--- title: "💭 A quote from Dan Abramov" description: "!https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/27/dan-abramov/#atom-everything" date: 2025-09-27 published: true tags: - social - thought template: link ---

Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented …

Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net

Interesting catch from the HN discussion over his [article](https://overreacted.io/open-social/) that came out yestereday. I scanned it yesterday and it has some really fascinating diagrams showing different phases of the web being open, to being siloed, to somewhere that we are trying to make it easy to publish, and retain ownership. I don't know enough about bluesky, but the core is build on the AT protocol, you can self host your own instance, you can build different front ends for it. So rather than having siloed instagram, FB, twitter, there are clones of those platforms that read the same data from everyones data, that they have the option of self hosting. I like this distinction between Mastadon here. Mastadon can also be self host, but its data aggregation is decentralized, so each instance is fragmented and cannot have a complete view of the data. The way that the ATproto does its aggregation is quite fascinating and feels right for an open social platform. I'm probably missing something, but if you are posting to one of these platfoms publically, why not have the data available to all of them, if you don't want it shared it probably belongs somewhere more private anyways and there are platforms for that. !!! note This post is a thought. It's a short note that I make about someone else's content online #thoughts