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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

I feel very conflicted about this work.

On one side I find these ideas extremely compelling. This is aligned with the Indie web body of work, that pictures anyone having a personal website of their own content and ownership over that. And this page an article are beautifully put together.

On the other hand, we haven’t really seen a lot of developers adopting these standards for their own projects (like using this for their personal website or open source project). Nor from casual users (including people who make their own blogs and websites).

I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels.

I respect the vision and the work. Will personally see if we can use this for our work. But I wonder how we make this into something that’s not just a micro niche hobby.

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There's still some more work to do to make the developer experience simple enough that it's a no-brainer for people to pick ATProto up in anger.

But there's a lot of work developing on that front, and the next 6-12 months will be super exciting to watch.

The longer story is that most people don't understand that ATProto is more than just Bluesky, and the usecases are wayyyyyy broader. That's going to take more time to play out in the market.

Absolutely. In fact I’d love for my startup to run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky, but it still looks like quite a lift. Lmk if you have some recommendations.

Basically our thing would give that ecosystem the ability to have personal pages that can look like Patreon, YouTube, Instagram and others

It depends how much you want to replicate. All you really need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to your client app, and write them to people’s repos. I’ve been tinkering with the ‘personal website on AT’ idea space for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people already have implemented cool AT integrations in their sites!). Happy to chat ab it.

HMU! I’m “shokunin.” on discord, leshokunin on TG / Twitter.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url.

I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Bluesky.

Are you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.

Okay, so this sounds like you'd want to run an appview + pds. (and possibly a relay, depending on some details.) Except for one thing:

> or dependent on Bluesky.

If you want to take this to an extreme, and are uncomfortable with how did:plc has not yet moved into its own org, then you'd want to also run your own plc server, etc. The problem with doing this is:

> If people wanna follow on bluesky they can

You lose this. Because you're now not running on the main atproto system, but instead a fully parallel one of your own.

Anyway, you could start on this by running a PDS via the reference implementation here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds and then building your own appview (application).

You could also take a look at Blacksky's implementation https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky and if you end up using it, consider throwing them a few dollars. Alternative implementations are super important!

Thank you for the detailed answer! Totally comfortable with the did implementation. Just trying to separate from their brand and just use the standard :)

We already built our own platform independently from Bluesky, so we have a timeline in the wrong post and everything. I’m just trying to give our users into opera ability. So that when they make a post on our platform, people can also follow your Bluesky and see on their timeline. Am I correct to assume then that we would not require our own app view?

You're welcome, yeah then that's a lot easier.

> Am I correct to assume then that we would not require our own app view?

Well, given that you have built a platform, and you then want to interact with the atproto eocsystem, that means you'd be making your platform an appview, in a sense. An appview is just a service that reads the underlying data from the network and does something useful with it.

There's hope for an independent but synchronized PLC directory: https://tangled.org/@microcosm.blue/Allegedly

You mean you want to host the personal repositories (PDS) for your users?

Ideally yes!

I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels.

Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning? Why should people care about the abstract concept of data ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, books, movies, radio, etc. Most people do just want that, their primary motivation to engage with media is just to be entertained in that moment.

Now that they have places where they can publish stuff and their friends and family and maybe even some other people might see it, why should they care that they don't "own" their Instagram post, whatever that means?

idk if the normal user should necessarily care about data ownership, but I think the incentive structure it creates would be immediately legible to most people

I'm not sure what that means, can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?

sure, https://x.com

So mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better, because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent idea.

It’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to survive, which will in turn read legibly to users as less exploitative (you decide your feed, you can switch providers, you can choose moderation layers, etc)

the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs

No I think it's predicated on creating a product that people like to use. That's the Step 1 that OSS zealots miss when they focus entirely on these niche lofty ideals. I highly doubt the average Instagram user is yearning for - or would even be enticed by - a version of that same experience that has a lower exit cost.

That's the problem with these Twitter clones. "It's just like Twitter, but RESPECTS your data ownership" is not compelling. Just create a freaking compelling and original user experience (the actual hard part that made the big platforms successful) and secretly do whatever you want on the back end.

The reason I like Bluesky is that they understand this, and that's why the protocol stuff isn't front and center. They're focused on product first, technology second. The tech serves to create a good product, they don't build the tech first and then hope people find the product acceptable.

lol, ok

There’s nothing compelling and original about the twitter UX compared to all the clones. Pretty much across the board it’s just posting short messages and following others.

The entire value of a social media platform is in the network. Accumulating and maintaining one is the actual hard part that made the big players successful.

It was compelling and original when the concept didn't exist, or at least hadn't been successfully brought to market like they did. In a world where Twitter exists, and has the network, there is nothing compelling about a Twitter clone.

None of these platforms started with a network. They weren't cooked up by evil investors and MBAs looking for a rent-extraction scheme. Nor were they designed by a committee of philosophical experts saying "oh we'll just copy their thing and make it more esoteric and confusing so that maybe one day we can aggregate content from 14 competing Twitter-like platforms and you can switch between them whenever you like!" They were started largely by kids goofing around and making fun things for people.

Did we read the same article? It spends so many words answering these exact questions with examples and helpful illustrations!

