Item — HN Reader

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/.

1 comments

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

I actually agree with you on a lot of these things, I just think that they do relate to the technological shape.

To give you an example, Blacksky is in setting up their alternative server that is effectively forking the product, which gives them ability to make different moderation decisions (they've restored the account of a user that is banned from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...).

However, unlike Mastodon and such, anyone on the Blacksky server will continue living in the same "world" as the Bluesky users, it's effectively just a different "filter" on the global data.

Before AT, it was not possible to do that.

You couldn't "fork" moderation of an existing product. If you wanted different rules, you had to create an entire social network from scratch. All past data used to stay within the original product.

AT enables anyone motivated to spin up a whole new product that works with existing data, and to make different decisions on the product level about all of the things you mentioned people care about. How algorithms run, how moderation runs, what the standards are, what the platform affordances are.

What AT creates here is competition because normally you can't compete until you convince everyone to move. Whereas with AT, everybody is always "already there" so you can create or pick the best-run prism over the global data.

Does this make more sense? It's all in service of the things you're talking about. We just need to make it possible to try different things without always starting from scratch.