[HN Gopher] Open Social
___________________________________________________________________
Open Social
Author : knowtheory
Score : 354 points
Date : 2025-09-26 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (overreacted.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (overreacted.io)
| jrm4 wrote:
| This is _such_ an important idea -- and yet I feel like the
| hyper-individualized "bluesky" implementation pictured is a less
| good practical idea than Mastodons more "server/host" way of
| doing things.
|
| I get that theoretically the two should be similar or even
| identical in practice, but I feel like the way Bluesky goes so
| hard at "literally individuals maintain control over their own
| stuff" is kinda too hard for most, and that Mastodon's "just
| trust the server" way, which ABSOLUTELY has it's own problems, of
| course -- is still better, mostly because we have better practice
| in this style, in the form of good ol email.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| They should be interoperable... I should be able to take my
| account from bluesky and host it on any other pub server
|
| The server shouldn't need to be specific to mastodon/bluesky
| networks either
|
| Ghost (the blogging platform) is kind of a peek into this --
| you can host your microblogging account there and interact with
| other activity pub networks like mastodon
|
| this is the promise of the activitypub standard, anyone that
| uses the standard can interact with anyone else using the
| standard...
| danabramov wrote:
| I've tried to lightly allude to Mastodon here:
|
| _> Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and
| search are non-negotiable in modern social products._
|
| 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 user
| experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly
| compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a
| full view of the network like they do.
|
| The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed
| social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is
| like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and
| so on). Because it enables global aggregation, _every_ atproto
| app has a consistent state of the world. There 's no notion of
| "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the
| replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation
| artifacts as you have in Mastodon.
|
| I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or
| performance characteristics.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yeah, the goals of atproto are REALLY GOOD ones. The only
| thing I'm skeptical of is the extent to which "centralized
| state of the world" really needs to be a core of the
| _protocol_ -- and does that sort of thing introduce the same
| kind of centralization that makes it vulnerable to
| enshittification?
|
| My gut is that IT DOES. Put differently, there's presently
| nothing about TECH of the Mastodon model that prevents
| building tools that achieve similar "centralized everything"
| goals on top of Mastodon; only, you know, people and trust,
| the easiest part </sarcasm>.
|
| Mastodon's probably the best long-term model and it's email
| that makes me think that.
| jpereira wrote:
| In my view the atproto approach asks the users to make fewer
| required complex decisions, but gives them the freedom to make
| many voluntary ones. If someone wants to use a particular
| application, they basically just need to sign in. If they don't
| have an existing ATProto account, they can just make one, in
| the flow of the application they're signing into. Later they
| can chose different clients, or different infrastructure, or
| move their account, to their own hosting even if they want.
|
| Mastodon requires a complex decision upfront, which server do I
| trust, which is analogous to where you create your account on
| ATProto, but unlike ATProto, doesn't give the tools to
| seamlessly transition later.
|
| The trust lens I think is a good one. You want to let different
| users make different tradeoffs in effort without having that
| leading to a worse experience..
| jrm4 wrote:
| I mean, this might depend on who your intended audience is?
| As perhaps pie-in-the-sky my desire is, I'd like to see one
| of these things _replace twitter_ (as opposed to smaller
| communities.)
|
| And it seems to me that the more frictionless model is the
| one that looks like something people are used to; just "sign
| up with a thing."
|
| That does leave the interconnection to the servers and
| others, but that may be how it has to be?
| iameli wrote:
| Bluesky is incredibly just "sign up with a thing." Except
| even easier, because you don't have to pick an instance
| first.
| jrm4 wrote:
| "Sign up with a thing" -- but then what about _after_
| that? You 've made a bunch of stuff, what happens to it?
|
| Offloading THAT mentally to a different "service" or
| "account" I think is easier than this all-in-one thing.
|
| Again, I like the IDEA a lot; if you'd presented it to me
| like in 2000 before a lot of this stuff took off I would
| have been all about it.
|
| Today? No, I think it's reasonable to offload that to so-
| and-so-dot-com, each as a separate account. Like the
| phrase "I have a facebook" always sounds weird to ME, but
| I think that's "the way."
| mcny wrote:
| Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of
| cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with
| registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure
| certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit
| provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be
| pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7
| for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free
| of cost.
|
| And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway
| so you don't need to type the monstrosity.
|
| Or is it a really bad idea(tm)?
| ramon156 wrote:
| I might not be fully understanding the idea, but the difference
| here is that a let's encrypt certificate can be generated on
| the fly. domains are considered branding, and getting a 5
| letter domain nowadays is impossible. The cost here is that
| you're renting a domain that others might want aswell, people
| don't really want your LE cert
| charcircuit wrote:
| X lets people own a 5 letter username for free. Renting names
| is not even industry standard for platforms. It seems like
| it's only DNS that charges for names.
| notatoad wrote:
| running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it
| requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that
| requires servers and electricity.
|
| so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it.
| letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of
| money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted
| by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free
| domains?
| deadbabe wrote:
| How about DNS on a blockchain?
| meowkit wrote:
| https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/
|
| Supporting DNS all up should be possible but organizing the
| other decentralized services (compute, storage) is the hard
| part
| fruitworks wrote:
| The name service is easy, namecoin did it more
| efficiently than ENS a decade ago.
|
| The decentralized services need not be attached to some
| blockchain due to the resource constraints. But there are
| examples like Filecoin and such.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They already work in Brave too or for other browsers if you
| install a webextention.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| That sounds like an unnecessarily overcomplicated
| nightmare.
| simonw wrote:
| Aka DNS where if you lose your passphrase (or get phished)
| you irreversibly lose control of that domain.
| koolba wrote:
| > running a domain costs money. there's no way around that -
| it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and
| that requires servers and electricity.
|
| I guarantee you I can store and make available over DNS the
| less than 1 KiB of data for less than a penny a year.
|
| Instead of free, charge a flat $1, put it in long term US
| treasuries at 5% / TIPS at 2.5% and you've covered your
| hosting costs forever. The principle will never need to be
| touched.
| notatoad wrote:
| okay, so why aren't you doing that. if you can offer
| domains for $1, you can undercut all the existing players
| by a huge margin. that's a big opportunity, no?
| fruitworks wrote:
| You would need to pay the ICANN fief
| eikenberry wrote:
| Everyone would get a subdomain and so you only need to
| pay for 1 TLD.. that's <$20US/year.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are some github project which offer free domains if you
| send them a issue asking them kindly for subdomain iirc
|
| https://github.com/topics/free-domains
|
| Another thing, the thing that you mention is really similar to
| how tor onion links work... Except they offer encryption and
| prevents MITM/any other ways while still having your ip hidden.
|
| Another idea which I use sometimes is to use something like
| cloudflare tunnels or ssh forwarding with things like
| serveo.net or any ssh based remote forwarding in general like
| pinggy or even ngrok.
