Dan Abramov: Open Social
I really Dan Abramov’s framing of AT Protocol for open social Internet interactions as inevitably winning over closed platforms like Facebook and Twitter, much in the same way that open-source code has won over closed-source, proprietary code.
(I mean that’s not strictly true, since all of the world’s most powerful tech companies keep their source closed, but the lower-level stuff is all open.)
The closed social web innovated in scaling and in social aggregation features. Notifications, search, and feeds are non-negotiable in modern social products:
However, the closed social web has also excluded us from the web. The web we create is no longer meaningfully ours. We’re just rows in somebody else’s database.
Open social frees the web we’re creating from somebody else’s boxes. Our profiles, likes, follows, recipes, scrobbles, and other content meaningfully belong to us:
The data no longer lives inside the products; the products aggregate over our data:
This blurs the boundaries between apps. Every open social app can use, remix, link to, and riff on data from every other open social app.
Dan’s post also links to a couple of firehose websocket connections that stream every interaction on AT Proto-compatible platforms, which has blown my mind.