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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

Errant thought - I kind of hope that the actual social network for developers of the not so distant future looks more like a bunch of us separately building bespoke applications to serve files to each other.

> Dave: "Bot, add a folder to my personal data store with the pictures I took this weekend and share it with everyone in my poker group"

> Sally: "I see that I've gotten an email from Dave with a magic link conveying access to something. Bot, use this link to negotiate a key exchange with whatever weird app Dave cobbled together (ask his bot if you need help) and then log into my VPS and add a tab to my personal webapp to display the content he has shared."

That might be overly optimistic, but it doesn't feel that far off. It's kind of what Tim Berners-Lee build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_project for right?

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Isn't that just called hosting a website?.. You can just give an agent access to your server and let them do all that, no?

There are also places like https://tilde.town/ if you want something more social media–esque

Think of it this way - why didn't we all just replace Facebook with "host files on our personal sites and give each other access to them" ten years ago? Because we'd have to store passwords, identify each other past spoofed emails, figure out when/how to trust friends of friends, etc. In practice that means everyone adopting the same protocol, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.

That hasn't changed, but what has changed is that reading docs and writing the glue code is effectively free. The main problem with something like Solid is, if it takes even an hour to figure out how to get it going, I am effectively assigning my friends an hour of homework to be able to network with me. That's no longer true. If you like the Fediverse and I like Solid and Dave uses Nostr and Sally is stuck with some proprietary thing that came with her NAS, we can all build a network without any of us switching to, or even learning much about, each other's platforms.

It’s actually changed for the worse. Now everyone wants their slop to be the winning protocol, so the competing standards problem has become far broader

I think that a million people asking Claude to build something is going to tend to converge on one protocol, not diverge. But the point is, I don't think it matters that much if they diverge. The whole idea of a standardization is predicated on the assumption that bespoke software is expensive, and that is now not always true.

I wouldn’t have agreed before I learned software more deeply, now I especially agree in the age of better and better AI.

Put simply there are solutions that are elegant and irreducibly correct. I think we got away from this because software expertise got so fragmented by frameworks and packages but AI can cut through all of that.

I applied for a tilde account some years ago and never even heard back from the vetting process.

I suppose I can't say I don't want to be part of it without sounding like sour grapes.

But if you don't like me you can join them and benefit from them keeping riff-raff like me out!

Just need to dust off the finger protocol.

About that: https://dotplan.space/about

I thought this is why we established standards. I truly hope the LLM singularity brings further adherence to existing standards and doesn't lead to an explosion in protocols and formats. That sounds like a nightmare! :)

I have plans to make something that is eerily similar to what you described at the start.

One other aspect I was thinking of was limiting sharing to friends of friends only so it's more a community than a toxic clusterf

I like that it’s email-based.

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