Your question:

> why should they care that they don't "own" their Instagram post, whatever that means?

From the article:

> The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind. On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal. However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.

Your question:

> can you give examples of good and bad incentive structures in this context?

From the article:

> Maybe the app gets squeezed by investors, and every third post is an ad. Maybe it gets bought by a congolomerate that wanted to get rid of competition, and is now on life support. Maybe it runs out of funding, and your content goes down in two days. Maybe the founders get acquihired—an exciting new chapter. Maybe the app was bought by some guy, and now you’re slowly getting cooked by the algorithm.

> Luckily, web’s decentralized design avoids this. Because it’s easy to walk away, hosting providers are forced to compete, and hosting is now a commodity.

I think you’re right that the average person doesn’t care so much as they just want to be entertained or reach a large network, but apathy is not an argument in favor of the status quo.

In fairness to you, I had originally skimmed the article and did later realize that some of my points had been addressed. In fairness to me, in this subthread I was responding to other commenters and asking them questions rather than commenting directly on the article itself.

At this point my argument is that the ability to switch providers is not a major concern to most users of these platforms. I don't want a generic social media hosting provider. I want the Facebook experience, or the Instagram experience, or the Twitter experience. I'm happy to be in the garden and on the rails because it's easy and tightly curated. I don't want some Frankenstein amalgamation of data from all these things. I don't want to shoehorn my Instagram world into something else.

It matters because your posts aren’t just entertainment in the moment — they’re your history, your proof of existence online. Platforms treat them as disposable. If Instagram dies or bans you, your years of photos, writing, and connections vanish. Owning your data means your work and identity survive these issues, if you want.

An example: I have been a Swarm user for like, fifteen years. As soon as atproto has private records, I'll want to set up syncing that data into my PDS. It's kept track of a huge part of my life, and losing that would be sad.

I think a lot of people treat their own content as disposable also though. I don't know if most people would really care to save or dig through their entire Twitter history, for example. The rise of Stories is evidence of this. We're moving from a culture of preserving ancient pieces of paper to swimming in a never-ending river of data where there's so many things coming at you that you just move forward and don't have a ton of time to look back.

People that really want to preserve and archive their content find a way to do it and manage it separately. I have all the pictures that I've posted to Instagram. I have anything I've written that I cared enough to keep. If and when IG dies or I move onto the next thing, am I really going to want to meaningfully preserve and transfer the specific contents of that walled garden somewhere else? Maybe. I can definitely see the value, but it doesn't seem super compelling to me yet.

There is something to be said for the uniquely curated walled gardens and the centralized trust and organization and opinions they bring. When I started an Instagram account, I didn't want to transfer my Facebook world, it's a new world with a fresh start. I didn't want the same friends, the same voice for myself, etc. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to dig through all of that to figure out what made sense to carry over.

I mean.. if you can still find the archives (pretty sure they're out there, but getting harder and harder to find), I have my name on lots of usenet posts from the 90s. But I'm pretty sure all my BBS posts, GEnie posts, etc from before that are gone - they would stretch back as far as December '84, IIRC. And there's probably very little left from before 2000.

And yet, I don't lament that 10-15 years of my online life have "vanished" - I was an ignorant little snot back then, and actually, am VERY glad they HAVE vanished. And thankfully I've generally used aliases / usernames instead of my actual name in most places (other than the usenet posts that were from my university account) so that wayback can't be used against me easily. Heck - I wish I could assert/enforce a "right to be forgotten" (vanish) on some websites. Rarely have I wished (especially in this current administration) that I was MORE visible / persistent online.

Sure, this might matter to "very online" people. But I don't think it's the norm.

You asked me to explain why this matters. I did. I think your answer is fairly dismissive. Not everyone who cares about this is going to be some terminally online edge case. Unclear why ask a question if you are not curious about it. Probably not an effective use of our time.

Just to clarify, I was the one that asked you, this was not my response.

> People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media

Disagree. The punk phenomenon was largely about reclaiming that ownership and agency over cultural output, and it was massive in the 70s/80s/90s. The early web was very punk in attitude, with people basically self-publishing. Even in the '00s, there was still a clear distinction between "corporate" portals and grassroots.

This phenomenon where even creatives and intellectuals are Just Fine with playing in someone else's heavily-tweaked, hyper-monetized sandbox, is a new development.

You are correct, and yet depends on ourselves to popularize and make this tech happen. Maybe, just maybe a newer startup out there will have a CEO/CTO that is deeply influenced by open social and delivers a success app that reaches the masses.

One never knows, but for sure it won't happen when we do nothing.

Has the experience of spinning up an instance been simplified?

What do you mean by "instance"?

There are several protocol components you can run independently, each filling a different role and having different complexity levels

If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip

So it sounds like multiple things then

1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting, handles)

2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on if you want to intermingle Bsky data

3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation and algorithms, among the many other things.

I think 1 is the main thing. We have our own posts and UI but we just want to give people usernames and a way that shares posts in a way that interop with Bluesky. Any advice on a simple way to self host a PDS?

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

There are also a couple of discord channels and even a server for PDS self-hosters

https://discord.atprotocol.dev

Wonderful, ty

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