Comment by motoxpro
8 hours ago
I've always thought walled gardens are the effect of consumer preferences, not the cause.
The effect of the internet (everything open to everyone) was to create smaller pockets around a specific idea or culture. Just like you have group chats with different people, thats what IG and Snap are. Segmentation all the way down.
I am so happy that my IG posts arent available on my HN or that my IG posts arent being easily cross posted to a service I dont want to use like truth social. If you want it to be open, just post it to the web.
I think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation. It feels like in crypto when people said I want to use my Pokemon in game item in Counterstrike (or any game) like, how and why would that even be valuable without the context? Same with a Snap post on HN or a HN post on some yet-to-be-created service.
Ever heard of the World Wide Web?
It was great. Anyone could host web pages, anyone could access and read anyone’s web pages with a tool called a web browser, of which there used to be several compatible implementations.
>I am so happy that my IG posts arent available on my HN or that my IG posts arent being easily cross posted to a service I dont want to use like truth social.
ATProto apps don't automatically work like this and don't support all types of "files" by default. The app's creator has to built support for a specific "file type". My app https://anisota.net supports both Bluesky "files" and Leaflet "files", so my users can see Bluesky posts, Leaflet posts, and Anisota posts. But this is because I've designed it that way.
Anyone can make a frontend that displays the contents of users PDSs.
Here's an example...
Bluesky Post on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dame.is/post/3m36cqrwfsm24
Bluesky Post on Anisota: https://anisota.net/profile/dame.is/post/3m36cqrwfsm24)
Leaflet post on Leaflet: https://dame.leaflet.pub/3m36ccn5kis2x
Leaflet post on Anisota: https://anisota.net/profile/dame.is/document/3m36ccn5kis2x
I also have a little side project called Aturi that helps provide "universal links" so that you can open ATProto-based content on the client/frontend of your choice: https://aturi.to/anisota.net
Except that a lot of the app builders in ATProto seem to think the protocol was designed to make their lives easier when bootstrapping their network from Bluesky userbase.
(Imo, that is a perverse interpretation, it's about user choice, which they are effectively taking away from me by auto importing and writing to my Bsky graph)
re: the debates on reusing follows from Bluesky in other apps instead of their own
I agree. I don't understand the driving force here.
I have all of the raw image files that I've uploaded to Instagram. I can screenshot or download the versions that I created in their editor. Likewise for any text I've published anywhere. I prefer this arrangement, where I have the raw data in my personal filesystem and I (to an extent) choose which projections of it are published where on the internet. An IG follow or HN upvote has zero value to me outside of that platform. I don't feel like I want this stuff aggregated in weird ways that I don't know about.
For me, part of it is that we have no power collectively against products turning their back on users because coordination to "export data all at once and then import it into specific other place" is near-impossible. So this creates a perverse cycle where once you capture enough of the market, competition has very little chance unless they change the category entirely.
What AT enables is forking products with their data and users. So, if some product is going down a bad road, a motivated team can fork it with existing content, and you can just start using the new thing while staying interoperable with the old thing. I think this makes the landscape a lot more competitive. I wrote about this in detail in https://overreacted.io/open-social/#closed-social which is another longread but specifically gets into this problem.
I hear you re: not wanting "weird aggregation", that just be a matter of taste. I kind of feel like if I'm posting something on the internet, I might as well have it on the open web as aggregatable by other apps.
Thanks for your thoughts. I do feel like this is all very specifically connected to Twitter. Which tech people really adopted, but I never used much, so it is interesting that these different perspectives are somewhat tied to one's megaplatform(s) of choice. I don't know of another social network that has inspired such a consistent effort to be forked or cloned. I do kind of feel like "change the category" and create a new network with the traits you want to see is the right move.
For better or worse, Twitter built their network. That many people willingly signed up and posted and continue to post there. I don't think anyone really should be able to fork it, because the users didn't collectively agree to that, and they don't all agree on what a good road or a bad road is. Ultimately, they can choose to leave if and when they want. Are these networks rather sticky, yes of course, but that's life.
