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A Social Filesystem

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Re: A Social Filesystem

#81

Post by icy »

skybrian wrote: post #14
avsm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microblogging is also the least interesting part of the ATProto ecosystem. I've switched all my git hosting over to https://tangled.org and am loving it, not least of which is that my git server (a 'knot' in Tangled parlance) is under my control as a PDS and has no storage limits!

Is it as easy for other people to read as a Github repo? Want to share?

Tangled founder here; it's just as easy! For example, here's the entire Tangled codebase monorepo: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core — you can clone this directly as you would a git repo anywhere else.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#82

Post by danabramov »

eduction wrote: post #43

Unpopular opinion: this should be done with xml, not json. XML can have types, be self describing, and be extended (the X in XML). That said it’s a very elegant way to describe AT protocol.

I'd be curious to see what that would look like!

Re: A Social Filesystem

#83

Post by lanyard-textile »

yladiz wrote: post #64

I know this is somewhat covered in another comment, but, the concepts described in the post could have been reduced quite a bit, no offense Dan. While I like the writing generally, I would consider writing and then letting it sit for a few days, rereading, and then cutting chaff (editing). This feels like a great first draft but without feedback, and could have greatly benefited from an editing process, and I think u…

There is not much actionable here, as well intentioned as your comment is.

It's like saying this MR could use some work but not citing a specific example.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#84

Post by theturtletalks »

POSSE and AT Protocol can be understood as interoperable marketplaces. Platforms like Reddit and Instagram already function this way: the product is user content, the payment is attention, and the platform’s cut is ads or behavioral data. Dan argues that this structure is not inevitable. If social data is treated as something people own and store themselves, applications stop being the owners of social graphs and become interfaces that read from user-controlled data instead.

I am working on a similar model for commerce. Sellers deploy their own commerce logic such as orders, carts, and payments as a hosted service they control, and marketplaces integrate directly with seller APIs rather than hosting sellers. This removes platform overhead, lowers fees, and shifts ownership back to the people creating value, turning marketplaces into interoperable discovery layers instead of gatekeepers.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#86

Post by demux »

danabramov wrote: post #44
nonethewiser wrote: post #34

But how do you get people to actually want this? This stuff is pretty niche even within tech.

Bluesky is not huge, but 40M users is not nothing either. You don't get people to want this, you just try to build better products. The hope is that this enables us all to build better products by making them more interoperable by default. Whether this pans out remains to be seen.

I also don't think the average user gets the value of the protocol yet. Most of those users were looking for a new, more politically palatable home but with the same features as Twitter. The new generation of apps on the protocol will be vital in showing users what's possible. IMO the two most valuable features at a practical level are: - social graph portability, which might look like having an onboarding experience that bootstraps your community on that app - lexicon cross compatibility, i.e. your data from app A shows up in a contextually relevant spot in app B. Or app B writes records that show up in app A. This is pretty key to get right because it might confuse or anger users if they aren't condition to expect it. Once the average user groks these features though, I'd be surprised if they voluntarily switch back to the standard corpo apps that eventually exit to some company who tries to monetize the shit out of every feature.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#87

Post by demux »

EGreg wrote: post #60

As someone who explicitly designed social protocols since 2011, who met Tim Berners-Lee and his team when they were building SOLID (before he left MIT and got funded to turn it into a for-profit Inrupt) I can tell you that files are NOT the best approach. (And neither is SPARQL by the way, Tim :) SOLID was publishing ACLs for example as web resources. Presumably you’d manage all this with CalDAV-type semantics. But o…

FYI the CTO of Bluesky was an early dev of Secure ScuttleButt

Re: A Social Filesystem

#88

Post by catapart »

danabramov wrote: post #37
catapart wrote: post #3

yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub. if they were decent people, th…

>that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) That's not correct, actually hosting user data is cheap. Most users' repos are tiny. Bluesky doesn't save anything by having someone move to their own PDS. What's expensive is stuff like video processing and large scale aggregation. Which has to be done regardless of where the user is hosting their data.

come on, man, let's be real. you're talking modern, practical application; I'm talking reasonable user buy in at big boy social media levels. the video hosting IS what I'm talking about being expensive. you think bsky is going to be successfully while ignoring the instagram crowd forever? what are we doing here?

bsky saves the video processing and bandwidth by not hosting that content on bsky. it's a smaller problem, but in a large enough pool, images become heavy, too. and, either way, the egress of that content is expensive if you're doing it for the entire world, instead of letting each individual's computer (their pds) do it.

I'm happy to admit that text is cheap and bsky isn't looking to offload their data as it stands now. but let's be honest about the long term, which is what my original comment takes aim at.

Re: A Social Filesystem

#89

Post by catapart »

lou1306 wrote: post #4
catapart wrote: post #3

yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub. if they were decent people, th…

> until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage Quite some BSky users are publishing on their own PDS (Personal Data Server) right now . They have been for a while. There are already projects that automate moving or backign up your PDS data from BSky, like https://pdsmoover.com/

yeah, I was one of them. developers are not the endgame, though. true social media needs people who are not going to do anything more complicated than "go to website, sign up". there's no world where setting up your own pds is that simple without an organized piece of software to do that kind of thing.

personally, I could probably get behind recommending something like umbrel[0], if it included something like a "include a pds" option during config. but even that is asking for a lot of mind-share for a non-tech user. it would take a super smooth setup process for that to be realistic. point is, though, I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying no one is doing it and what people are doing is not getting the job done for wider adoption.

[0] https://umbrel.com/ *and, naturally, at this point, I'd prefer they include something that isn't based on AT proto for social publication. I wouldn't mind if they had both, but just an AT proto implementation wouldn't attract me.

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