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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#51

Post by danabramov »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11

99% of social media users don't care about any of this. If it's one extra step or configuration they need to learn, or includes a word like "protocol" that they need to understand, they won't use it.

Right, which is why the article makes the point that it’s invisible to the end user several times.

That’s also why it frames the benefits in the concrete way that shows up in the products — like products being able to riff on each other’s data.

My audience for this article is slightly technical so I put some focus on the technical parts. I don’t try to avoid mentioning the “protocol” for the same reason why teaching to make websites involves mentioning HTTP.

I 100% agree with you though and that’s important for broader communication. What people care about are good products.

Re: Open Social

#52

Post by Kye »

mozzius wrote: post #22
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…

Even if everyone is on bsky.social, that's still a huge improvement on the status quo. It's not like the web isn't decentralised just because lots of people are on AWS - you can move away at any moment, adversarially if necessary.

Looking forward to the future where an app just sort of silently backs up your PDS/keys on your device until the day you need it and everyone finds out they can log into whatever platform replaces the one that blew up like nothing happened.

Re: Open Social

#53

Post by verdverm »

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.

You'd probably like this article too, same ideas from the distributed engineer perspective

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

Re: Open Social

#54

Post by danabramov »

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.

Thanks! I’m glad it’s clicking. The comparisons with AP are always frustrating for this reason as it doesn’t try to do anything similar in scope.

Re: Open Social

#55

Post by [deleted] »

notatoad wrote: post #9
mcny wrote: post #4

Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and a…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Open Social

#56

Post by knowtheory »

drnick1 wrote: post #44

This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have an online presence at all.

I'd argue that ATProto is the next iteration of open internet. It's what an internet where accounts/identity and verifiable content attribution are built in, and nobody using the technology needs to think about any of that.

There's a space here where we can move from nobody having smart phones or hosting digital presences -> everyone having digital presence provided by Facebook/Instagram, and icloud/google accounts -> Accounts w/ something like ATProto where its your stuff, you get to decide where you keep it, and you get to decide who gets access to it.

Re: Open Social

#57

Post by danabramov »

numpad0 wrote: post #47

I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting whale. That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content p…

While I use microblogging to frame the initial narrative, as explained in the article, this isn’t limited to Twitter-like products. Tangled is “GitHub on atproto”, Leaflet is “Medium on atproto”, and so on.

The problem with client-side P2P is you can’t do large-scale aggregation with consistency. Large-scale aggregation with consistency is what normal people expect from social apps.

Re: the OpenAI thing you mentioned, that's actually a perfect example of something atproto excels at. Since the data already exists in the network, you can crawl/index it and run your own tooling that does something proactive on cron jobs etc. See https://github.com/graze-social/iftta for some initial work in that area.

Re: Open Social

#58

Post by RobotToaster »

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…

AFAIK bluesky isn't even properly federated yet, everything relies on a single "BGS" router server.

Re: Open Social

#59

Post by verdverm »

steveklabnik wrote: post #28
mcny wrote: post #4

Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and a…

> It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost. This is basically where did:plc comes in, for atproto. https://web.plc.directory/ provides free ID numbers. For example, mine is https://plc.directory/did:plc:3danwc67lo7obz2fmdg6jxcr . Your domain then uses a txt record to indicate that you want it to be a…

just to note, did:web is also an option, but has drawbacks like losing your identity if you lose your domain.

Re: Open Social

#60

Post by Kye »

danabramov wrote: post #57
numpad0 wrote: post #47

I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting whale. That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content p…

While I use microblogging to frame the initial narrative, as explained in the article, this isn’t limited to Twitter-like products. Tangled is “GitHub on atproto”, Leaflet is “Medium on atproto”, and so on. The problem with client-side P2P is you can’t do large-scale aggregation with consistency. Large-scale aggregation with consistency is what normal people expect from social apps. Re: the OpenAI thing you mentioned…

I like that labeler that shows which lexicons a user has in their repo.

https://bsky.app/profile/recordcollector.edavis.dev

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