Comment by skeledrew
5 hours ago
I've been thinking of this for some time, conceptually, but perhaps from a more fundamental angle. I think the idea of "files" is pretty dated and can be thrown out. Treat everything as data blobs (inspired by PerKeep[0]) addressed by their hashes and many of the issues described in the article just aren't even a thing. If it really makes sense, or for compatibility sake, relevant blobs can be exposed through a filesystem abstraction.
Also, users don't really want apps. What users want are capabilities. So not Bluesky, or YouTube for example, but the capability to easily share a life update with interested parties, or the capability to access yoga tutorial videos. The primary issue with apps is that they bundle capabilities, but many times particular combinations of capabilities are desired, which would do well to be wired together.
Something in particular that's been popping up fairly often for me is I'm in a messaging app, and I'd like to lookup certain words in some of the messages, then perhaps share something relevant from it. Currently I have to copy those words over to a browser app for that lookup, then copy content and/or URL and return to the messaging app to share. What I'd really love is the capability to do lookups in the same window that I'm chatting with others. Like it'd be awesome if I could embed browser controls alongside the message bubbles with the lookup material, and optionally make some of those controls directly accessible to the other part(y|ies), which may even potentially lead to some kind of adhoc content collaboration as they make their own updates.
It's time to break down all these barriers that keep us from creating personalized workflows on demand. Both at the intra-device level where apps dominate, and at the inter-device level where API'd services do.
I'm using filesystem more as a metaphor than literally.
I picked this metaphor because "apps" are many-to-many to "file formats". I found "file format" to be a very powerful analogy for lexicons so I kind of built everything else in the explanation around that.
You can read https://atproto.com/specs/repository for more technical details about the repository data structure:
The repository data structure is content-addressed (a Merkle-tree), and every mutation of repository contents (eg, addition, removal, and updates to records) results in a new commit data hash value (CID). Commits are cryptographically signed, with rotatable signing keys, which allows recursive validation of content as a whole or in part. Repositories and their contents are canonically stored in binary DAG-CBOR format, as a graph of data objects referencing each other by content hash (CID Links). Large binary blobs are not stored directly in repositories, though they are referenced by hash (CID).
Re: apps, I'd say AT is actually post-app to some extent because Lexicons aren't 1:1 to apps. You can share Lexicons between apps and I totally can see a future where the boundaries are blurring and it's something closer to what you're describing.