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Comment by vincnetas | Hacker News Reader

imagine having this open data for major social networks.

I'm pretty sure the AT protocol is meant to solve this. Not so sure that any of the big players in the social media industry are enthusiastic to use it, though.

Meanwhile the Fediverse is and has been running for years, long before AT jumped in and took the spotlight. You're not wrong, and I'd rather have AT than not have it. But it reminds me of N'Sync eating the Backstreet Boys' lunch back in the day.

It also reminds me of the Onion article "Sumerians Look On in Confusion as God Creates World".

https://theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-c...

I get you, though it's mostly a problem if the userbase is split (I suppose it is, I'm unfamiliar). If so, it's a long-term problem only if one does not eat the other. Having a mainstream protocol/stack is a good thing.

My opinionated take is there was a kind of cultural moment where the world was ready for Something Else post-twitter, and instead of just the Fediverse, or just something else, the world encountered a fractured, motley combination of Fediverse/Bluesky + AT proto/Threads and there was never a unified zeitgest moment that belonged to any single answer, though BlueSky was closest to having a kind of cultural watershed reaction moment.

I think that's true in the micro sense that the fringe techies and terminally online big tech-averse crowd had a moment where they could collectively choose a better way to communicate.

Sadly, convenience always wins, and most people need a better reason to "switch platforms" (which is, ironically, what moving your socials to atproto/fedi means). Together with the dismal state of general education on digital independence, such revolutions just won't happen for the overwhelming majority of internet users. The lack of GPG usage is a common example, but people don't even own their email domains :)

Well as the song goes, I want it AT way.

We used to have.. at least it was not so heavily restricted.. and then AI happened, and everyone closed those down.

Such a sad state of affairs.. holding end user's data hostage.

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