The early version of Facebook platform was essentially meant to be a social OS. For various reasons, FB/Twitter/LinkedIn all locked down and strictly limited their APIs. That’s one of the most compelling reasons for new crypto social networks. Devs can’t be deplatformed.
santi
 @santisiri
25 Jul 2019
Replying to @balajis
i’m beginning to think twitter as the os lately.
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Doesn't have to be crypto (although that's fine too) - eg, ActivityPub or Indieweb networks have the same properties. Developer access was one of the underlying driving forces for building them.
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Yeah. But here’s an interesting factor I think about frequently. Basically, getting global consensus on one integer (user count) in an implicitly adversarial distributed system like Mastodon was a challenge. Crypto solves that problem. ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/335
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Replying to @balajis @benwerd
Why is a global consensus on user count a required (or even an important) feature? That doesn't even model real-world relationships, and plenty of systems work completely fine without that.

Jul 25, 2019 · 6:44 PM UTC

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Replying to @aaronpk @benwerd
Great q. I’d argue that many social apps make use of global consensus on at least *some* values. Could be upvotes vs user counts. If you can get global consensus on one byte, you can run it again to get global consensus on N bytes (possibly with some upper limit on N).
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And I'd argue that global consensus is unrealistic and unnecessary, and pursuing it comes at the cost of too many other useful properties. Local consensus is more useful and easier to achieve, and still results in perfectly functional systems.
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