alt Hacker News> I think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation.
Twitter was my home on the web for almost 15 years when it got taken over by a ... - well you know the story. At the time I wished I could have taken my identity, my posts, my likes, and my entire social graph over to a compatible app that was run by decent people. Instead, I had to start completely new. But with ATProto, you can do exactly that - someone else can just fork the entire app, and you can keep your identity, your posts, your likes, your social graph. It all just transfers over, as long as the other app is using the same ATProto lexicon (so it's basically the same kind of app).
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But.... why ? Is this assuming a huge portion of the people you interact with on Twitter are also all moving identities to the new platform ?
I can see for something like artistic expression it being useful to export and and move over to a new platform (like moving a whole photography portfolio, short story writing samples, or similar). But who cares about your "likes" on a totally new and separate social media platform ?
I would not call the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and took it private "decent people". I think that Musk purchasing the company and running it in a way that a lot of previous userbase objected to was ultimately a huge boon for software freedom - because without that, the large number of people who stopped using Twitter and went to the ATProto ecosystem instead would have been happy to continue using completely-proprietary Twitter. A lot of people were suddenly and viscerally faced with the downsides of building a digital "home" on someone else's platform.
But what if your entire social graph didn't choose to transfer over as well? What if they don't want to be on that app? What if someone that was very indecent made a compatible app? Would you want your entire Twitter history represented on there?
For better or worse, I don't think it makes sense to decentralize social. The network of each platform is inherently imbued with the characteristics and culture of that platform.
And I feel like Twitter is the anomalous poster child for this entire line of thinking. Pour one out, let it go, move on, but I don't think creating generalized standards for social media data is the answer. I don't want 7 competing Twitter-like clones for different political ideologies that all replicate each others' data with different opt-in/opt-out semantics. That sounds like hell.