[HN Gopher] Open Social
___________________________________________________________________
Open Social
Author : knowtheory
Score : 895 points
Date : 2025-09-26 16:01 UTC (1 days 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| But the tradeoff is that it's free right?
| 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
| KolibriFly wrote:
| The main thing standing in the way isn't technical feasibility,
| it's governance and control
| 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/
| niutech wrote:
| Why disaster? Google used it successfully in their products
| like Orkut. It was a novel federation protocol at that time.
| 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).
| dangus wrote:
| I think the other issue here is that there's a serious question
| of why bother "upgrading" your social media from closed to open
| when we've all figured out that it's bad for you, worsens your
| mood, and generally wastes your time?
|
| If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why
| am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
| krapp wrote:
| Social media is just a paradigm for multimedia communication
| and networking over the internet. It isn't inherently good or
| bad, any more than telephones, television, radio or the
| internet itself.
|
| I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't
| one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry
| and addicted all the time.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| For a significant subset of users - younger people and
| children - a consensus is forming among specialists that
| social media is indeed inherently bad.
| krapp wrote:
| They said the same thing about video games, and the
| internet as a whole, and cellphones, and television, and
| magazines.
|
| I'm not going to claim that social media can't have
| negative consequences for young people, lots of things
| do. But the hyperbole behind the discourse makes it
| obvious there is also a moral panic at work. In every
| case, technology is blamed for a failure of society's
| responsibility to educate and raise children properly.
| dangus wrote:
| IIRC peer reviewed scientific study was not saying that
| about video games, it was other less thoroughly
| researched sources and/or propaganda groups.
| dangus wrote:
| It is quite debatable whether it is inherently good or bad.
|
| There is not a whole lot of scientific evidence for it
| being good from what I understand.
|
| I would also argue that if you broaden the definition of
| social media too far you're not really talking about social
| media anymore. Calling your friends on Signal isn't "social
| media."
| tjpnz wrote:
| Those products are both owned by an ad company, they're
| incentivized to push all your buttons so they can maximize
| the time you spend looking at ads. Similar offerings exist
| which don't, and as a result have a very different vibe.
| 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.
| tynanpurdy wrote:
| with every additional user, every additional post, the
| value of the open network only grows, and eventually
| becomes too big to ignore.
| 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
| leshokunin wrote:
| Wonderful, ty
| 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:
| There's nothing compelling and original about the twitter
| UX compared to all the clones. Pretty much across the
| board it's just posting short messages and following
| others.
|
| The entire value of a social media platform is in the
| network. Accumulating and maintaining one is the _actual_
| hard part that made the big players successful.
| jrowen wrote:
| It was compelling and original when the concept didn't
| exist, or at least hadn't been successfully brought to
| market like they did. In a world where Twitter exists,
| and has the network, there is nothing compelling about a
| Twitter clone.
|
| None of these platforms started with a network. They
| weren't cooked up by evil investors and MBAs looking for
| a rent-extraction scheme. Nor were they designed by a
| committee of philosophical experts saying "oh we'll just
| copy their thing and make it more esoteric and confusing
| so that maybe one day we can aggregate content from 14
| competing Twitter-like platforms and you can switch
| between them whenever you like!" They were started
| largely by kids goofing around and making fun things for
| people.
| 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.
| leshokunin wrote:
| You asked me to explain why this matters. I did. I think
| your answer is fairly dismissive. Not everyone who cares
| about this is going to be some terminally online edge
| case. Unclear why ask a question if you are not curious
| about it. Probably not an effective use of our time.
| toyg wrote:
| _> People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or
| agency over media_
|
| Disagree. The punk phenomenon was largely about reclaiming
| that ownership and agency over cultural output, and it was
| massive in the 70s/80s/90s. The early web was very punk in
| attitude, with people basically self-publishing. Even in the
| '00s, there was still a clear distinction between "corporate"
| portals and grassroots.
|
| This phenomenon where even creatives and intellectuals are
| _Just Fine_ with playing in someone else 's heavily-tweaked,
| hyper-monetized sandbox, is a new development.
| 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.
| est wrote:
| nostr started as simple but now there's like a million NIPs.
| 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...
| verdverm wrote:
| Oh is Nostr the other one, why do these groups feel the
| need to try and ruin what other people enjoy?
| _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.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Community drama has always been the achilles heel of large,
| open-source projects which are volunteer driven. Focus on
| community is critical to delivering this, especially when
| your product relies on mind share.
| debugnik wrote:
| In my experience, focus on community is how you get
| community drama in the first place.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > Your goal here is to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE
| game engine possible.
