems there is no benefit to using a limited schema app - and you'd end up missing content that the creator assumes you see. Ex: You can make an app that only shows pictures, but the people posting pictures will likely assume you also can see.. their Leaflet docs or whatnot. You can't force restrictions on the users - ex: if you use my Freegram schema then well you can't add additional stuff - b/c that's the social space we're building

Unless I'm misunderstanding the doc, the lexicon seems also very limited in what it can express. You can't specify images have to be black and white, or video clips have to be shorter than 15seconds. Or replies have different restrictions from posts.

It's maybe impossible to encode everything - but furthermore a lot of the "app culture" is just due to the app design. The photo description on instagram can be extremely long. You can write a diatribe about.. whatever. But it's hidden behind an collapsible button - which make it so people don't typically engage with it.

That's all to say, I think ATProto is very cool - but there is (maybe unfortunately) still a space for the walled gardens b/c they're providing a certain subculture.

Re: Open Social

#390

Post by binbasti »

frumiousirc wrote: post #315
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…

> This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does I didn't know "private likes" even existed, but if atproto includes public key encryption, I could publish a record containing a "like" that I have encrypted with the "liked" user's public key. Only that user would know what the record contained. Though, the fact that the encrypted message exists and had a cleartext "@n…

... if Bluesky users owned their private key.
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