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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

But how do you get people to actually want this? This stuff is pretty niche even within tech.

Bluesky is not huge, but 40M users is not nothing either. You don't get people to want this, you just try to build better products. The hope is that this enables us all to build better products by making them more interoperable by default. Whether this pans out remains to be seen.

I also don't think the average user gets the value of the protocol yet. Most of those users were looking for a new, more politically palatable home but with the same features as Twitter. The new generation of apps on the protocol will be vital in showing users what's possible. IMO the two most valuable features at a practical level are: - social graph portability, which might look like having an onboarding experience that bootstraps your community on that app - lexicon cross compatibility, i.e. your data from app A shows up in a contextually relevant spot in app B. Or app B writes records that show up in app A. This is pretty key to get right because it might confuse or anger users if they aren't condition to expect it. Once the average user groks these features though, I'd be surprised if they voluntarily switch back to the standard corpo apps that eventually exit to some company who tries to monetize the shit out of every feature.

I think most people do want this. They want to own their data. If you ask someone if they post on IG, if they should own that, or IG, they'll tell you it's them.

The hard problem IMO is how do you incentivize companies from adopting this since walled gardens helps reduce competition.

We want more control over data that we've created, and more control over data that's about us. I'm not sure either of these concepts align well with "ownership" though. Property and data are concepts that don't mix.

Language nitpicking aside... you subvert the walls of their gardens and aggregate the walled-off data without the walls, so users face a choice not between:

- facebook

- everything else

but instead between

- facebook and everything else

- just facebook

But that approach only works if we can solve the "data I created" problems in a way that doesn't also require us to acknowledges facebook's walls.

I think the opportunity is huge, that a new social media without the current flaws will emerge is inevitable and this is could be part of the implementation solution but sure no real universal success. Think it probably needs to come outside of the us to have any credibility.

“You know how much it sucked when Elon bought Twitter and it became a cesspool? Wouldn’t it have been great if you could easily take your entire post history to some other platform?”

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