|
| That sounds awful if applied to Bevy, and seems you
| misunderstand what "Mr. Beast" is trying to say.
|
| They're not saying make the best game engine, but make the
| game engine that would do best by GitHub-popular metrics,
| which is absolutely the wrong way to go.
|
| I hope they continue to simply make the best game engine
| available, as before, and ignore useful metrics or focusing
| on where it's hosted.
| debugnik wrote:
| They didn't misunderstand, they're calling out Bevy's
| priorities.
|
| Bevy is still incomplete as an engine. AFAIK there's only
| one commercially successful game made with it, Tiny
| Glade, and it doesn't even use Bevy's renderer but a
| custom one.
|
| Yet the Bevy developers distract the project with essays
| and debates about the politics of their federated social
| media presence. You don't need that to build a game
| engine, but you do to build a "GITHUB OPEN SOURCE" game
| engine. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong
| with it, but that's clearly the focus here.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > They didn't misunderstand, they're calling out Bevy's
| priorities.
|
| Yes, but the misunderstanding I'm trying to point out is
| that Mr Beast is not trying to create something of value,
| they're trying to create something that works well on a
| specific platform.
|
| In the Bevy analogy, that would be creating a GitHub
| project that gets the most stars, regardless of how
| useful or well the engine itself is working.
|
| I'm instead saying the same thing as you, they should
| continue focusing on building the greatest engine,
| regardless of the platform for hosting the project.
|
| If Bevy were to follow Mr Beasts advice, they'd focus on
| flashy demos, engaging READMEs and so on, to increase the
| success on the platform itself, instead of focusing on
| the engine itself, which from following their direction
| almost since inception, they're doing a pretty good job
| with already.
| saghm wrote:
| If your goal is to be viral and not care about the quality,
| then maybe following Mr. Beast's advice might make sense.
| If you'd rather risk popularity by trying to what you think
| will actually be better without knowing whether it will end
| up being viral, it makes sense probably to take anything he
| says with a grain of salt.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I guess my point is, writing 3,000 words on social media
| choices isn't going to make the game engine any better.
| But I can see how it is really important to the community
| and developers, which is to say, it's really important if
| the product is not a game engine but An Open Source
| (Esoteric) Game Engine Hosted On GitHub. Do you see what
| I am saying? That is the difference between making the
| best videos and making the best YOUTUBE videos. Mr. Beast
| isn't confusing, he's capitalizing the important part of
| what he is trying to say!
| saghm wrote:
| I fully understand what you're saying; I just don't agree
| with it. For starters, people can be complex and have
| more than one goal. The effect of making an open source
| project isn't necessarily just the utility of the project
| itself, and if some of those other potential effects are
| desired, the best way to do things won't necessarily be
| the same as if there's only one output that someone cares
| about.
|
| For another thing, even if there aren't any other
| specific effects that are desired, there still might be
| some that are specifically _not_ wanted, and avoiding
| those might be important. Mr. Beast is a exactly the type
| of example that demonstrates this point; by focusing on
| making the "best" YouTube content as measured purely by
| popularity, he's done all sort of things that someone
| might very understandably want to avoid. I agree that
| he's not confusing, but that's not the issue with him.
| He's extremely transparent in how little he cares about
| whether what he does actually helps anyone other than
| himself (or if he hurts other people in the process of
| helping himself). I suspect this is quite different from
| the mentality of most open source developers, who are
| putting in personal time and effort towards contributing
| to something that realistically has little likelihood of
| direct personal benefits for those involved. What you're
| perceiving as a lack of focus comes across to me as
| having the humility and thoughtfulness to try to look at
| the big picture and understand one's actions in the
| context of a larger environment that isn't improved in
| the long term by pursuing a single narrow goal to the
| exclusion of literally everything else.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Okay... Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than Bevy,
| but are much better game engines. They will be shipping
| more great games every day than Bevy will in the next
| year, including beloved meaningful ones, like Silksong
| and Indiecute and Cuddlygame or whatever. And hardly
| anyone there, like most big corpo employees, is directly
| benefitted from the better games, they get paid the same
| amount of money, but the rub is also, everyone I know
| working at Unity and Epic is really sincere and loves
| games.
|
| Of course I understand these are different things. Bevy
| is not at all competing with Unity.
|
| Because Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game
| engine. I'm just trying to be a little jocular about
| how... you know, I didn't say unfocused, but surely it
| seems a little silly to write 3000 words in response to a
| community worried about which open source social media
| federation protocols to adopt. That giant thread IS the
| product, it makes perfect sense from the POV that Bevy is
| trying to be the best OPEN SOURCE GITHUB GAME ENGINE, in
| the same way that Mr Beast is making the best YOUTUBE
| videos or Egyptology professors are making the best
| EGYPTOLOGY writing or painters are making the best
| PERSONALLY MEANINGFUL FINE ART or whatever. I like Bevy!
