[jrv]

> I think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation.

Twitter was my home on the web for almost 15 years when it got taken over by a ... - well you know the story. At the time I wished I could have taken my identity, my posts, my likes, and my entire social graph over to a compatible app that was run by decent people. Instead, I had to start completely new. But with ATProto, you can do exactly that - someone else can just fork the entire app, and you can keep your identity, your posts, your likes, your social graph. It all just transfers over, as long as the other app is using the same ATProto lexicon (so it's basically the same kind of app).

[jrowen]

But what if your entire social graph didn't choose to transfer over as well? What if they don't want to be on that app? What if someone that was very indecent made a compatible app? Would you want your entire Twitter history represented on there?

For better or worse, I don't think it makes sense to decentralize social. The network of each platform is inherently imbued with the characteristics and culture of that platform.

And I feel like Twitter is the anomalous poster child for this entire line of thinking. Pour one out, let it go, move on, but I don't think creating generalized standards for social media data is the answer. I don't want 7 competing Twitter-like clones for different political ideologies that all replicate each others' data with different opt-in/opt-out semantics. That sounds like hell.

[dameis]

The framing of "portability" is a bit confusing. Your data is not actually "transferring" anywhere, it's always in your PDS. These other apps and clients are just frontends that are displaying the data that is in your PDS. The data is public and open, though private data is in the works and hopefully will arrive in 2026.

[jrowen]

The data is not transferring, but the user is. When I sign up for e.g. Twitter, I don't want to sign up for Mastodon, or Bluesky, or Truth Social, or whatever other platform someone might create later. Thus I would not choose to put my data in a PDS. I feel like that would actually leave me with less ownership and control than I have now.

My point is that I don't believe the separation of frontend and data is desirable for a social network. I want to know that I am on a specific platform that gives me some degree of control and guarantee (to the extent that I trust that platform) over how my data is represented. I don't really have to worry that it's showing up in any number of other places that I didn't sign up for (technically I do since everything public can be scraped of course, but in practice there are safeguards that go out the window when you explicitly create something like a PDS).

[danabramov]

Do I understand correctly that your main concern is that some random service would serve a page when asked for /your-handle, and so, given a link, someone may assume that you actively use that service? Just trying to understand the exact scenario.

Generally it's good practice for AT apps to treat you as not signed up if you have not explicitly signed up to this app before. So I think a well-behaved site you never used shouldn't show your profile page on request. If this is right, maybe it needs to be more emphasized in docs, templates, etc. Same as they should correctly handle lifecycle events like account getting deactivated.

Realistically it's possible some services don't do this well but it's not clear to me that this is going to be a major problem. Like if it gets really bad, it seems like either this will get fixed or people will adjust expectations about how profile pages work.

[dameis]

I think part of the issue is that humans are hyper conditioned to expect a certain UX and set of conditions thanks to the past 3 decades of the internet + legacy social media. It only feels weird that you could publish content on Bluesky and have it show up on some other app without your consent because of how we've been conditioned. There will be a lot of unconditioning and reconditioning that has to take place over a span of time if the ATmosphere (or any new vision of social media) wants to succeed.

https://anisota.net will display any Bluesky content and profiles without the consent of the user — no one cares at the moment though because either 1) they don't know about such a niche project, or 2) they aren't concerned cause I'm not a controversial figure.

If Truth Social was suddenly a part of the ATmosphere or a part of some other wide network of users, most people would catch on eventually and be hopefully conditioned to realize that the mere presence of someone's content on an app/site doesn't mean they use that app/site

[danabramov]

FWIW, I think Anisota is a bit different because conceptually people see it as a Bluesky client. So it is expected that you're "projecting" Bluesky, for better or worse. Whereas if it's some fanart exchange service or something, maybe it makes less sense. Maybe it just depends on what you think the user would expect.

[jrowen]

It's kind of just like, this sense of the "safety" of the walled garden (which one might argue the overlords could rugpull at any moment, which kind of happened with Twitter, but that's not something that really concerns me personally enough to trade it for the complexity of decentralization).