|
| If you are using this in some internal thing, I can also
| suggest something like piping server which I really like and I
| want to build something like a web browser tor-onion links
| esque but on top of piping server, its really really cool
|
| https://github.com/nwtgck/piping-server
| derefr wrote:
| > It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for
| all I care but it would be globally unique and available free
| of cost.
|
| You're essentially talking about IPv6 addresses.
|
| Interestingly, most residential ISPs these days already issue
| your home network an IPv6 /64 or better! But they (sadly) just
| firewall off use of most ports that residential users have no
| purpose for -- on my own network, even if I configure my router
| to allocate each machine on the network a public-routable IPv6
| address, the only port the _network_ (not the router!) is
| willing to allow non-established incoming flows to is 22 /tcp.
|
| But even if they worked, they'd still be ephemeral. At best,
| even if your ISP keeps the allocation the same, you'd lose it
| if/when you switch ISPs. (Similar problem to ISP email
| addresses.)
|
| The real key here, would be if someone was freely giving out
| tiny slices of IPv6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-
| independent_address_s... to individuals; _and_ there were
| hosting providers / residential ISPs willing to add BGP routes
| in their ASN for these tiny prefixes. Then you could have a
| stable _and_ portable _and_ free IPv6 address for life. (It 's
| certainly possible in theory, just not built yet -- similar to
| how LetsEncrypt was "certainly possible in theory, just not
| built yet" until it was built.)
|
| ---
|
| That being said, if you really want this to be DNS (not sure
| why; if it's not a short memorable name [and thus inherently
| competed over by typosquatters], then DNS is the wrong tool for
| the job), then you _could_ do what systems like ngrok do, but
| directly serving those dynamic records as domains under its own
| gTLD, rather than serving them as subdomains under a domain.
| Maybe with each domain getting its own DNS zone and everything.
| That 'd certainly be neat.
|
| Note that way back when, the .me ccTLD sort of did this -- they
| gave away .me "domains" for "free"; but with all web traffic on
| those "free" domains being intermediated by their L7 reverse-
| proxy servers, where they'd inject ads into any delivered HTML
| pages.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked
| on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be
| globally unique and available free of cost.
|
| This is basically where did:plc comes in, for atproto.
| https://web.plc.directory/ provides free ID numbers. For
| example, mine is
| https://plc.directory/did:plc:3danwc67lo7obz2fmdg6jxcr .
|
| Your domain then uses a txt record to indicate that you want it
| to be associated with that particular did:plc.
| verdverm wrote:
| just to note, did:web is also an option, but has drawbacks
| like losing your identity if you lose your domain.
| Kye wrote:
| It's been tried. People quickly distribute a JavaScript snippet
| to remove whatever monetization you put on there, as Namezero
| discovered.
| ceayo wrote:
| Maybe AT over TOR? A hidden domain / onion address is totally
| free... I would supporting this a really nice enhancement to
| the protocol.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| There was a .FREE initiative but that got all weird after a
| while, the deadlines were not respected and then nothing
| happened... https://icannwiki.org/.free
| numpad0 wrote:
| That's almost like regular free dynamic DNS, just people don't
| mentally frame "example.dyndns.net" as their online "handle"
| jerf wrote:
| A free of cost TLD is probably not practical. There are some
| special things that go along with being a TLD and being in the
| public suffix list: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list
|
| If you drop the TLD part though, you can do whatever you want
| with any domain you want, up to and including handing out free
| subdomains to anyone who asks. As usual, though, if you try to
| do this, the dark internet will make you regret it as one day,
| quite suddenly, you'd find you were hosting the DNS of some
| massive scam email or other, or any of who-can-even-enumerate
| ways of making you sorry you put this service up because of
| their abuse of it. Just like anyone can make a URL redirector,
| and many people even use it as a sort of "learn this language
| project" but if you actually put it up online you will rapidly
| regret it.
|
| It's a bummer and I'm not celebrating this fact, but, yeah,
| it's not something you want to do.
| fruitworks wrote:
| Why can't it be a keypair like a .onion domain?
|
| DNS is not a sybil resistance mechanism
| jerf wrote:
| Because .onion isn't a DNS domain. It uses the same syntax
| but you have to be on Tor for it to work and it does
| something completely different than DNS resolution. I read
| the original question as specifically about having top-
| level domains, not "something like domains that works on a
| special network".
|
| Special networks can do as they like, but then they won't
| be DNS.
| input_sh wrote:
| .tk used to be free and was the top ccTLD in the world by the
| number of domains registered. You can imagine what it was
| mostly used for.
|
| Facebook sued the operator (Dutch company called Freenom) for
| facilitating phishing and now we can't have that anymore.
| bityard wrote:
| .tk was widely known for taking back domains once they got
| popular and turning them into ad spam. That's how they made
| money "giving" the domains away for free: lead generation,
| basically.
| a022311 wrote:
| Umm ever heard of .tk domains?
| zenmac wrote:
| Just FYI: there is handshake. It was on HN quite a few years
| ago: https://handshake.org
| tantalor wrote:
| We already had that in 2007:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
|
| It was a complete disaster
| rickette wrote:
| Shindig https://shindig.apache.org/ was the reference
| implementation of this spec. Was pretty novel at the time.
| danabramov wrote:
| This doesn't similar to atproto, which is what I discuss in the
| article. "Open social" isn't an official term btw, I just like
| it enough to refer to this movement. I think recycling names
| from dead projects to refer to new concepts is fine. You're
| welcome to ignore the article's title.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, the linked article did make me smile because the previous
| iteration of OpenSocial - which had a LOT of buzz around it
| back in 2007-2010 - was such an ambitious swing that completely
| missed.
|
| Apparently I wrote about it a fair bit back then, mostly noting
| how confusing it all was:
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/opensocial/
| LightChaser wrote:
| Sadly, it's hard to imagine a world where something like this
| will ever catch on. The target audience for "traditional" social
| media is very different from the niche of people who want
| decentralized social media. Most people just use social media as
| a means to an end and don't really care about the systems behind
| it.
|
| If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky
| account, that defeats the whole purpose because then everyone
| will still be on one or two large providers.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, yes. The problem is, basically, people.
| mozzius wrote:
| Even if everyone is on bsky.social, that's still a huge
| improvement on the status quo. It's not like the web isn't
| decentralised just because lots of people are on AWS - you can
| move away at any moment, adversarially if necessary.
| Kye wrote:
| Looking forward to the future where an app just sort of
| silently backs up your PDS/keys on your device until the day
| you need it and everyone finds out they can log into whatever
| platform replaces the one that blew up like nothing happened.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| AFAIK bluesky isn't even properly federated yet, everything
| relies on a single "BGS" router server.
| mozzius wrote:
| Not true, there are many independent relays (one went online
| today, in fact:
| https://bsky.app/profile/upcloud.com/post/3lzqkrrqap22n).