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Okay... Unity and Unreal have a lot less focus than
| Bevy
|
| Unity and Unreal also have billions of dollars in funding
| saghm wrote:
| > Bevy is trying to be best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game
| engine
|
| You're the only one saying this. No one else, including
| the person working on the project that you originally
| responded to, have claimed this is their sole goal to the
| inclusion of everything else. It's hard to tell if you
| think they literally don't care about anything else but
| are choosing their actions poorly, or if you think that
| they have the wrong priorities and should change them, or
| if you just didn't really stop to consider that maybe
| your assumption about what you're saying they're trying
| to do is incorrect and haven't read what I'm saying
| closely enough to understand that no number of examples
| of other things that happen to fit what you're saying is
| relevant if you aren't able to establish why anyone else
| should agree that it applies here in the first place.
| curious_ralts wrote:
| One could argue the opposite, let's take bevy as an
| example: more popularity could bring in more contributors
| or more funding which would hopefully result in making a
| better engine. The same could apply to Mr. Beast videos
| (more views translate to more money which translate to
| better production and staff which translate to more or
| better videos) but the goals are inherently different
| (maximizing profit which rewards quantity over quality)
| xigoi wrote:
| > We should pick a platform that is federated, where you have
| ownership and autonomy over your identity and your audience.
| Social media should not be own-able by a single group or
| person. Social media is serious business. It ties directly to
| human rights and business outcomes. It shouldn't be in anyone
| else's control but yours.
|
| I agree, but why not also apply the same logic to the other
| two communication platforms you are using (Discord and
| GitHub)?
| styanax wrote:
| > I agree, but why not also apply the same logic to the
| other two communication platforms you are using (Discord
| and GitHub)?
|
| Aside, this infuriates me - "here's our open source
| project/website, join our Discord!" (even Lemmy instances).
| _sigh_
| BrenBarn wrote:
| There aren't many realistic alternatives.
| t_mann wrote:
| Interesting discussion, and good points highlighted about
| Bluesky's did model that means you essentially don't own your
| identity either (in typical scenarios and when it will likely
| matter most). That takes a big chunk out of the "host your
| own data" narrative.
|
| One point I disagree on that's also mentioned in the replies:
| I don't think a global state should be seen as necessary or
| even desirable. Sure, it helps people who optimize for
| clicks/likes/attention as a business model But that shouldn't
| be the only concern. Having some degree of uncertainty around
| the global state can help reinforce a healthy skepticism
| towards what you're seeing in general. The 'correct' global
| number of upvotes on a post, or the majority of what has been
| said about a subject might still be manipulated to the point
| of being essentially fake. Optimizing for virality is not
| desirable if you think of the platform as a public good.
| Think about what it has done for the centralized platforms,
| and the consequences it's had in the real world.
| nightpool wrote:
| Every one of these "How AT proto works" explainers focuses on
| data ownership--which is where ATProto shines--and glosses over
| data processing, where ATProto is decidedly weaker than
| ActivityPub. ATProto is built on a global, public view of the
| world, where all events are visible to a trusted global
| "AppServer" that can make all of the decisions for you--how to
| create your feed, who can see who's posts, etc--all of those
| decisions have to be made by a trusted intermediary.
| ActivityPub is more like RSS or email--your local server only
| has to manage the feeds you subscribe to, and your inbox is
| directly built from all of the posts you have access to. People
| you subscribe to send you your posts, and you don't have to
| process them at all.
|
| This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the
| same way Twitter or ActivityPub does--every AppView needs to
| track the like counts of every post in the network manually.
| It's a huge hassle! I just don't see this architecture winning
| out in the long term, when compared to the AP feed-subscription
| architecture. primarily because multiple
| programs can access the same identity
|
| Actually, this was how AP was originally designed as well--it
| was just that the most popular early implementations took
| shortcuts to remove that functionality to fit them into their
| existing architecture. This is a direct consequence of the fact
| that the biggest AP implementations when it was initially
| adopted were descendants of older OStatus social networks, and
| not built to be "ActivityPub-native" from the ground up.
| zenmac wrote:
| Wow thanks for the valuable info. Would you recommend, for
| people who wants to add AP to their existing
| username/password application?
|
| We are currently working on something based on
| https://fedify.dev
|
| Would you consider that can provide more complete AP
| functionality?
