3 ms·

I think it's on open social apps to show that they're actually meaningfully better products, and that is possible because they're open. With luck, this may lead

I think it's on open social apps to show that they're actually meaningfully better products, and that is possible because they're open. With luck, this may lead to an ecosystem where it's worth staying compatible and interoperable, and where users scoff if someone is trying to break it, and where users have an easy way to walk away. I know this sounds super idealistic but this did essentially happen with open source over a long time. At some point, people were just as skeptical of open source as we might be about open social.

zahlman 9mo ago
I do really appreciate your vision, FWIW. (It also seems very compatible with my ideas about software complexity and dependencies etc.)
- danabramov 9mo ago
  To be clear, the vision is not mine, I'm just describing how AT works. Kudos to the team who designed it.
isodev 9mo ago
> meaningfully better products That are yet to become monetised. It's all fun and games until Bluesky announced how users and developers will pay for all this and what happens with your "social file system" when you stop paying.
- danabramov 9mo ago
  I mean, I can literally already self-host my personal data if I want to. And there are also already forks of Bluesky (not just the client, but the server and the database) that can participate without fragmenting the network. It is not a perfect system but it's so far from where you are when you just rely on a closed app.
  - isodev 9mo ago
    That's great, but also Mastodon is just there and has been for quite some time. I see no added value in Bluesky/ATProto beyond the layer of that "social as a service" which looks like a walled garden / app store of sorts in the making. I may be wrong, of course...
    - danabramov 9mo ago
      Mastodon isn't doing anything similar! Mastodon is just a bunch of isolated copies of the same app talking to each other. There is no notion of a shared identity, each server's admin is effectively a king over your account, etc. It's a fragmented patchwork of isolated sites that forward messages. With AT, there is just one global network. Like the web. You don't post "to" someone's isolated copy of an app. You post to your own folder, and every interested app can aggregate your post. It's a bit like email vs RSS. Very different shapes. To give you a concrete example to ground it. Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky. They're setting up their own server with different moderation policies and are unbanning some people that Bluesky has banned (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjos2b https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...). However, Blacksky posts still exist in the same "world" as Bluesky--they are not an isolated fragment. Thanks to AT, Blacksky and Bluesky are just two different prisms through which you see a single network. Whereas with Mastodon, every app is its own network, with some limited message passing between them.
      - isodev 9mo ago
        I understand the technology of course. In fact, it's clear ATProto is an instantiation of data spaces, a tech developed in the EU for industry purposes. However, while in industry there is pre-existing need for interoperable "data product marketplaces", it doesn't translate to social media in the same context. There is no pre-existing need or desire for people to put all their data into a single space - that part is entirely driven by social companies themselves which of course benefit from that kind of centralisation and interoperability. So yes, the prism is that our social interactions become a data product and more - a data product "under governance", well structured and with well defined schema, etc. For end users, functionally, there is very little to be gained (and some things to be let go) but the technology is not accessible enough for non-tech folks to decide on the tradeoff themselves. As for Mastodon, what you call limited currently includes editing posts, long form posts and private blocklists (among others), all features Bluesky lacks and current version of atproto does not allow. So let's not try to quantify/compare them like that. Regardless, I like the idea overall, I believe the Solid project (https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/) addresses a similar concept but when less dependence on a single authority as is the case of Bluesky and ATProto.

zahlman 9mo ago

I do really appreciate your vision, FWIW. (It also seems very compatible with my ideas about software complexity and dependencies etc.)

danabramov 9mo ago
To be clear, the vision is not mine, I'm just describing how AT works. Kudos to the team who designed it.

isodev 9mo ago

> meaningfully better products That are yet to become monetised. It's all fun and games until Bluesky announced how users and developers will pay for all this and what happens with your "social file system" when you stop paying.

danabramov 9mo ago
I mean, I can literally already self-host my personal data if I want to. And there are also already forks of Bluesky (not just the client, but the server and the database) that can participate without fragmenting the network. It is not a perfect system but it's so far from where you are when you just rely on a closed app.
- isodev 9mo ago
  That's great, but also Mastodon is just there and has been for quite some time. I see no added value in Bluesky/ATProto beyond the layer of that "social as a service" which looks like a walled garden / app store of sorts in the making. I may be wrong, of course...
  - danabramov 9mo ago
    Mastodon isn't doing anything similar! Mastodon is just a bunch of isolated copies of the same app talking to each other. There is no notion of a shared identity, each server's admin is effectively a king over your account, etc. It's a fragmented patchwork of isolated sites that forward messages. With AT, there is just one global network. Like the web. You don't post "to" someone's isolated copy of an app. You post to your own folder, and every interested app can aggregate your post. It's a bit like email vs RSS. Very different shapes. To give you a concrete example to ground it. Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky. They're setting up their own server with different moderation policies and are unbanning some people that Bluesky has banned (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjos2b https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...). However, Blacksky posts still exist in the same "world" as Bluesky--they are not an isolated fragment. Thanks to AT, Blacksky and Bluesky are just two different prisms through which you see a single network. Whereas with Mastodon, every app is its own network, with some limited message passing between them.
    - isodev 9mo ago
      I understand the technology of course. In fact, it's clear ATProto is an instantiation of data spaces, a tech developed in the EU for industry purposes. However, while in industry there is pre-existing need for interoperable "data product marketplaces", it doesn't translate to social media in the same context. There is no pre-existing need or desire for people to put all their data into a single space - that part is entirely driven by social companies themselves which of course benefit from that kind of centralisation and interoperability. So yes, the prism is that our social interactions become a data product and more - a data product "under governance", well structured and with well defined schema, etc. For end users, functionally, there is very little to be gained (and some things to be let go) but the technology is not accessible enough for non-tech folks to decide on the tradeoff themselves. As for Mastodon, what you call limited currently includes editing posts, long form posts and private blocklists (among others), all features Bluesky lacks and current version of atproto does not allow. So let's not try to quantify/compare them like that. Regardless, I like the idea overall, I believe the Solid project (https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/) addresses a similar concept but when less dependence on a single authority as is the case of Bluesky and ATProto.