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I feel very conflicted about this work. On one side I find these ideas extremely compelling. This is aligned with the Indie web body of work, that pictures any
by tetrisgm 1y ago
I feel very conflicted about this work.
On one side I find these ideas extremely compelling. This is aligned with the Indie web body of work, that pictures anyone having a personal website of their own content and ownership over that. And this page an article are beautifully put together.
On the other hand, we haven’t really seen a lot of developers adopting these standards for their own projects (like using this for their personal website or open source project). Nor from casual users (including people who make their own blogs and websites).
I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels.
I respect the vision and the work. Will personally see if we can use this for our work. But I wonder how we make this into something that’s not just a micro niche hobby.
- nunobrito 1y agoYou are correct, and yet depends on ourselves to popularize and make this tech happen. Maybe, just maybe a newer startup out there will have a CEO/CTO that is deeply influenced by open social and delivers a success app that reaches the masses. One never knows, but for sure it won't happen when we do nothing.
- tetrisgm 1y agoHas the experience of spinning up an instance been simplified?
- verdverm 1y agoWhat do you mean by "instance"? There are several protocol components you can run independently, each filling a different role and having different complexity levels If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip
- tetrisgm 1y agoI’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.
- verdverm 1y agoSo it sounds like multiple things then 1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting, handles) 2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on if you want to intermingle Bsky data 3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation and algorithms, among the many other things.
- tetrisgm 1y agoI think 1 is the main thing. We have our own posts and UI but we just want to give people usernames and a way that shares posts in a way that interop with Bluesky. Any advice on a simple way to self host a PDS?
- jrowen 1y agoI am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels. Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning? Why should people care about the abstract concept of data ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, books, movies, radio, etc. Most people do just want that, their primary motivation to engage with media is just to be entertained in that moment. Now that they have places where they can publish stuff and their friends and family and maybe even some other people might see it, why should they care that they don't "own" their Instagram post, whatever that means?
- dgaffney 1y agoidk if the normal user should necessarily care about data ownership, but I think the incentive structure it creates would be immediately legible to most people
- jrowen 1y agoI'm not sure what that means, can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?
- dgaffney 1y agosure, https://x.com https://x.com
- jrowen 1y agoSo mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better, because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent idea.
- dgaffney 1y agoIt’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to survive, which will in turn read legibly to users as less exploitative (you decide your feed, you can switch providers, you can choose moderation layers, etc)
- knowtheory 1y agoThere's still some more work to do to make the developer experience simple enough that it's a no-brainer for people to pick ATProto up in anger. But there's a lot of work developing on that front, and the next 6-12 months will be super exciting to watch. The longer story is that most people don't understand that ATProto is more than just Bluesky, and the usecases are wayyyyyy broader. That's going to take more time to play out in the market.
- tetrisgm 1y agoAbsolutely. In fact I’d love for my startup to run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky, but it still looks like quite a lift. Lmk if you have some recommendations. Basically our thing would give that ecosystem the ability to have personal pages that can look like Patreon, YouTube, Instagram and others
- tynanpurdy 1y agoIt depends how much you want to replicate. All you really need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to your client app, and write them to people’s repos. I’ve been tinkering with the ‘personal website on AT’ idea space for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people already have implemented cool AT integrations in their sites!). Happy to chat ab it.
- tetrisgm 1y agoHMU! I’m “shokunin.” on discord, leshokunin on TG / Twitter. I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.
- steveklabnik 1y agoAre you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.