| 1dom wrote:
| I mess around with fedify a lot, it's great. It's fun to
| integrate with existing websites.
|
| I've thought a lot about ATProto and integrating it in
| similar ways. I'd love to have a look at what you're doing
| and how. The struggle I have is that I think the ATProto
| repos have a fairly strong cryptographic structure compared
| to AP
|
| If someone requests an object over AP, that object contents
| can come from anywhere easily, and can be signed easy. So
| for me, when someone requests an activitypub object of one
| of my notes via fedify, it just reads the truth from my
| markdown note files and returns it. If I edit my markdown
| files, it's no real issue, the next request gets the latest
| version of that markdown (there's some signing nuances in
| places, but it's generally straightforward)
|
| With ATProto PDS and repositories use things like Merkle
| Search Trees and other things which I assume means the
| backend data needs to be a lot more... consistent. Like the
| data has to live in the PDS, and that has to become the
| source of truth to maintain the merkle structures,
| including updates.
|
| But with AP via fedify, it feels super easy and nice for my
| source of truth to be whatever backend store I like
| (markdown notes).
|
| I've done enough with crypto to see the benefits provided
| by the transparent verifiable history of merkle like
| structures, but honestly, this is social media not cash: I
| don't care if someone wants to subtly change something to
| manage how they come across with their own social media. In
| that respect, I feel the ATProto repositories
| overcomplicate things a bit.
| nightpool wrote:
| I haven't worked with Fedify before, but what I'm talking
| about is the difference between a service that has a
| "translation layer" between their own internal data model
| and ActivityPub, and a server that actually stores full
| ActivityPub object's in the user's inbox and outbox, and
| displays them unchanged to clients. 90% of deployed
| ActivityPub applications--like yours!--are the former, not
| the latter.
|
| A true "ActivityPub server" is almost as simple as a
| Bluesky PDS--all it's responsible for is 1) storing blobs
| of data, 2) fanning out subscriptions and 3) collecting
| incoming data for you to view. In the original way
| ActivityPub was designed, all of the actual data
| presentation layers--Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed--were
| designed to be specialized _clients_ that could communicate
| with the user 's generic server. However, the first popular
| implementations cut out the client-to-server part of the
| protocol, so now we're stuck in a place where everyone
| thinks ActivityPub means you need a separate identity for
| every client application.
|
| So, what I would recommend for your own username/password
| site is implementing an ActivityPub _client_ , and
| recommending that users use it to connect to a third-party
| ActivityPub _server_. That way, the user owns the data, and
| they simply use your service to get access to (filtered
| version of) it.
|
| Unfortunately, since this is a less implemented part of the
| protocol, the client APIs necessary to make this a reality
| haven't seen much development. And you're facing an uphill
| battle for user adoption. In practice, users don't seem to
| mind having separate accounts and identities for different
| clients. It reminds me a bit of the "key management
| problem" in e2e cryptography. Having a stable cryptographic
| identity is doable if you're technically minded, but most
| people just muddle along and don't really care about it
| that much--they create new keys every time they get a new
| laptop instead of trying to figure out cross-signing, and
| everything works itself out more or less fine.
| QuantumFunnel wrote:
| Private likes are the only way forward on social media if
| we're to finally decouple free speech from the vindictive
| outrage mob feedback loop
| frumiousirc wrote:
| > This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the
| same way Twitter or ActivityPub does
|
| I didn't know "private likes" even existed, but if atproto
| includes public key encryption, I could publish a record
| containing a "like" that I have encrypted with the "liked"
| user's public key. Only that user would know what the record
| contained. Though, the fact that the encrypted message exists
| and had a cleartext "@name" is itself informative to
| adversaries. Concealing that level of info would require
| other measures.
| nightpool wrote:
| Correct. All information in the system is part of a public,
| append-only ledger. That's the thing I'm pointing out is a
| fundamental weakness of the system.
| viraptor wrote:
| > primarily because multiple programs can access the same
| identity
|
| Why do you think that's different in ActivityPub? As far as I
| know there's nothing preventing (for example) Mastodon and
| Pixelfed using the same identity.
| 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.
| prisenco wrote:
| I see the features that launched them as substantially
| distinct.
|
| The mode of interaction between users was wildly different
| from one to the other.
|
| You may be considering their convergent evolution not what
| caused their rise in the first place.
| 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.
| kevinak wrote:
| I've heard this multiple times but I don't know what
| clients do that? Most allow you to click something akin to
| the Following tab, just like Twitter, BlueSky, or what not.
|
| Are you asking for an application that does not have other
| kinds of feeds?