A lot of it is presentation. Instagram is the one that I use the most right now, and I feel like they really nailed this in the "everybody can make content" era. When I'm creating content for IG, I know exactly how it's going to look, there's editing and previewing tools, there's a confidence that people are going to receive it in the manner I intended and expected, and it's tied to the culture of that platform that I've become attuned to over time. The thought of a JSON of my IG post existing in a clearinghouse that encourages people to remix it into whatever, just kind of gives me the ick. Even if realistically it wouldn't really be abused, I don't feel compelled to choose that. If someone comes up with a new app that does some things better, I can choose to migrate to that, but likely I wouldn't want to just one-click import my IG history. It will be different in some way and I would want to make new content for it.

I guess I just kind of see these platforms as bespoke communities that people choose to be a part of, more than fungible data frontends. It's very personal, and...social. It's not the abstract world of data that programmers live in. My social graph in each app is unique and I don't really want it abstracted to one monolith that follows me everywhere. Each one is a new world with a fresh start.

Now, the IG post ecosystem is a lot more complex than it is with Twitter. With Twitter being at its core just text, it lends itself better to different views, but still, formatting matters and there are really a lot of rendering decisions to be made in a modern Twitter client. And again it just seems weird to me to have this oddly fragmented community with unavoidably complex interop semantics rather than everyone just being under the same roof. User opt-in aside, they will all develop their own features and quirks and they and the users will have to navigate how those translate or don't. Twitter clients are/were at least unified by the Twitter API. Regarding your initial question - it's more than just the profile page, do my comments show up in conversations? Likes and follower counts? Or are there weird gaps and discrepancies everywhere from users that haven't opted in? What if one fork requires mutual "connections" and one uses one-way followers? Each platform will make their own decisions. It just sounds like such a mess, and people will spend so much time disambiguating (oh no I'm on this one so I see it that way...).

There were some efforts to fork Reddit but it has survived as a great example of how lots of different people with different interests and opinions can occupy different parts of the same platform, even if lots of them complain about it because it's not their perfect vision of what it should be (see programming languages, and pretty much everything that reaches a certain userbase).

[harvey9]

This sounds like I need to host my PDS. Easy for me with no public profile but if I was someone famous wouldn't that mean I needed enterprise class hosting?

[danabramov]

You don't need to host your own PDS for any of this to work. It works the same way regardless of who hosts your PDS.

I think what may be confusing you is that Bluesky (the company) acts in two different roles. There's hosting (PDS) and there's an app (bsky.app). You can think of these conceptually as two different services or companies.

Yes, when you sign up on Bluesky, you do get "Bluesky hosting" (PDS). But hosting doesn't know anything about apps. It's more like a Git repo under the hood.

Different apps (Bluesky app is one of them) can then aggregate data from your hosting (wherever it is) and show different projections of it.

Finally, no, if you're famous, you don't need enterprise hosting. Hosting a PDS can be extremely cheap (like $1/mo maybe)? PDS doesn't get traffic spikes on viral content because it's amortized by the app (which serves from its DB).

[Melatonic]

But.... why ? Is this assuming a huge portion of the people you interact with on Twitter are also all moving identities to the new platform ?

I can see for something like artistic expression it being useful to export and and move over to a new platform (like moving a whole photography portfolio, short story writing samples, or similar). But who cares about your "likes" on a totally new and separate social media platform ?

[danabramov]

It makes the landscape competitive. There isn't really a notion of "moving" to a "platform". It's more like if Twitter sucks, some team can spin out an alternative that has the existing content but takes different product decisions. And then some people can try this alternative and use it without leaving the existing network. So, it allows more experimentation in the market without having to solve the cold start problem. The lifecycle of products becomes more fluid. It's easy to spin something up, and you can also shut things down without permanently killing them.

[JuniperMesos]

I would not call the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and took it private "decent people". I think that Musk purchasing the company and running it in a way that a lot of previous userbase objected to was ultimately a huge boon for software freedom - because without that, the large number of people who stopped using Twitter and went to the ATProto ecosystem instead would have been happy to continue using completely-proprietary Twitter. A lot of people were suddenly and viscerally faced with the downsides of building a digital "home" on someone else's platform.