This is such an important idea -- and yet I feel like the hyper-individualized "bluesky" implementation pictured is a less good practical idea than Mastodons more "server/host" way of doing things.
I get that theoretically the two should be similar or even identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice in this style, in the form of good ol email.
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 available free of cost.
And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway so you don't need to type the monstrosity.
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 because then everyone will still be on one or two large providers.
I think the other issue here is that there's a serious question of why bother "upgrading" your social media from closed to open when we've all figured out that it's bad for you, worsens your mood, and generally wastes your time?
If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
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.
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.
The bit about aggregation is interesting, but it's not clear to me what the performance characteristics will be for very popular accounts. Presumably Justin Beiber's repo cannot be expected to handle 100 million WebSocket connections, all of which push out a message the instant he posts something. Is it vital to have more centralized hosts which can implement the sort of hybrid push vs. pull models that Twitter famously needed to implement?
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.
The functioning is similar, albeit there is no need for hosting user data since it can be sent to multiple relays and live reachable to others from there.
> Open source has clearly won. Yes, there are plenty of closed source products and businesses. But the shared infrastructure—the commons—runs on open source.
Lost me right there. Open source is the infrastructure that powers closed cloud. None of the openness makes it to the end user. It only benefits highly technical users and businesses.
Open source was made irrelevant (to non-technical users) by the shift to services and cloud.
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.
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 decisions have to be made by a trusted intermediary. ActivityPub is more like RSS or email—your local server only has to manage the feeds you subscribe to, and your inbox is directly built from all of the posts you have access to. People you subscribe to send you your posts, and you don't have to process them at all.
This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does—every AppView needs to track the like counts of every post in the network manually. It's a huge hassle! I just don't see this architecture winning out in the long term, when compared to the AP feed-subscription architecture.
primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity
Actually, this was how AP was originally designed as well—it was just that the most popular early implementations took shortcuts to remove that functionality to fit them into their existing architecture. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the biggest AP implementations when it was initially adopted were descendants of older OStatus social networks, and not built to be "ActivityPub-native" from the ground up.
> primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity
Why do you think that's different in ActivityPub? As far as I know there's nothing preventing (for example) Mastodon and Pixelfed using the same identity.
This is clearly a wild claim that almost undermines the rest of the argument, but to the extent that we can accept that there are open source software packages that decision-makers deep in that industry will reliably choose for their business...it's not clear how this revolution will extend to "regular people." They just want easy. Make something as easy and fun as Instagram. They don't give a crap about all this, they don't want to think about it.
In the tech industry, open source has clearly won. You're right that most end users don't particularly care. The engineers building solutions definitely care, and prefer to build on top of open source dependencies.
I just don’t understand that assertion when there is very clearly still a massive proprietary closed-source software industry. How are you measuring? A lot of people use open source packages, because they’re free and easy, to build closed source products. Does that count as a win for open source? In my experience most engineers aren’t that fervent about it.
Either way, with social, and the network effects required, you’re targeting end users. The widest net with the lowest common denominator. Whatever success open source has had among people that live and breathe these issues every day is not replicable there.
I’m probably coming off as just a hater or anti-open source or something but I’m really not, I just feel like there’s a certain perspective that is a lot more niche and esoteric than its proponents realize.
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'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 problem by just gathering data in background and feeding it to the user anyway. That particular implementation might not work but it sounds correct.
IMO, not much of value of Twitter for most users is in ability to post tweets, it's in data bandwidth. 99.9% of users don't post anything interesting, those might as well be local text file or oit of band shared filler content. The value is in content sourcing, so something like multi-social RSS reader with optional P2P should be the way to go. Just IMdimO, though...
Thank you Dan for the post! I think two other things to point out:
1. Because open social has to actually compete for a user's business, any sufficiently mature platform build in the ecosystem will necessarily trend towards being more responsive to those users needs, which will trend towards a better product than the legacy crop,
2. Precisely at a moment where governments lean on large, visible corporate entities to enact desired policies, splintering that ownership helps ensure a resilient communications network
I'm glad to see someone recognize the critical importance of authors owning their domain. Without that, you will alway be at the mercy of someone else. The rest is just technical detail.
Technically on Bluesky even if you don't own your own domain you can still move all your stuff to a competitor and everything will still work. The only thing you can't do is keep your original handle but no "links" to your account (posts, followers, comments) will be broken because there's a stable identifier for your account that's independent of your handle. You will still be verifiably the same person on the other server.
All of this is meant for 100% public data, right? Or is there a concept of visibility control? Can I create private communities, with data flowing just inside?
I'm a little saddened to see that each app has it's own collection type, even if they are able to use each others collections. That means that apps will only interoperate to the extent that they are explicitly designed to.