| xigoi wrote:
| Unfortunately Bitcoin has strong ties with the planet-
| burning-coin community.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I love your idea of a multi-social RSS reader with P2P
| underpinnings
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| Technically on Bluesky even if you don't own your own domain
| you can _still_ move all your stuff to a competitor and
| everything will still work. The only thing you can 't do is
| keep your original handle but no "links" to your account
| (posts, followers, comments) will be broken because there's a
| stable identifier for your account that's independent of your
| handle. You will still be verifiably the same person on the
| other server.
| 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
| Timwi wrote:
| If you think that there are specific resources, you can just
| post them here. The fact that you didn't, and instead linked
| to a corporate walled garden, is very suspicious.
| danabramov wrote:
| Suspicious of what? What do you expect to find in the
| corporate walled garden of Discord?
| verdverm wrote:
| I posted links in another comment once I was back at a
| computer
| 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.
| isodev wrote:
| So what, the governance is not open and what good is a
| perfectly written engineering spec without the actual place
| where people hang out? It's just a lot of tech jargon masking
| yet-another "let's make someone very rich" scheme.
| danabramov wrote:
| They're actually making first steps to bring it to IETF:
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf
|
| You can be as cynical as you like but I actually tried hard
| to avoid tech jargon in the article. I'd appreciate you
| giving it a read -- happy to answer questions or discuss
| specific concerns.
| 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.
| vermilingua wrote:
| This makes sense but doesn't this imply that displaying
| comments under a post is a _very_ expensive operation?
|
| Also not totally clear to me (apologies if I missed it in the
| post) is _where_ repositories live, I have a bsky account
| with my own domain, but I am not running anything to host a
| repo. Am I correct in assuming that bsky is hosting my repo,
| but I would have the option to self host or move it elsewhere
| and continue using bsky?
| nasso_dev wrote:
| Displaying comments is cheap because the AppView (the
| "cache" layer that consumes the aggregated feed of records
| from the relay) can maintain a relational database of the
| social web/graph.
|
| When it receives a post, it creates a row in the Post
| table. When it receives a comment, it creates a row in the
| Comment table, which has a column pointing to the Post it's
| replying to. Then, getting all comments under a post is
| easy SQL.
|
| About your second question: yes, you're correct. What
| handle you use and where your data is hosted are completely
| separate matters.
| danabramov wrote:
| _> doesn't this imply that displaying comments under a post
| is a very expensive operation?_
|
| It would be expensive if you don't do your own aggregation.
| The recommendation for social atproto apps is to aggregate
| the records you care about into a local database and
| essentially build your app-specific index/cache of the
| network.
|
| Ctrl+F to this part: _"Coincidentally, that's the exact
| mechanism you would use for aggregation. You listen to
| events from all of your app users' repositories, write them
| to a local database, and query that database as much as you
| like with zero extra latency."_.
|
| (One interesting consequence is that indexing the network
| can also be done by someone on your behalf, see
| https://slices.network/ for an upcoming experiment in that
| area.)
|
| _> Also not totally clear to me (apologies if I missed it
| in the post) is where repositories live, I have a bsky
| account with my own domain, but I am not running anything
| to host a repo._
|
| Yeah, Ctrl+F here: _"Note thathttps://alice.com and
| at://alice.com do not need to resolve to the same server.
| This is intentional so that having a nice handle like
| @alice.com doesn't force Alice to host her own data, to
| mess with her website, or even to have a site at all. If
| she owns alice.com, she can point at://alice.com at any
| server."_
|
| You can inspect where at:// points for your handle in an
| online browser like http://pdsls.dev. If you put your
| handle there you'll see the physical server it resolves to
| at the top.
|
| Presumably you signed up from Bluesky so yes, Bluesky is
| hosting your repo by default. You can move it somewhere
| else with no disruption. See
| https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u for how to do
| this from CLI and https://pdsmoover.com/info.html for
| something less technical.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Being able to dump everything into your own repo and let others
| filter it however they want - that's a powerful shift
| 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".
| est wrote:
| well if you think the name is bad, there's also Go, which is
| conveniently typed as Golang.
