Came by https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/allure-of-sync-engines/ via @liaizon, and this image on a hypothetical ‘sync engine market’ caught my eye.
“This becomes very valuable because now you can have many “sync engines” — e.g. imagine “AWS Sync Engine”, “Azure Sync Engine” etc. — and when one becomes too expensive, or you stop liking it, or they change their terms of service, you can simply switch from one syncing service to another.”
I think we have good reason to believe that such a market would produce standards that’d be *impossible* to run without big companies at the heart of it all.
As a concrete example, look at Bluesky and their moderation market where the systems are simply too large and complex to be run by ordinary users, so if you want safety you have to *rent* it.
(^ for more on that, @lrhodes has a lot of good writing on this topic e.g. https://destructured.net/paid-moderation)
Came by https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/allure-of-sync-engines/ via @liaizon, and this image on a hypothetical ‘sync engine market’ caught my eye.
“This becomes very valuable because now you can have many “sync engines” — e.g. imagine “AWS Sync Engine”, “Azure Sync Engine” etc. — and when one becomes too expensive, or you stop liking it, or they change their terms of service, you can simply switch from one syncing service to another.”
@gwil @liaizon @lrhodes
"As a concrete example, look at Bluesky and their moderation market where the systems are simply too large and complex to be run by ordinary users, so if you want safety you have to *rent* it."
Ahh right, sure thatttt won't cause a problem down the road for allowing centralization of bluesky.
I think the nut of the issue is that big tech companies believe they can use AI to moderate... when moderation is probably one of the hardest problems to tackle with automation.
@gwil @liaizon @lrhodes
> But sync engines (in the context of local-first software) aim to do for data what React did for the DOM.
Um, I haven’t really kept up with the “local first” discourse, but this piece has opened my eyes to the fact that the Tech People talking about local first software have a very different vision than I do.
@gwil @liaizon @lrhodes haven't read up on how bluesky's moderation works, will have to read that one!