|
| This also completely misunderstands the architecture. Things
| don't hinge on the relays at all and they don't act as
| routers.
| danabramov wrote:
| This is misleading. I'm not sure if you've read the article
| so it's difficult to elaborate -- it aims to explain
| precisely that.
|
| There isn't such a thing as "Bluesky getting federated" --
| that doesn't on its own mean anything. In Mastodon world,
| "getting federated" means many copies of the same webapp
| emailing each other. In atproto, you don't create many copies
| of the same app. Instead, it's shaped like the web --
| individual users can host their data in different places, and
| apps aggregate over that data. There's no point in having
| many copies of the same app.
|
| The BGS server you're referring to is the "relay" mentioned
| in the article. Running your own relay is possible (Blacksky
| does it, as mentioned in the article). It costs about $30/mo
| with the current traffic. However, note that a relay is very
| dumb (it's just a retransmitter of signed JSON over
| websocket). It's cool that anyone can run one but by itself
| this isn't a vanity metric to chase. We'll probably see more
| independent relays but usually someone would run one for a
| reason -- to insulate a company or a community from upstream
| failures, or maybe to censor things (in repressive
| governments).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 99% of social media users don't care about any of this. If it's
| one extra step or configuration they need to learn, or includes a
| word like "protocol" that they need to understand, they won't use
| it.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| That's one reason why Bluesky has gained a lot of traction. All
| of this is under the surface, not something you need to care
| about unless you want to.
| verdverm wrote:
| I would contend not all of it is under the surface
|
| The Bsky team regularly highlights other apps, custom feeds,
| and moderation choice
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The important part is that you don't need to know about any
| of this to use the service. Of course, the protocol enables
| user-level features.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| You don't need to know how any of those features or
| websites work to use them. I'd also argue that most users
| have no idea who the people working on the site are. (even
| if reading the replies under their personal posts gives a
| different impression)
|
| The end user just sees they can subscribe to a moderation
| list that hides any post labelled as "Beans", or that they
| can have a feed next to their Discover feed that's an
| endless stream of people getting ligma'd.
|
| Or that they can use their account to log into a seemingly
| unrelated site.
| danabramov wrote:
| Right, which is why the article makes the point that it's
| invisible to the end user several times.
|
| That's also why it frames the benefits in the concrete way that
| shows up in the products -- like products being able to riff on
| each other's data.
|
| My audience for this article is slightly technical so I put
| some focus on the technical parts. I don't try to avoid
| mentioning the "protocol" for the same reason why teaching to
| make websites involves mentioning HTTP.
|
| I 100% agree with you though and that's important for broader
| communication. What people care about are good products.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| I'm a simple man, I see a Dan post and I click.
|
| I'm a bit concerned that the open web only won because of first
| mover advantage. What gives me hope is OSS winning.
|
| I'd love to see something like atproto win though. It's clear
| that a major issue with social media is network effects
| preventing better apps from becoming popular.
| verdverm wrote:
| > a major issue with social media is network effects preventing
| better apps from becoming popular.
|
| One thing ATProto does is enable real competition in social
| apps, assuming they all run on the atproto fabric. One of the
| core hopes is that we can get everyone over to something like
| atproto once, to get them out of the silos, such that this is
| there last time they have to "move" their social network
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| The challenge will be that first move, yeah. Current social
| media companies have every incentive not to let users do
| that.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| AIUI, HTML won because it was free. There were competing paid
| for online hypermedia standards at the time, but many cost
| money. Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The bit about aggregation is interesting, but it's not clear to
| me what the performance characteristics will be for very popular
| accounts. Presumably Justin Beiber's repo cannot be expected to
| handle 100 million WebSocket connections, all of which push out a
| message the instant he posts something. Is it vital to have more
| centralized hosts which can implement the sort of hybrid push vs.
| pull models that Twitter famously needed to implement?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| In atproto, those websocket connections aren't between users's
| repos, they're between an application and user's repos. Bieber
| has one connection per application doing aggregation, not per
| follower.
| verdverm wrote:
| Relays also provide an important scaling building block, such
| that every app can listen to the relay, which listens to all
| the repos, instead of many app<->pds.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| And if Justin's pds goes down, then his followers won't be able
| to consume his content.
| psionides wrote:
| They read the content cached from the AppView, not directly
| from the PDS
| evbogue wrote:
| Does this article mention anywhere that Dan is a former employee
| of Bluesky and I just missed that disclosure?
| danabramov wrote:
| Thanks for the nudge, should deploy soon.
| https://github.com/gaearon/overreacted.io/commit/26d40321dc7...
| swyx wrote:
| wait what? where does he work now?
| danabramov wrote:
| https://overreacted.io/im-doing-a-little-consulting/
| leshokunin wrote:
| I feel very conflicted about this work.
|
| On one side I find these ideas extremely compelling. This is
| aligned with the Indie web body of work, that pictures anyone
| having a personal website of their own content and ownership over
| that. And this page an article are beautifully put together.
|
| On the other hand, we haven't really seen a lot of developers
| adopting these standards for their own projects (like using this
| for their personal website or open source project). Nor from
| casual users (including people who make their own blogs and
| websites).
|
| I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the
| idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the
| idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels.
|
| I respect the vision and the work. Will personally see if we can
| use this for our work. But I wonder how we make this into
| something that's not just a micro niche hobby.
| nunobrito wrote:
| You are correct, and yet depends on ourselves to popularize and
| make this tech happen. Maybe, just maybe a newer startup out
| there will have a CEO/CTO that is deeply influenced by open
| social and delivers a success app that reaches the masses.
|
| One never knows, but for sure it won't happen when we do
| nothing.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Has the experience of spinning up an instance been
| simplified?
| verdverm wrote:
| What do you mean by "instance"?
|
| There are several protocol components you can run
| independently, each filling a different role and having
| different complexity levels
|
| If you mean the PDS, not sure if it is simpler than the
| unknown point you are looking to compare against. Bsky did
| just announce that you can migrate back to their PDS
| hosting to make trying out alternatives a one-way trip
| leshokunin wrote:
| I'd prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky.
| We'd give people something like username.page.app and
| they'd make posts there. If people wanna follow on
| bluesky they can, and we provide a username that's just
| the url.
|
| I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But
| I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and
| I'd prefer using the protocol but not be directly
| associated or dependent on Bluesky.
| verdverm wrote:
| So it sounds like multiple things then
|
| 1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group
| themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting,
| handles)
|
| 2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on
| if you want to intermingle Bsky data
|
| 3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest
| completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you
| build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation
| and algorithms, among the many other things.
| leshokunin wrote:
| I think 1 is the main thing. We have our own posts and UI
| but we just want to give people usernames and a way that
| shares posts in a way that interop with Bluesky. Any
| advice on a simple way to self host a PDS?
| verdverm wrote:
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
|
| There are also a couple of discord channels and even a
| server for PDS self-hosters
|
| https://discord.atprotocol.dev
| jrowen wrote:
| _I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the
| idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the
| idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram
| reels._
|
| Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning?