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| There is a lot of "culture war battlefield" stuff on Bluesky
| too.
| 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).
| yborg wrote:
| It's literally a feature - individual users can set post
| auto-deletion on their instance. Because a government could
| suddenly start firing people from their jobs for some
| shitpost they made a decade ago.
|
| But you have the fact that this is the Internet, and somebody
| will have archived your post no matter what you or your host
| instance does. So you can rest assured that whatever you
| wrote on Mastodon is out there somewhere...
| 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.
| linza wrote:
| I read your reply as the scenario from GP is unlikely to
| happen in practice or has low impact. To me it seems you
| need to make frequent backups of "your" data to have a
| copy of it.
|
| Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to
| not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my"
| data?
| danabramov wrote:
| Ideally, a client app would make these backups for you
| automatically. I hope Bluesky official client will add
| automatic backups (in addition to the existing manual
| export flow that already exists). It's not hard to set it
| up as a GitHub action today if you're technical but
| making it accessible to non-technical users seems
| important.
|
| _> Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity
| to not give one provider exclusive power over access to
| "my" data?_
|
| Not really since there has to be a source of truth where
| the writes happen. I guess you could manually replicate
| changes between multiple servers but there still has to
| be one that applications know to talk to. I'm not sure
| what problem it would solve. This seems similar to "can I
| have multiple deployments of my site" -- you sure can,
| but you might as well deploy it elsewhere when you
| actually plan to point to it.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I personally believe that the chance of Bluesky PBC
| suddenly swapping all of their software to no longer be
| built on atproto to be a very low chance, yes.
|
| There's middle grounds here; for example, due to some
| recent moderation decisions, some users have decided to
| move away from Bluesky PBC-run PDSes and to self hosting.
| Those users did not need to proactively backup to move.
| The proactive backup cases are things like "Bluesky PBC's
| servers disappear suddenly" or "they ban your account."
|
| I don't think you can run multiple PDSes, but since it's
| quick to move the canonical version, I don't see that as
| a huge drawback personally. In the same way you'd
| fallback to the secondary if the primary turns out badly,
| you'd set up a new PDS and point your identity at it.
| nulfrost wrote:
| Regular backups help in this case, you can move all of your
| data to a new host if you have a recent backup somewhere
| and your rotation key. Not really approachable for the
| average user today but there are people working to make
| this easier.
| rossy wrote:
| I don't think being able to migrate your account addresses
| the rugpull concern. The rugpull scenario is that one day, in
| five years or so, bsky.app drops all AT Protocol support and
| transforms into a Twitter-like centralized social media
| website. The problem isn't that the account will stop
| "existing" but that Bluesky users will stop seeing it. The
| average non-techie Bluesky user who doesn't know about the AT
| Protocol won't even notice the change, except that, from
| their perspective, a tiny percentage of nerdy users have
| stopped posting. For you, "migrating" your account away is
| effectively just deleting it from the now-centralized Bluesky
| and willfully decreasing your audience by 100-fold or more.
|
| The problem is a social not a technical one. It doesn't
| matter how good AT Protocol is at account migration. The vast
| majority of AT Protocol users _think_ of themselves as
| Bluesky users and don 't even know what the AT Protocol is.
| If the official Bluesky clients move away from the AT
| Protocol, the majority of users are moving with Bluesky.
|
| For all the UX concerns people have with
| Mastodon/ActivityPub, at least they make it obvious that
| different users are hosted on different instances, and no one
| instance has more to gain than it does to lose by
| defederating.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It is true that there are both social and technical
| components. You cannot force someone to use an app they
| don't want to, so there's no real solution to the social
| problem you pose. However, this isn't any better in
| Mastodon. If you instance decides to swap the software to
| no longer federate, you're stuck.
| 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.
| popcar2 wrote:
| This is very true, and it's a large part of why I never use
| microblogging at all, it's impossible to just find posts that
| fit what you want to see.
|
| That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is
| neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to.
| I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very
| chill.
| viraptor wrote:
| > if you go to literally any mastodon instance it's all
| American politics.
|
| It really depends on who you follow. Almost all the talk I
| see is tagged with #uspol so I could easily filter it out,
| but even without it, it's not the dominating topic.
| est wrote:
| so what we need a de-politics filter by default?
| small_scombrus wrote:
| I feel like I get ${local_country} politics* because I follow
| people from ${local_country} and most the other people I
| follow who do post about US politics tend to spoiler their
| posts with USPOL, so I can just scroll past if I'm not
| feeling it.
|
| * Usually spoilered with "${local_country_code}POL"
| 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
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Even if the information consumers are 99% of the users, making
| the features available for the content creators leads to much
| better content. Plus people want the ability to be able to post
| content if they need to. I shall point to the /r/ask*
| subreddits as an example.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Hacker News doesn't allow you to build an audience, so every
| post has to appeal to the average HN reader to get attention.
| 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
| nulfrost wrote:
| Hm? Which part of the stack requires a lot of resources? Each
| part (PDS, Relay, AppServer (AppView)) can be run on a PI.
