Comment by zahlman
20 days ago
Indeed. My first reaction was:
> Files are the source of truth—the apps would reflect whatever’s in your folder.
Now that the "app" is a web site that supports itself with advertising revenue, it has no incentive whatsoever to work this way.
There was never any such incentive. MS Office formats were undocumented for years because MS had no incentive to document them. Merely using files did not help at all. Actually the vast majority of all file formats have never been open. Think about all the custom file formats used by video games, for instance.
I actually talk about this in the article. Merely using files is how we got out of the dependency on MS Office. Multiple efforts reverse-engineered them, including Google Docs. Yes they were undocumented, but as long as stuff has to be stored on the disk under user’s control, the overall dynamics are very different from you-can’t-see-the-files systems.
Is it really so different in the service context? You could also reverse engineer the HTTP endpoints and formats used by Word Online to export data from the service. It doesn't feel all that different, except perhaps that the online service can try to detect your custom tooling and block you, whereas with static data that isn't possible.
But other than that admittedly real extra problem, the bulk of the work would still be understanding the undocumented protocols and feature semantics, then matching the feature set.
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I think it's on open social apps to show that they're actually meaningfully better products, and that is possible because they're open. With luck, this may lead to an ecosystem where it's worth staying compatible and interoperable, and where users scoff if someone is trying to break it, and where users have an easy way to walk away. I know this sounds super idealistic but this did essentially happen with open source over a long time. At some point, people were just as skeptical of open source as we might be about open social.
I do really appreciate your vision, FWIW. (It also seems very compatible with my ideas about software complexity and dependencies etc.)
To be clear, the vision is not mine, I'm just describing how AT works. Kudos to the team who designed it.
> meaningfully better products
That are yet to become monetised. It's all fun and games until Bluesky announced how users and developers will pay for all this and what happens with your "social file system" when you stop paying.
I mean, I can literally already self-host my personal data if I want to. And there are also already forks of Bluesky (not just the client, but the server and the database) that can participate without fragmenting the network. It is not a perfect system but it's so far from where you are when you just rely on a closed app.
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