Universal profiles on the open social web

erlend.sh · April 26, 2026, 7:55am

Relevant to the atmosphere/pds account framing:

This requires a different lexicon, but personally what I’d like to see is a “personal preferences" lexicon where I can save a default background to be shared by apps, as well as other backgrounds I commonly use.

If I have set a default background in my preferences, apps can use it without issues

If not, apps can present me a picker (as part of onboarding) with other backgrounds in my preferences OR backgrounds I’ve chosen in other apps they know about, if I have no preferences set.

Once I set my background, if it’s in a new one I haven’t saved before, Apps can ask me if I want to save it to my preferences/make default.

Apps can keep a pointer to the background in my preferences they derived the background from, so one can update all linked backgrounds at the same time.

IMO an easy onboarding where you offer backgrounds from another apps as a yes/no/make default choice should be low friction enough, and beats the moment a family friendly app ends up with the very inappropriate background someone had somewhere else…for both the app and the background-haver.

In general, the lexicon community background should be a shared standard to define what a background is, but it would be nice to make a default preference be a choice made explicitly rather than assumed. Especially now that people don’t conceptualize all these apps as belonging together, yet.