| Blacksky (not a large organization by any means and completely
| community funded) is almost running the entire bluesky stack
| themselves. IMO there's not much of a reason to run every part
| of the stack yourself unless you want to be completely
| independent from bluesky. At the very least if you want to host
| your own data then that just means running a PDS, which means
| finding the cheapest VPS you can that fulfills the min spec.
| Mine costs about 7 bucks per month and I never have to think
| about it. I'm also running a relay for no reason other than for
| learning purposes for about 30 bucks a month.
|
| The AppServer, if you want index the full bluesky network (39M
| users) will run you about 200-300 dollars a month. Again, not
| really needed but you can if you want. There's also experiments
| people are trying out to only index smaller parts of the
| network, e.g. only users you follow which would mean hosting an
| AppServer would be even cheaper. FWIW, I like both protocols
| and want them to succeed, anything that gets people off of
| closed social media.
| INTPenis wrote:
| It sounds like the AT protocol is improving in the right
| direction, but the numbers still say it's highly centralized
| and therefore closed social media owned by one monolithic
| entity.
|
| AP has its issues, namely not being at all consistent, but
| that trade-off allows anyone to run all the components of the
| network without breaking their bank.
| danabramov wrote:
| AP is just "many small centralized services that email each
| other". Its scaling characteristics reflect that - of
| course running a "little Twitter for 100 people" is cheap.
| But it's a completely different thing. You could "scale
| down" atproto in the same way, but the point of atproto is
| that you can aim higher than niche islands.
|
| ActivityPub doesn't _attempt_ to solve any of the same
| issues that atproto does -- there's no ability to have a
| full consistent view of the network. So it's comparing
| apples and oranges.
| 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?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here.
|
| Anyone can run a moderation service. Users subscribe to the
| services they want. When you flag a post or account for
| moderation, you choose which service you send the report to.
|
| > How does blocking work?
|
| Blocking works by publishing a "hey I've blocked this person"
| record in your database. Applications then can use this to
| enforce that.
|
| > How do people make sure to distance themselves from political
| enemies?
|
| I'm not sure what this means.
|
| > Do the aggregator cache servers block certain user domains?
|
| They could, and this is also a property that's not really about
| blocking, that is, you could choose to cache only part of the
| network if you choose, which could be useful for various
| reasons.
|
| > How do you ensure that the aggregator returns valid and non-
| forged comments and likes?
|
| Cryptography, basically.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > I'm not sure what this means.
|
| I'm trying to imagine how a situation analogous to Gab vs
| Mastodon may arise and play out here, or if the setup is
| different. Like would they just live side by side, with
| various frontend aggregators that present one or the other
| world to you?
|
| > Cryptography, basically.
|
| How do I, the user with a browser verify that? Do I need to
| use a different client program, or a browser extension? The
| aggregator site can show me a green checkmark or whatever,
| but that's just a claim by the aggregator. Am I expected to
| fire up a terminal window to compute signature validations to
| check if Alice really put a like on that comment?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Ah, I see. Yeah, you could build alternative clients that
| only show you part of the network if you want. Or run your
| own separate copy of the entire network. Because the two
| models work differently, there's not an exact analogy.
|
| You could also use one of the various PDS browser websites
| to go check their PDS, or a terminal tool, sure. I will be
| honest and the details of exactly how the cryptography
| stuff works is not my strongest point when understanding
| the protocol, maybe someone else can chime in and give you
| a more detailed description here.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| Every day I am more convinced that we don't need these global
| conversation platforms at all.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I know this sounds pithy, but why are you here then? Or do you
| think that only other people shouldn't have them?
| poolnoodle wrote:
| I should have been more precise. We don't need microblogging.
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| They will only see the data you post publicly. You know, like
| with a personal website or with any other social media
| platform.
| danabramov wrote:
| This is for public data.
|
| Think Twitter posts, StackOverflow answers, Reddit comments,
| etc. The stuff you don't want companies to gradually start
| locking up for their own gains (as they tend to).
|
| The protocol will likely be extended for private and semi-
| private data in the future, which would work by granting
| explicit permissions to apps. For now, app developers would
| keep private data in databases, same as usual.
| 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
| danabramov wrote:
| Yeah. I was thinking of emphasising RSS as a comparison more
| but didn't end up using it much. But I do like to explain
| atproto as basically typed and signed JSON RSS over HTTP and
| WebSockets.
| rakoo wrote:
| This is a beautifully written introduction to the architecture of
| AT, but after much consideration I will still remain on
| ActivityPub for the time being.
|
| I love the idea to define data formats first, and then build on
| top of that. It's the only way we should do everything, because
| if you have the data, everything can be re-built on top.