| Why should people care about the abstract concept of data
| ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero
| ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, books,
| movies, radio, etc. Most people do just want that, their
| primary motivation to engage with media is just to be
| entertained in that moment.
|
| Now that they have places where they can publish stuff and
| their friends and family and maybe even some other people might
| see it, why should they care that they don't "own" their
| Instagram post, whatever that means?
| dgaffney wrote:
| idk if the normal user should necessarily care about data
| ownership, but I think the incentive structure it creates
| would be immediately legible to most people
| jrowen wrote:
| I'm not sure what that means, can you give examples of good
| and bad incentive structures in this context?
| dgaffney wrote:
| sure, https://x.com
| jrowen wrote:
| So mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better,
| because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent
| idea.
| dgaffney wrote:
| It's pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to
| explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you're ever
| going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is
| what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of
| social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto
| takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn
| is that new businesses will need to develop less
| extractive models of viability to survive, which will in
| turn read legibly to users as less exploitative (you
| decide your feed, you can switch providers, you can
| choose moderation layers, etc)
| jrowen wrote:
| _the entire economic foundation of social media is
| predicated on high exit costs_
|
| No I think it's predicated on creating a product that
| people like to use. That's the Step 1 that OSS zealots
| miss when they focus entirely on these niche lofty
| ideals. I highly doubt the average Instagram user is
| yearning for - or would even be enticed by - a version of
| that same experience that has a lower exit cost.
|
| That's the problem with these Twitter clones. "It's just
| like Twitter, but RESPECTS your data ownership" is not
| compelling. Just create a freaking compelling and
| original user experience (the actual hard part that made
| the big platforms successful) and secretly do whatever
| you want on the back end.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The reason I like Bluesky is that they understand this,
| and that's why the protocol stuff isn't front and center.
| They're focused on product first, technology second. The
| tech serves to create a good product, they don't build
| the tech first and then hope people find the product
| acceptable.
| dgaffney wrote:
| lol, ok
| foltik wrote:
| Did we read the same article? It spends so many words
| answering these exact questions with examples and helpful
| illustrations!
|
| Your question:
|
| > why should they care that they don't "own" their
| Instagram post, whatever that means?
|
| From the article:
|
| > The web Alice created--who she follows, what she likes,
| what she has posted--is trapped in a box that's owned by
| somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind. On an
| individual level, it might not be a huge deal. However,
| collectively, the net effect is that social platforms--at
| first, gradually, and then suddenly--turn their backs on
| their users. If you can't leave without losing something
| important, the platform has no incentives to respect you
| as a user.
|
| Your question:
|
| > can you give examples of good and bad incentive
| structures in this context?
|
| From the article:
|
| > Maybe the app gets squeezed by investors, and every
| third post is an ad. Maybe it gets bought by a
| congolomerate that wanted to get rid of competition, and
| is now on life support. Maybe it runs out of funding, and
| your content goes down in two days. Maybe the founders
| get acquihired--an exciting new chapter. Maybe the app
| was bought by some guy, and now you're slowly getting
| cooked by the algorithm.
|
| > Luckily, web's decentralized design avoids this.
| Because it's easy to walk away, hosting providers are
| forced to compete, and hosting is now a commodity.
|
| I think you're right that the average person doesn't care
| so much as they just want to be entertained or reach a
| large network, but apathy is not an argument in favor of
| the status quo.
| jrowen wrote:
| In fairness to you, I had originally skimmed the article
| and did later realize that some of my points had been
| addressed. In fairness to me, in this subthread I was
| responding to other commenters and asking them questions
| rather than commenting directly on the article itself.
|
| At this point my argument is that the ability to switch
| providers is not a major concern to most users of these
| platforms. I don't want a generic social media hosting
| provider. I want the Facebook experience, or the
| Instagram experience, or the Twitter experience. I'm
| happy to be in the garden and on the rails because it's
| easy and tightly curated. I don't want some Frankenstein
| amalgamation of data from all these things. I don't want
| to shoehorn my Instagram world into something else.
| leshokunin wrote:
| It matters because your posts aren't just entertainment in
| the moment -- they're your history, your proof of existence
| online. Platforms treat them as disposable. If Instagram dies
| or bans you, your years of photos, writing, and connections
| vanish. Owning your data means your work and identity survive
| these issues, if you want.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| An example: I have been a Swarm user for like, fifteen
| years. As soon as atproto has private records, I'll want to
| set up syncing that data into my PDS. It's kept track of a
| huge part of my life, and losing that would be sad.
| jrowen wrote:
| I think a lot of people treat their own content as
| disposable also though. I don't know if most people would
| really care to save or dig through their entire Twitter
| history, for example. The rise of Stories is evidence of
| this. We're moving from a culture of preserving ancient
| pieces of paper to swimming in a never-ending river of data
| where there's so many things coming at you that you just
| move forward and don't have a ton of time to look back.
|
| People that really want to preserve and archive their
| content find a way to do it and manage it separately. I
| have all the pictures that I've posted to Instagram. I have
| anything I've written that I cared enough to keep. If and
| when IG dies or I move onto the next thing, am I really
| going to want to meaningfully preserve and transfer the
| specific contents of that walled garden somewhere else?
| Maybe. I can definitely see the value, but it doesn't seem
| super compelling to me yet.
|
| There is something to be said for the uniquely curated
| walled gardens and the centralized trust and organization
| and opinions they bring. When I started an Instagram
| account, I didn't want to transfer my Facebook world, it's
| a new world with a fresh start. I didn't want the same
| friends, the same voice for myself, etc. I certainly
| wouldn't have wanted to dig through all of that to figure
| out what made sense to carry over.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I mean.. if you can still find the archives (pretty sure
| they're out there, but getting harder and harder to find),
| I have my name on lots of usenet posts from the 90s. But
| I'm pretty sure all my BBS posts, GEnie posts, etc from
| before that are gone - they would stretch back as far as
| December '84, IIRC. And there's probably very little left
| from before 2000.
|
| And yet, I don't lament that 10-15 years of my online life
| have "vanished" - I was an ignorant little snot back then,
| and actually, am VERY glad they HAVE vanished. And
| thankfully I've generally used aliases / usernames instead
| of my actual name in most places (other than the usenet
| posts that were from my university account) so that wayback
| can't be used against me easily. Heck - I wish I could
| assert/enforce a "right to be forgotten" (vanish) on some
| websites. Rarely have I wished (especially in this current
| administration) that I was _MORE_ visible / persistent
| online.
| losvedir wrote:
| Sure, this might matter to "very online" people. But I
| don't think it's the norm.
| knowtheory wrote:
| There's still some more work to do to make the developer
| experience simple enough that it's a no-brainer for people to
| pick ATProto up in anger.
