Comment by jrv
7 hours ago
> 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.
The data is not transferring, but the user is. When I sign up for e.g. Twitter, I don't want to sign up for Mastodon, or Bluesky, or Truth Social, or whatever other platform someone might create later. Thus I would not choose to put my data in a PDS. I feel like that would actually leave me with less ownership and control than I have now.
My point is that I don't believe the separation of frontend and data is desirable for a social network. I want to know that I am on a specific platform that gives me some degree of control and guarantee (to the extent that I trust that platform) over how my data is represented. I don't really have to worry that it's showing up in any number of other places that I didn't sign up for (technically I do since everything public can be scraped of course, but in practice there are safeguards that go out the window when you explicitly create something like a PDS).
3 replies →
This sounds like I need to host my PDS. Easy for me with no public profile but if I was someone famous wouldn't that mean I needed enterprise class hosting?
1 reply →