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Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, nostalgia :).

It seems like with the recent wave of news about social media migrations (reddit, facebook, twitter, twitch, tiktok), people are hopefully starting to get more and more warmed up to the idea of protocolization of their social data.

But most of the projects doing it are still just too immature. Solid, Perkeep, Blockstack, etc. just seem like vaporware.

Seems like the only serious projects in use are Matrix, Urbit, and ActivityPub/Mastodon. But I haven't checked in with the decentralization scene in a while.

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I want that protocolization too, although I don't hold out much hope that the monopolies in place can be broken, outside of fairly radical regulation.

To add to your list, there is also Secure Scuttlebutt [1] which has had a decent userbase over the past few years, and Planetary [2] which is a funded iOS client for it.

I think in general they all suffer from the chicken-egg problem and will need some reason for enough people to switch to be able to build a userbase. There isn't really any "novel hook" like tiktok, twitter, whatsapp, instagram, snapchat, etc have had in the past.

[1] https://scuttlebutt.nz/

[2] https://planetary.social/

Ah, I forgot about SSB. Very unique project and interesting people working on it.

Man, I love the idea of Scuttlebutt but I hate the developer UX. I'm writing some apps that I wanted to put on SSB but have all but given up on the idea. Something about SSB, as a dev, leaves me with a lot of questions and no idea where to even get answers from.

So I'll write my app outside of SSB, hopefully in a way that's mostly compatible, and possibly with future integration.

I may also toy with an SSB-like protocol myself, as the fundamentals of SSB is a work of art imo. I really enjoy what Gossip brings to the table, and how SSB focuses on human->human relationship to bring P2P to the table.

I'm bullish on the Solid model, but they have a chicken-egg problem. Nobody is going to develop apps until a lot of people have their own pod, and nobody is going to use a pod until there are great apps for accessing their data.

The same thing happened with remoteStorage. There's initially a flurry of proof-of-concept apps, but no commercial quality killer apps to attract daily users.

AFAIK the only cloud storage protocol really used for app development is Google Drive. GDrive got successful by making a great cloud storage solution first, then once everyone had one app developers started making apps for it.

How can you call a pile of open source code with no marketing "vaporware"?

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