|
| But there's a lot of work developing on that front, and the
| next 6-12 months will be super exciting to watch.
|
| The longer story is that most people don't understand that
| ATProto is more than just Bluesky, and the usecases are
| wayyyyyy broader. That's going to take more time to play out in
| the market.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Absolutely. In fact I'd love for my startup to run our own
| atproto instance separately from Bluesky, but it still looks
| like quite a lift. Lmk if you have some recommendations.
|
| Basically our thing would give that ecosystem the ability to
| have personal pages that can look like Patreon, YouTube,
| Instagram and others
| tynanpurdy wrote:
| It depends how much you want to replicate. All you really
| need is the Application Data Server (or AppView) to
| aggregate the records you are interested in, serve them to
| your client app, and write them to people's repos. I've
| been tinkering with the 'personal website on AT' idea space
| for a bit, tons of cool possibilities (and several people
| already have implemented cool AT integrations in their
| sites!). Happy to chat ab it.
| leshokunin wrote:
| HMU! I'm "shokunin." on discord, leshokunin on TG /
| Twitter.
|
| I'd prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky.
| We'd give people something like username.page.app and
| they'd make posts there. If people wanna follow on
| bluesky they can, and we provide a username that's just
| the url.
|
| I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But
| I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and
| I'd prefer using the protocol but not be directly
| associated or dependent on Bluesky.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Are you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top
| of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance
| separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully
| parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or
| want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An
| "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.
| leshokunin wrote:
| I'd prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky.
| We'd give people something like username.page.app and
| they'd make posts there. If people wanna follow on
| bluesky they can, and we provide a username that's just
| the url.
|
| I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But
| I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and
| I'd prefer using the protocol but not be directly
| associated or dependent on Bluesky.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Okay, so this _sounds_ like you 'd want to run an appview
| + pds. (and possibly a relay, depending on some details.)
| Except for one thing:
|
| > or dependent on Bluesky.
|
| If you want to take this to an extreme, and are
| uncomfortable with how did:plc has not yet moved into its
| own org, then you'd want to also run your own plc server,
| etc. The problem with doing this is:
|
| > If people wanna follow on bluesky they can
|
| You lose this. Because you're now not running on the main
| atproto system, but instead a fully parallel one of your
| own.
|
| Anyway, you could start on this by running a PDS via the
| reference implementation here:
| https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds and then building
| your own appview (application).
|
| You could also take a look at Blacksky's implementation
| https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky and if you
| end up using it, consider throwing them a few dollars.
| Alternative implementations are super important!
| leshokunin wrote:
| Thank you for the detailed answer! Totally comfortable
| with the did implementation. Just trying to separate from
| their brand and just use the standard :)
|
| We already built our own platform independently from
| Bluesky, so we have a timeline in the wrong post and
| everything. I'm just trying to give our users into opera
| ability. So that when they make a post on our platform,
| people can also follow your Bluesky and see on their
| timeline. Am I correct to assume then that we would not
| require our own app view?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You're welcome, yeah then that's a lot easier.
|
| > Am I correct to assume then that we would not require
| our own app view?
|
| Well, given that you have built a platform, and you then
| want to interact with the atproto eocsystem, that means
| you'd be making your platform an appview, in a sense. An
| appview is just a service that reads the underlying data
| from the network and does something useful with it.
| Kye wrote:
| There's hope for an independent but synchronized PLC
| directory: https://tangled.org/@microcosm.blue/Allegedly
| psnehanshu wrote:
| You mean you want to host the personal repositories (PDS)
| for your users?
| leshokunin wrote:
| Ideally yes!
| nunobrito wrote:
| Good article, very clear.
|
| Can you also do one for NOSTR?
|
| The functioning is similar, albeit there is no need for hosting
| user data since it can be sent to multiple relays and live
| reachable to others from there.
|
| Thanks in advance.
| danabramov wrote:
| I probably won't do it myself but this one should be helpful:
| https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html
| nunobrito wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. By coincidence (or not so much) I had
| lunch this week with a founder of bluesky along with a others
| and many names were mentioned that I'd never heard about.
| They were mentioned on that article and now understand
| better.
|
| Quite a lot of food for thought today. Thank you for that.
| api wrote:
| > Open source has clearly won. Yes, there are plenty of closed
| source products and businesses. But the shared infrastructure--
| the commons--runs on open source.
|
| Lost me right there. Open source is the infrastructure that
| powers closed cloud. None of the openness makes it to the end
| user. It only benefits highly technical users and businesses.
|
| Open source was made irrelevant (to non-technical users) by the
| shift to services and cloud.
| bumseltagbaerbi wrote:
| Oh, some fancy British Indian Ocean TLD; totally trustworthy and
| morally right!
| ceayo wrote:
| Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and
| AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at
| is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs
| can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to
| have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.
| verdverm wrote:
| You'd probably like this article too, same ideas from the
| distributed engineer perspective
|
| https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
| danabramov wrote:
| Thanks! I'm glad it's clicking. The comparisons with AP are
| always frustrating for this reason as it doesn't try to do
| anything similar in scope.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| imo ActivityPub sounds better than ATProto, hence people
| assume the former is superior. This is a branding issue.
| danabramov wrote:
| Yea maybe! I think at:// is an even stronger brand in a
| sense though. Actually makes sense as something browsers
| may support one day, "at://alice.com" makes sense at "stuff
| at alice dot com", "authenticated transfer" is a decent
| acronym, "atmosphere" for the ecosystem is just great (and
| wasn't even coined by the team).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Does that mean there is a centralized identity service?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You have two choices of identity service: did:plc, which is,
| and did:web, which is not.
|
| In theory additional dids could come into existence too,
| those are just the two that blueksy supports at the moment.
| danabramov wrote:
| That's correct. PLC is being split into an independent
| entity but that is ongoing: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-
| directory-org
|
| It's worth noting that PLC can't fake your data because
| each edit is recursively signed. So you can verify a chain
| of updates. However, PLC can in theory deny you service or
| ignore your updates.
| verdverm wrote:
| it's def not doing that right now lol, more than half the
| ops are adversarial and still accepted (the vast majority
| contain invalid contents)
| psionides wrote:
| Yeah, there are tens of thousands of records referencing
| a PDS with a certain... controversial president's name in
| the hostname, which doesn't actually exist at all.
|
| Also someone from Nostr made a tool that let you upload
| image files and encode them (split into parts) into plc
| directory records...
| _cart wrote:
| The AT vs AP issue is full of nuance. Our community has gone
| back and forth on this:
| https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/18302
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Really nice analysis, thank you.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| This is not meant as a criticism at all, I like Bevy. Are you
| familiar with the Mr. Beast PowerPoint that said:
|
| > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
| That's the number one goal of this production company. It's
| not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the
| funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the
| highest quality videos.. It's to make the best YOUTUBE videos
| possible.
