Comment by danabramov
20 days ago
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.
That's great, but also Mastodon is just there and has been for quite some time. I see no added value in Bluesky/ATProto beyond the layer of that "social as a service" which looks like a walled garden / app store of sorts in the making. I may be wrong, of course...
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