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by ineptech 1718 days ago
Um. Go to Facebook. Type in some text or select a photo and hit "Share". You have just shared a file with your friends.

(I'm not being snarky, but it seems you misunderstood me and I'm not sure how. Perhaps you thought I meant "share a file" like pirating movies or something? I just meant in the general sense that anything on a computer is a file, and sharing means letting someone else access it, which is sort of the core feature of any social media site.)

1 comments

Yes I think the misunderstanding is that sharing a status update on Facebook constitutes sharing a file; I assumed you meant "sharing a file" like "I have a PDF I need to get to someone" and just could not imagine a world in which that constituted the majority of Facebook usage. :)

If you had said "creating an entry in a database" instead of "sharing a file" I don't think I would have had the same misunderstanding.

Sharing a file also has different connotations from uploading an image; when I upload an image to Instagram I am not doing it to share the raw file with someone so they can download it (though they certainly can if they use a browser extension to do so); I'm sharing it because that's where the people I know can see and interact with it.

Okay, that makes sense, but "creating an entry in a database" would've been confusing to the intended audience of urbit devs. I probably should've said "serve some stuff".