|
| When I glance at the Bevy discussion link you shared, my
| reaction is:
|
| > Your goal here is to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game
| engine possible. It's not to make the most performant game
| engine. Not to make the game engine that powers the best
| games. Not to make the best looking graphics in a game
| engine. Not the highest quality game engine or game editing
| experience. It's to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game
| engine.
| jrowen wrote:
| _Open source has clearly won._
|
| This is clearly a wild claim that almost undermines the rest of
| the argument, but to the extent that we can accept that there are
| open source software packages that decision-makers deep in that
| industry will reliably choose for their business...it's not clear
| how this revolution will extend to "regular people." They just
| want easy. Make something as easy and fun as Instagram. They
| don't give a crap about all this, they don't want to think about
| it.
| pfraze wrote:
| That first point is so true, as a programmer I never use open
| source
| Kye wrote:
| A complementary article I wrote: "Nobody cares about
| decentralization until they do"
|
| https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
| brap wrote:
| I think we tend to do a lot of idealization. The vast majority of
| non-techies don't care whatsoever about decentralization.
| verdverm wrote:
| One can explain features that are possible on ATProto but not
| Big Social without talking about "decentralization". My pitch
| to the non-technical typically follows or covers these points
|
| - Social today is not healthy
|
| - Single account instead of N
|
| - All apps keep your data in your database
|
| - User level choice over apps, algos, moderation. Esp algos, my
| social media usage patterns have changed for the better since I
| started using custom feeds
|
| - Real competition in social media
|
| - Take back our shared digital experience from a handful of
| billionaires deciding everything and keeping us locked into
| their attention economy
| danabramov wrote:
| Yes, which is a point the article repeatedly makes. I totally
| agree with you. See also
| https://knotbin.leaflet.pub/3lx3uqveyj22f/ which I linked to
| close to the end of the article.
| drnick1 wrote:
| This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see
| what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of
| minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and
| host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have
| an online presence at all.
| pfraze wrote:
| Bit apples to oranges, isn't it? You're not exactly able to do
| tiktok with personal websites
| igor47 wrote:
| I have my own site. But the people love engagement - it
| motivates a lot of content creation. Back in the day we had web
| log rings and WordPress comments, but that stuff is dead on the
| modern web, it's too adversarial an environment. My blog has no
| meaningful engagement, I don't even know if anyone ever reads
| it. It works for me since I write primarily for myself, but
| this is just not the case for most people
| knowtheory wrote:
| I'd argue that ATProto is the next iteration of open internet.
| It's what an internet where accounts/identity and verifiable
| content attribution are built in, and nobody using the
| technology needs to think about any of that.
|
| There's a space here where we can move from nobody having smart
| phones or hosting digital presences -> everyone having digital
| presence provided by Facebook/Instagram, and icloud/google
| accounts -> Accounts w/ something like ATProto where its your
| stuff, you get to decide where you keep it, and you get to
| decide who gets access to it.
| danabramov wrote:
| Personal websites are great. They don't do large-scale
| aggregation which a lot of people enjoy and look for. The
| article is about an approach to large-scale aggregation with
| important properties of personal sites. For what it's worth,
| you can host atproto repositories from your home too -- some
| people run them on Raspberry Pi.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power
| vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they
| all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user
| growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People
| gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting
| whale.
|
| That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better
| approach, it solves content problem by just gathering data in
| background and feeding it to the user anyway. That particular
| implementation might not work but it sounds correct.
|
| IMO, not much of value of Twitter for most users is in ability to
| post tweets, it's in data bandwidth. 99.9% of users don't post
| anything interesting, those might as well be local text file or
| oit of band shared filler content. The value is in content
| sourcing, so something like multi-social RSS reader with optional
| P2P should be the way to go. Just IMdimO, though...
| danabramov wrote:
| While I use microblogging to frame the initial narrative, as
| explained in the article, this isn't limited to Twitter-like
| products. Tangled is "GitHub on atproto", Leaflet is "Medium on
| atproto", and so on.
|
| The problem with client-side P2P is you can't do large-scale
| aggregation with consistency. Large-scale aggregation with
| consistency is what normal people expect from social apps.
|
| Re: the OpenAI thing you mentioned, that's actually a perfect
| example of something atproto excels at. Since the data already
| exists in the network, you can crawl/index it and run your own
| tooling that does something proactive on cron jobs etc. See
| https://github.com/graze-social/iftta for some initial work in
| that area.
| Kye wrote:
| I like that labeler that shows which lexicons a user has in
| their repo.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/recordcollector.edavis.dev
| prisenco wrote:
| Social networks rarely come up by being "the same but..."
|
| They come up by doing something unique that can't be done on
| older platforms.
| paxys wrote:
| "Unique" is definitely not necessary. Look at the dominant
| social media platforms of the last two decades. MySpace ->
| Facebook -> Twitter -> Instagram -> Snapchat -> TikTok. Each
| of them was a minor evolution over the last, with the core
| feature set remaining basically the same. Lots of user-
| generated content, algorithmic recommendations, likes,
| comments, DMs, ads. There has really not been a revolution in
| the social media space since it was invented.
| kevinak wrote:
| ...and this is why Nostr is different! You can build basically
| anything on it. A blog, a Twitter like application, a streaming
| service, messaging apps, the sky is the limit!
|
| Here's a selection of things built on the protocol:
| https://nostrapps.com
| danabramov wrote:
| Nostr is not different from atproto in that sense because
| atproto also supports arbitrary applications (the article
| uses Leaflet and Tangled as examples). There's a good
| comparison of atproto vs Nostr:
| https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html
| kevinak wrote:
| Fair enough. But it is a more complicated protocol that, I
| feel, makes it a lot harder to diversify and build
| different applications on.
| brody_hamer wrote:
| I really like the approach of nostr, but when I tried to use
| it, each client I tried would start me off following ecoin
| pump and dump influencers. It was really off putting.
|
| I would've preferred starting off in an empty room, an
| experience more like using signal.
| dgaffney wrote:
| Thank you Dan for the post! I think two other things to point
| out:
|
| 1. _Because_ open social has to actually compete for a user 's
| business, any sufficiently mature platform build in the ecosystem
| will necessarily trend towards being more responsive to those
| users needs, which will trend towards a better product than the
| legacy crop,
|
| 2. Precisely at a moment where governments lean on large, visible
| corporate entities to enact desired policies, splintering that
| ownership helps ensure a resilient communications network
| xnx wrote:
| I'm glad to see someone recognize the critical importance of
| authors owning their domain. Without that, you will alway be at
| the mercy of someone else. The rest is just technical detail.
| swyx wrote:
| i'm interested in making a new social network on atproto. does
| anyone have resources to recommend where to start?
| verdverm wrote:
| https://discord.atprotocol.dev
|
| Lots of people there to direct you to specific resources
| Kye wrote:
| https://atproto.com/guides/applications
| ireadmevs wrote:
| All of this is meant for 100% public data, right? Or is there a
| concept of visibility control? Can I create private communities,
| with data flowing just inside?
