Comment by danabramov
5 hours ago
Author here! I grew up reading Joel's blog and am familiar with this post. Do you have a more pointed criticism?
I agree something like "hyperlinked JSON" maybe sounds too abstract, but so does "hyperlinked HTML". But I doubt you see web as being vague? This is basically web for data.
> Do you have a more pointed criticism?
Sure.
After taking the time to re-read the article since I initial posted my (admittedly shallow) dismissal, I realized this article is really a primer/explainer for the AT protocol, which I don't really have enough background in to criticize.
My criticism is more about the usefulness of saying "what if we treated social networking as a filesystem": which is that this doesn't actually solve any problems or add any value. The idea of modeling a useful thing (social media)[0] as a filesystem is generalizing the not-useful parts of it (ie. the minutia of how you actually read/write to it) and not actually addressing any of the interesting or difficult parts of it (how you come up with relevant things to look at, whether a "feed" should be a list of people you follow or suggestions from an algorithm, how you deal with bad actors, sock puppets, the list goes on forever.)
This is relevant to Joel's blog because of the point he makes about Napster: It was never about the "peer to peer" or "sharing", that was the least interesting part. The useful thing about Napster was that you could type in a song and download it. It would have been popular if it wasn't peer to peer, so long as you could still get any music you wanted for free.
Modeling social media as a filesystem, or constructing a data model about how to link things together, and hypergeneralizing all the way to "here's how to model any graph of data on the filesystem!" is basically a "huh, that's neat" little tech demo but doesn't actually solve anything. Yes, you can take any graph-like structured data and treat it as files and folders. I can write a FUSE filesystem to browse HN. I can spend the 20 minutes noodling on how the schema should work, what a "symlink" should represent, etc... but at the end of the day, you've just taken data and changed how it's presented.
There's no reason for the filesystem to be the "blessed" metaphor here. Why not a SQL database? You can `SELECT * FROM posts WHERE like_count > 100`, how neat! Or how about a git repo? You can represent posts as commits, and each person's timeline as a branch, and ooh then you could cherry-pick to retweet!
These kind of exercises basically just turn into nerd-sniping: You think of a clever "what if we treated X as Y" abstraction, then before you really stop to think "what problem does that actually solve", you get sucked into thinking about various implementation details and how it to model things.
The AT protocol may be well-designed, it may not be, but my point is more that it's not protocols that we're lacking. It's a lack of trust, lack of protection from bad actors, financial incentives that actively harm the experience for users, and the negative effects on what social media does to people. Nobody's really solved any of this: Not ActivityPub, not Mastadon, not BlueSky, not anyone. Creating a protocol that generalizes all of social media so that you can now treat it all homogeneously is "neat", but it doesn't solve anything that you couldn't solve via a simple (for example) web browser extension that aggregated the data in the same way for you. Or bespoke data transformations between social media sites to allow for federation/replication. You can just write some code to read from site A and represent it in site B (assuming sites A and B are willing.) Creating a protocol for this? Meh, it's not a terrible idea but it's also not interesting.
- [0] You could argue whether social media is "useful", let's just stipulate that it is.
I think there was a bit of a communication failure between us. You took the article as a random "what if X was Y" exploration. However, what I tried to communicate something more like:
1. File-first paradigm has some valuable properties. One property is apps can't lock data out of each other. So the user can always change which apps they use.
2. Web social app paradigm doesn't have these properties. And we observe the corresponding problems: we're collectively stuck with specific apps. This is because our data lives inside those apps rather than saved somewhere under our control.
3. The question: Is there a way to add properties of the file-first paradigms (data lives outside apps) to web social apps? And if it is indeed possible, does this actually solve the problems we currently have?
The rest of the article explores this (with AT protocol being a candidate solution that attempts to square exactly this problem). I'm claiming that:
1. Yes, it is possible to add file-first paradigm properties to web social apps
2. That is what AT protocol does (by externalizing data and adding mechanisms for aggregation from user-controlled source of truth)
3. Yes, this does solve the original stated problems — we can see in demos from the last section that data doesn't get trapped in apps, and that developers can interoperate with zero coordination. And that it's already happening, it's not some theoretical thing.
I don't understand your proposed alternative with web extension but I suspect you're thinking about solving some other problems than I'm describing.
Overall I agree that I sacrificed some "but why" in this article to focus on "here's how". For a more "but why" article about the same thing, you might be curious to look at https://overreacted.io/open-social/.
The problems with social media are not at all the fact that things are “locked up in apps”.
Again, you missed my point. Data sharing is the least interesting thing imaginable, has already been solved countless times, and is not the reason social media sinks or swims.
Social media sinks or swims based on one thing and one thing only: is it enjoyable to use. Are all the people on here assholes or do they have something interesting to say? Can I post something without being overrun by trolls? How good are the moderation standards? How do I know if the people posting aren’t just AI bots? What are the community standards? In short: what kind of interactions can I expect to have on the platform?
The astronaut types look at the abysmal landscape social media has become, and think “you know what the fundamental problem is? That all this is locked up in apps! Let’s make a protocol, that’ll fix it!”
Never mind that the profit seeking platforms have zero interest in opening up their API to competing sites. Never mind that any of the sites that are interested in openness/federating all univerally have no answer to the problem of how you address content moderation, or at least nothing that’s any different from what we’ve seen before.
The problem in social media is not that things are locked up behind an app. There are apps/readers that combine multiple platforms for me (I remember apps that consolidated Facebook and twitter fully eighteen years ago. It’s not hard.)
The problem with social media is that it’s a wasteland full of bots and assholes.
A HN poster said it best 8 years ago about twitter, and I think it applies to all of social media: it’s a planetary scale hate machine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501147