We've seen lots of social networks come and go, things do change over time, there's ample opportunity for new ideas to flourish. In that sense, AT is perfectly welcome to throw their hat in the ring and see if that resonates and sticks. If people want their social network to be forkable, that concept will succeed.
I do think it misses what a lot of people find valuable about the tangibility and constraints of "I am making this content specifically for this platform and this audience at this point in time." I don't think most people think of their social media posts as a body of work that they want to maintain and carry over in an abstract sense independent of platform, and give open license to anyone to cook up into whatever form they can dream of.
1 reply →
> I think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation.
Twitter was my home on the web for almost 15 years when it got taken over by a ... - well you know the story. At the time I wished I could have taken my identity, my posts, my likes, and my entire social graph over to a compatible app that was run by decent people. Instead, I had to start completely new. But with ATProto, you can do exactly that - someone else can just fork the entire app, and you can keep your identity, your posts, your likes, your social graph. It all just transfers over, as long as the other app is using the same ATProto lexicon (so it's basically the same kind of app).
But what if your entire social graph didn't choose to transfer over as well? What if they don't want to be on that app? What if someone that was very indecent made a compatible app? Would you want your entire Twitter history represented on there?
For better or worse, I don't think it makes sense to decentralize social. The network of each platform is inherently imbued with the characteristics and culture of that platform.
And I feel like Twitter is the anomalous poster child for this entire line of thinking. Pour one out, let it go, move on, but I don't think creating generalized standards for social media data is the answer. I don't want 7 competing Twitter-like clones for different political ideologies that all replicate each others' data with different opt-in/opt-out semantics. That sounds like hell.
The framing of "portability" is a bit confusing. Your data is not actually "transferring" anywhere, it's always in your PDS. These other apps and clients are just frontends that are displaying the data that is in your PDS. The data is public and open, though private data is in the works and hopefully will arrive in 2026.
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>The effect of the internet (everything open to everyone) was to create smaller pockets around a specific idea or culture. Just like you have group chats with different people, thats what IG and Snap are. Segmentation all the way down.
I actually agree with that. See from the post:
>For some use cases, like cross-site syndication, a standard-ish jointly governed lexicon makes sense. For other cases, you really want the app to be in charge. It’s actually good that different products can disagree about what a post is! Different products, different vibes. We’d want to support that, not to fight it.
AT doesn't make posts from one app appear in all apps by default, or anything like that. It just makes it possible for products to interoperate where that makes sense. It is up to whoever's designing the products to decide which data from the network to show. E.g. HN would have no reason to show Instagram posts. However, if I'm making my own aggregator app, I might want to process HN stuff together with Reddit stuff. AT gives me that ability.
To give you a concrete example where this makes sense. Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub/) is a macroblogging platform, but it ingests Bluesky posts to keep track of quotes from the Leaflets on the network, and display those quotes in a Leaflet's sidebar. This didn't require Leaflet and Bluesky to collaborate, it's just naturally possible.
Another reason to support this is that it allows products to be "forked" when someone is motivated enough. Since data is on the open network, nothing is stopping from a product fork from being perfectly interoperable with the original network (meaning it both sees "original" data and can contribute to it). So the fork doesn't have to solve the "convince everyone to move" problem, it just needs to be good enough to be worth running and growing organically. This makes the space much more competitive. To give an example, Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky that takes different moderation decisions (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...) but remains interoperable with the network.
There's also a risk of adversarial cross-site syndication: your stuff can and probably will show up on websites you don't control.
That's just how it works and I accept the risk.
People concerned about that probably shouldn't publish on Bluesky. Private chat makes more sense for a lot of things.
That also seems to be a risk with most centralized social networks these days as well.
Our LinkedIn profiles have been scanned by scrapers, Instagram photos used for facial recognition training, Twitter / FB posts replicated in a bunch of downstream places, archives, and search indexes. Not to mention data being sold to third parties.
At this point, I assume if I post it publicly online, it is no longer in my control where it ends up downstream and I assume it will be online somewhere forever.
If truth social didn't remove all the federation code, posts from mastodon and many other ActivityPub sites would have appeared there.