One of the beautiful (but perhaps not that practically relevant) things about ActivityPub is that a Mastodon user can subscribe to a Pixelfed user without anything special being done. It's like if Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Substack all automatically interoperated.
AP intercompatibility is fun, but it starts to fall apart once you leave the safety of the "Note" (statuses) and "Question" (polls) types (which is what Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, Pleroma, etc. all use as their primary elements). Everything outside of it becomes either loosely converted to a note (Mastodon does this for a lot of things, see https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/activitypub/#payloads) or is discarded by the instance. The only types that I know of which have been able to have native support from multiple AP implementations are micro-blogging and Lemmy's community system, with everything else essentially being a monoculture (or just extremely one-sided towards a specific implementation) due to a lack of interest from other implementations in providing full, standardized support. This isn't an inherent protocol limitation, but I do think that the community could do better in organizing standards outside of the core documents.
ATproto's system is a bit more well defined (you HAVE to abide by the lexicon/schema of the data collection to be accepted by implementations, reference implementation and some third-party ones have schema validators to do so) and allows for easier intercompatibility, but I do think that it could be a bit looser than it is right now (selective support for additional fields) to provide proper "sidecar" values in a record (they'll be in the user's PDS but it won't validate and could be rejected by indexers). Bridgy Fed does this to include the originating URL from APub and the original text, which third-party clients could certainly take advantage of if they detect that the post comes from a Bridgy account. (https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-fields)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadI get that theoretically the two should be similar or even identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice in this style, in the form of good ol email.
And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway so you don't need to type the monstrosity.
Or is it a really bad idea™?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
It was a complete disaster
If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account, that defeats the whole purpose because then everyone will still be on one or two large providers.
If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
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.
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.
Can you also do one for NOSTR?
The functioning is similar, albeit there is no need for hosting user data since it can be sent to multiple relays and live reachable to others from there.
Thanks in advance.
Lost me right there. Open source is the infrastructure that powers closed cloud. None of the openness makes it to the end user. It only benefits highly technical users and businesses.
Open source was made irrelevant (to non-technical users) by the shift to services and cloud.
This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does—every AppView needs to track the like counts of every post in the network manually. It's a huge hassle! I just don't see this architecture winning out in the long term, when compared to the AP feed-subscription architecture.
Actually, this was how AP was originally designed as well—it was just that the most popular early implementations took shortcuts to remove that functionality to fit them into their existing architecture. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the biggest AP implementations when it was initially adopted were descendants of older OStatus social networks, and not built to be "ActivityPub-native" from the ground up.Why do you think that's different in ActivityPub? As far as I know there's nothing preventing (for example) Mastodon and Pixelfed using the same identity.
This is clearly a wild claim that almost undermines the rest of the argument, but to the extent that we can accept that there are open source software packages that decision-makers deep in that industry will reliably choose for their business...it's not clear how this revolution will extend to "regular people." They just want easy. Make something as easy and fun as Instagram. They don't give a crap about all this, they don't want to think about it.
Either way, with social, and the network effects required, you’re targeting end users. The widest net with the lowest common denominator. Whatever success open source has had among people that live and breathe these issues every day is not replicable there.
I’m probably coming off as just a hater or anti-open source or something but I’m really not, I just feel like there’s a certain perspective that is a lot more niche and esoteric than its proponents realize.
https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content problem by just gathering data in background and feeding it to the user anyway. That particular implementation might not work but it sounds correct.
IMO, not much of value of Twitter for most users is in ability to post tweets, it's in data bandwidth. 99.9% of users don't post anything interesting, those might as well be local text file or oit of band shared filler content. The value is in content sourcing, so something like multi-social RSS reader with optional P2P should be the way to go. Just IMdimO, though...
1. Because open social has to actually compete for a user's business, any sufficiently mature platform build in the ecosystem will necessarily trend towards being more responsive to those users needs, which will trend towards a better product than the legacy crop,
2. Precisely at a moment where governments lean on large, visible corporate entities to enact desired policies, splintering that ownership helps ensure a resilient communications network
One of the beautiful (but perhaps not that practically relevant) things about ActivityPub is that a Mastodon user can subscribe to a Pixelfed user without anything special being done. It's like if Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Substack all automatically interoperated.
ATproto's system is a bit more well defined (you HAVE to abide by the lexicon/schema of the data collection to be accepted by implementations, reference implementation and some third-party ones have schema validators to do so) and allows for easier intercompatibility, but I do think that it could be a bit looser than it is right now (selective support for additional fields) to provide proper "sidecar" values in a record (they'll be in the user's PDS but it won't validate and could be rejected by indexers). Bridgy Fed does this to include the originating URL from APub and the original text, which third-party clients could certainly take advantage of if they detect that the post comes from a Bridgy account. (https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-fields)