| danabramov wrote:
| For now, yes, only 100% public data lives on the protocol (you
| can still, of course, augment protocol data with the stuff you
| hold in the DB).
|
| In the future, the plan is to also enable some types of private
| data on the protocol. See these recent notes from Paul on the
| state of things:
|
| - https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhmtognls2q
|
| - https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b
| verdverm wrote:
| There is also a Working Group that just formed to push the
| envelope on private data / permissioned spaces
|
| Links to my own efforts on this
|
| - https://github.com/blebbit/atproto (fork)
|
| - https://youtu.be/oYKA85oZc8U?si=DIf09hu8-REw-yHj&t=3758
| (presentation I gave last week)
| advisedwang wrote:
| I'm a little saddened to see that each app has it's own
| collection type, even if they are able to use each others
| collections. That means that apps will only interoperate to the
| extent that they are explicitly designed to.
|
| One of the beautiful (but perhaps not that practically relevant)
| things about ActivityPub is that a Mastodon user can subscribe to
| a Pixelfed user without anything special being done. It's like if
| Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Substack all
| automatically interoperated.
| verdverm wrote:
| See https://github.com/lexicon-community for the effort towards
| common lexicon
| danabramov wrote:
| Yeah, atproto pushes this down to be a community/governance
| issue. Nobody is preventing apps from working out a common
| standard and supporting it. However, nobody is forcing them
| to do that either. So it will play out with natural dynamics.
| What atproto ensures is that there's a convention for
| strongly-typed foward-evolving schemas and how they get
| validated (and reverse domains specify the authority). But
| ultimately cooperation is up to the community.
| verdverm wrote:
| For anyone who wants to read up more on this, another of
| Paul's (non-math) Notes (also, not the same Paul :)
|
| https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
| ltjbukem wrote:
| AP intercompatibility is fun, but it starts to fall apart once
| you leave the safety of the "Note" (statuses) and "Question"
| (polls) types (which is what Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey,
| Pleroma, etc. all use as their primary elements). Everything
| outside of it becomes either loosely converted to a note
| (Mastodon does this for a lot of things, see
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/activitypub/#payloads) or is
| discarded by the instance. The only types that I know of which
| have been able to have native support from multiple AP
| implementations are micro-blogging and Lemmy's community
| system, with everything else essentially being a monoculture
| (or just extremely one-sided towards a specific implementation)
| due to a lack of interest from other implementations in
| providing full, standardized support. This isn't an inherent
| protocol limitation, but I do think that the community could do
| better in organizing standards outside of the core documents.
|
| ATproto's system is a bit more well defined (you HAVE to abide
| by the lexicon/schema of the data collection to be accepted by
| implementations, reference implementation and some third-party
| ones have schema validators to do so) and allows for easier
| intercompatibility, but I do think that it could be a bit
| looser than it is right now (selective support for additional
| fields) to provide proper "sidecar" values in a record (they'll
| be in the user's PDS but it won't validate and could be
| rejected by indexers). Bridgy Fed does this to include the
| originating URL from APub and the original text, which third-
| party clients could certainly take advantage of if they detect
| that the post comes from a Bridgy account.
| (https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-fields)
| isodev wrote:
| Yes, it's interesting but there is no way the instantiation of
| the protocol (Bluesky) remains free of investor influences. It
| would require a great deal of capital for anyone to recreate the
| "network" in such an eventuality. So yes, it's cool but not
| really Open.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They took VC a long time ago.
| verdverm wrote:
| for clarity, Bluesky is an app and ATProtocol is an Open Social
| fabric they built along with it and what Bluesky is built on
| top of
|
| In the long-term, ATProtocol will be separated from Bluesky the
| company and end up as a standards and in some shared governance
| structure
| BigTuna wrote:
| There are already working alternate implementations of every
| protocol component.
| backproblems204 wrote:
| Great read, love these ideas
| arjie wrote:
| That was very well written. I have to admit that because AT
| Protocol was Bluesky's I thought it was some corpo version of
| ActivityPub, but based on this post it makes a lot of sense. The
| data is in a 'repository' of my choice. I think I like that very
| much and it aligns with the kind of general principle I have
| where it's better to apply filtering etc. on the read side rather
| than on the write side so that I can publish all sorts of things
| that I want into my repo and others can then read etc. that
| stuff.
|
| The arrows do seem to imply that commenting on my posts goes into
| my repo, but I'm sure that's just an imprecision trying to
| express an idea. The whole thing seems very cool and
| decentralized.
|
| When I went to see what it takes to run a separate PDS on AT,
| though, I see that it's all nice and packaged up and has certain
| assumptions:
|
| 1. It takes care of SSL etc.
|
| 2. It will stand up HTTPS/WSS servers to handle a bunch of RPC
|
| So in practice, you don't get https://roshangeorge.dev and
| at://roshangeorge.dev because for the latter you kind of need
| https://roshangeorge.dev/xrpc and wss://roshangeorge.dev
|
| Therefore, you probably end up with https://roshangeorge.dev and
| at://at.roshangeorge.dev and then you can run
| https://at.roshangeorge.dev and wss://at.roshangeorge.dev
|
| All minor stuff and doesn't take away from the main point, but it
| was a thing.
| whyrusleeping wrote:
| The default pds packaging takes care of SSL, but thats not a
| requirement, just something we try to make easy for users.
|
| Also at:// URIs are of the form at://DID/..., and your human
| readable handle is bound to your DID through DNS TXT records
| _atproto.roshangeorge.dev, but applications all know to render
| that as just roshangeorge.dev. That DID points to a document
| that specifies where your server lives, so the HTTPS/WSS routes
| can live wherever you want them to.
|
| Also likes/replies/etc on your posts go in their authors repos
| not yours, your intuition is correct there.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| You can authenticate a handle via a file in ./well-known/ at
| the domain too, which is how bluesky does it for their
| default handles.
| danabramov wrote:
| _> The arrows do seem to imply that commenting on my posts goes
| into my repo, but I'm sure that's just an imprecision trying to
| express an idea. The whole thing seems very cool and
| decentralized._
|
| The way I used arrows might've been a bit confusing because I
| use two types of them.
|
| The solid ones pointing from @alice.com downwards indicate
| ownership. They're the same thing as grouping by color. All
| blue stuff is Alice's.
|
| The dashed ones pointing between records are links. Those are
| equivalent of <a href>. Any record can link to any other
| record, no matter which repositories either is in.
|
| When you comment on someone's post, your comment goes into
| _your_ repo, but it has a link to the parent post (which may be
| in any repo). That's usually how you want to represent it in
| the data model so that anyone indexing both records can
| reconstruct the relationship.
|
| In the example, Bob comments on Alice's post. So Bob's comment
| is in Bob's repo and Alice's post is in Alice's repo.
