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So, euh... interesting discussions in the last couple days. Made me look again 👀 at the choices I've made building @sifa.id (public profiles...) 😅 Make sure to pour a cup 🍵 first 🧵👇

I could show up live Sifa profiles for all ~46M accounts today: your avatar, your photos, your music, every app you once used and how often, every post you've made. Without you ever having been to sifa.id ... 😱 "no permission needed, it's all public already"

I didn't built it like that because I think that is friggin creepy But the data is just there to see. To analyse. To enrich your CRM. To train an LLM model on. Partially this makes atproto AMAZING to build on: no need to build "accounts", much less of a cold start problem, much easier onboarding.

But this also makes it VERY different for a user, NOT at all what they are used to compared to other platforms. I like to think building on atproto is better in general, but it does come with "quirks" that are alien to many users. We should try not to care them away 😅

Can be a tricky balance: as a builder you want to make things as easy as possible for the user: if they sign-in w/ atproto, how amazing is it you can just fetch their name, avatar, bio, workplace, events from their PDS and just load it without any hastle 🤯 As a user: WAIT HOW DID YOU GET THAT

For now, Sifa DOES show a profile for all atproto users without consent, but... ✔︎ it only shows name + bio, avatar is blurred ⚠️ clear "Unclaimed" badge + explainer, not pretending the person added this 🚫 NONE of the data is in our database, it only loads data directly from the PDS in-browser

(Note that Sifa doesn't carry ANY PDS data in our database BTW, it all loads from the firehose and some parts are cached) To me this felt like a good balance, but is it? You tell me (I now you will)

I do think that asking (or demanding...) restraint by careful builders doesn't make anyone safe(r). Anyone can read every record on your PDS. Bots and LLMs are already scraping atproto data right now, HR tools too probably. None of these hidden tools are asking anyone for consent.