|
| To clarify your specific point, a person commenting on your
| post will create record in their repo. In fact one can never
| create records in somebody else's repo. That's the central
| premise.
|
| Hope that makes sense.
| bArray wrote:
| I really dislike that BlueSky named their protocol the "AT
| protocol" [1], when we already have the AT command set which
| remains important [2].
|
| [1] https://atproto.com/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_AT_command_set
| simonw wrote:
| I can forgive them that. There are only 26*26 = 676 two-letter
| acronyms to go around, and they had the decency to call it "AT
| protocol" which makes it clearly different from "AT command
| set".
| eigencoder wrote:
| Loved the breakdown of a topic I wasn't familiar with.
|
| I just can't help but think that the whole ethos of Open Social
| Media is misguided. I think that social media isn't good for us
| -- not just because of the big companies making it worse, but
| because the technology itself doesn't promote health.
|
| It feels like trying to make cigarettes open-source. Sure you can
| stick it to big tobacco but at the end of the day you're still
| making cigarettes.
| gdulli wrote:
| As long as the Eternal September remains on Twitter, there's
| nothing unhealthy about being on Bluesky. The format isn't the
| problem, it's the people who use it as a stupid culture war
| battlefield. Those people seem content to remain on Twitter.
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| Huge missed opportunity not using Alice and Tom for the relevant
| initials lol
| popcar2 wrote:
| I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but
| while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer
| to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which
| is quite active and fun to browse
|
| 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed
| by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't
| control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating
| instance of that protocol, what's stopping them from strong-
| arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them?
| Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing
| off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now
| that you aren't allowed to move your account? This isn't some
| hypothetical scenario, this already happened before. A lot of
| social medias started off with fairly open features and APIs and
| slowly choked them out for profit.
|
| 2. Users don't really care about protocol, they care about
| momentum and userbase. Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin are all popular-ish
| Reddit alternatives using AP. It was already a struggle to reach
| a point where posts could get over a hundred comments a day, how
| are you going to convince people to move to another platform
| again? I'm worried this will just end in splintering an already
| niche community and cause people to just give up and go back to
| using popular platforms.
|
| Being able to move accounts is a very neat feature but it's not a
| reason enough to move. You can already export your settings and
| make an account on another instance in 20 seconds then import
| your settings again, which would bring back your subscriptions
| and blocks and all you set up from account 1. To me it's not a
| huge deal.
|
| See also: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
|
| [1]: A fediverse Reddit alternative, e.g https://lemmy.world/ and
| https://programming.dev/ . See also Piefed which I think is
| better nowadays https://piefed.social/
| self_awareness wrote:
| I know that Mastodon is not the same as ActivityPub, but I
| don't know how can it be treated seriously if it allows
| disappearing replies. Whatever we write will disappear after
| some time. Sometimes. Because sometimes not. Maybe it's an
| implementation problem, I don't know, but it was one of my two
| reasons for my exit from Mastodon.
| F3nd0 wrote:
| I think it's ultimately up to your instance whether it keeps
| your posts indefinitely or not. I think most do, but others
| might delete posts after a period of time, in which case they
| should mention this to their users (on their 'About' page,
| for example). Personally, I can't say I've encountered this
| problem, but then again I've mostly used Pleroma (which is a
| different program implementing the ActivityPub protocol, like
| Mastodon).
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol,
|
| Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not
| really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even
| within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically,
| stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows
| the details of) and so talking about the structure of things
| ends up working differently.
|
| > what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and
| changing how it works to benefit them?
|
| This is absolutely a real concern. I believe they have shown
| themselves to be good stewards, and they also recognize this
| concern. As the ecosystem grows, this will be fixed.
|
| > Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and
| closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years
| from now that you aren't allowed to move your account?
|
| This is built into the protocol! You can back up your CAR file
| and move it to another host without the approval of your
| current host.
|
| > You can already export your settings and make an account on
| another instance
|
| This doesn't work on masto to the same degree as atproto. You
| lose a lot of stuff when you move on masto, but it's 100%
| transparent on atproto.
| xrisk wrote:
| If your pds refuses to serve you your CAR file I don't think
| you can do anything about it, can you?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Yes, if you are really worried about this you'd want to
| regularly back that up.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| What irks me is that in the end of the day if you go to Bluesky
| it's all American politics and if you go to literally any
| mastodon instance it's all American politics.
|
| Maybe it's because I don't like monster of the week political
| drama, but I still don't see a reason to use them instead of
| Tumblr, Pinterest, or even TikTok.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder - maybe websites were enough? Most people on
| most platforms are readers/consumers, not producers anyways.
| Maybe having a personal website was a good filter for publishing
| after all? Maybe personal websites + sites like hackernews that
| allows us to discuss our and other people's work is the best the
| Internet could be.
| woah wrote:
| Maybe pianos were enough. Radio has made it so families no
| longer gather round and sing in the evenings and TikTok is even
| worse than radio
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| It depends; not everything that's newer is automatically
| better.
|
| Web and websites did the heavy lifting of instant and world-
| wide information sharing.
|
| With social media, open or closed, there are many non-obvious
| tradeoffs; I am not sure whether on the whole, we are better
| off with or without them - time will tell
| INTPenis wrote:
| This has already been covered many times but the design of the AT
| protocol requires a lot more resources than AP. Meaning it will
| be reserved for large organizations, while AP has a lower entry
| of threshold.
|
| I want both to thrive, but I prefer AP for small communities.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Depending on what exactly you mean, this isn't the case. For
| example, running your own PDS is _very_ cheap.
|
| If you want to fully run a full copy of _everything_ yourself,
| it 's going to be more expensive, sure, but those costs have
| gone down _dramatically_ over time. The most expensive bit is
| running $34 /month:
| https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
| bonoboTP wrote:
| How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here. How does
| blocking work? How do people make sure to distance themselves
| from political enemies? Do the aggregator cache servers block
| certain user domains? How do you ensure that the aggregator
| returns valid and non-forged comments and likes?
| poolnoodle wrote:
| Every day I am more convinced that we don't need these global
| conversation platforms at all.
| tolerance wrote:
| This looks to be turning into a curious case study on how network
| states develop.
| motoxpro wrote:
| I really hope this doesn't catch on. Having ever random site on
| the internet being able to see every bit of my data sounds like a
| nightmare. Unless I am misunderstanding something.
| not--felix wrote:
| After developing my own rss reader[1] i think atproto could be
| the successor of rss. It is the same principal. The only
| difference is it is more complex and there are more components
| like the firehose, which is optional, the reader could just
| scrape their following themself. I think the resource usage is
| also only a problem if you want a view of the entire network, if
| we treat it more like rss it would be totally fine to just keep
| the portion of the network we are interested in. Its not as
| straight forward as rss, because of types like comments and
| likes. To notice them you need to listen to the entire network
| stream, but you do not need to save everything. I am really
| excited where this will go.
|
| [1] https://ivyreader.com
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