| Unfortunately the way AT works is all contained in here:
|
| > Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and
| search are non-negotiable in modern social products. [...]
| Coincidentally, that's the exact mechanism you would use for
| aggregation. You listen to events from all of your app users'
| repositories, write them to a local database, and query that
| database as much as you like with zero extra latency. [...] This
| might remind you of how Google Reader crawls RSS (rip).
|
| In order for the social aspect to work, all data must at some
| point or another be aggregated in a single place. Said single
| place must then be huge, as it scales linearly with the activity
| of the network; in a still-capitalist world this means that this
| single place will always be run and led by money, unless some
| extraordinary volunteers-based project like Wikipedia springs up.
| The example of Google Reader is to the point: it was the biggest
| tech company at the time, provided a service for free, and
| decided to stop because it didn't care anymore.
|
| In fact Google Reader is a very good comparison. AT works exactly
| as if you had websites, each with their own RSS feed, and then a
| big relay called Google, providing search, feeds, notifications,
| ... but as we all know by being the middleman between producers
| and readers Google gained an astonishingly high power. That is
| the business model described by Cory Doctorow when he talks about
| enshittification. Put yourself in the middle, and everyone will
| depend on you.
|
| The only way an AT based product works at scale, ie with everyone
| easily talking to everyone, is with one or a few mega
| intermediaries between everyone of us. I fear this is not going
| to solve any of the issues we have.
|
| What is different in ActivityPub ? Intermediaries are definitely
| useful for some services, but once your network is built you
| don't need them anymore: content flows directly between the
| repository, no middlemen needed.
|
| In short: if we want a single network at large scale, AT requires
| large scale centralization points, while AP certainly needs them
| but could survive without them. Either we face that, or we start
| exploring and living within small-scale networks
| Timwi wrote:
| What I found most exciting while reading this article was the
| promise that you can "up and leave" and take your data with you
| without breaking links, because the links are based on a domain
| name you control.
|
| This is not so in ActivityPub. The data you post is owned
| by/controlled by the instance you're on. In the language of the
| article, you're still a row in somebody else's database.
|
| I was on Mastodon for a while until the instance I was on shut
| down. I naively assumed that I could export and re-import my
| posts but that was not so. Everything is deleted. I technically
| have an archive of it in the form of some JSON files, but as
| illustrated by the article, this is now dead data. The same
| will happen again if/when my current instance shuts down. The
| only way around it is to run my own instance, which for the
| vast majority of people is a ludicrous proposition.
| rakoo wrote:
| If we're talking strictly ActivityPub, they're exactly the
| same: servers where your data lives. AT's PDS give you access
| to your data, but proper AP servers also do that: you have
| your collections, and all your activities in them. The trick
| is to recognize which software is actually a proper
| ActivityPub software, and unfortunately Mastodon isn't one of
| them. The current issue is not with ActivityPub.
| danabramov wrote:
| Well, atproto can scale down too if you're content with a
| subset of data. In other words, it's not that atproto
| _requires_ you to have a full network, it's that it _lets_ you
| build apps over whole network. ActivityPub doesn't offer an
| approach to do that. So we're not comparing apples to oranges.
|
| I do think that you're underestimating the value of open
| network for large-scale aggregation. Yes, for big open world
| you need big indexes. But indexes don't have to always done by
| single entity. Some can be shared. Resources can be pooled for
| apps that need a materialized index of the same data. We
| haven't really seen how this plays out yet because big indexes
| only existed behind the doors so far.
|
| And if all else fails, limiting the scope (by time or
| community) works in atproto too. It's just... not as fun :)
| rakoo wrote:
| The subtext of my comment is that the people doing and
| pushing for atproto are not building for small networks but
| for big networks. Yes, technical solutions can be found; the
| problem is, as usual, not technical but rather social. What
| kind of organization can build and maintain world-scale
| indexes ? What kind of people can be in those organizations ?
| There is very little reason to believe that those
| intermediaries will _not_ behave the same way intermediaries
| have always behaved, if we don 't also challenge the socio-
| economico-political system they are developed in. Which
| developers have an automatic reaction to _not_ do. That 's
| where ActivityPub changes: the social aspect of what it takes
| for viable communities cannot be evaded. Sometimes with bad
| consequences though.
| danabramov wrote:
| I guess I just don't believe that any solution where you
| don't have full view of the network is aligned with what
| normal people want. Maybe AP is on a bigger mission to
| teach people that they're "wanting wrong things" and
| actually you _should_ enjoy a system where everyone sees a
| different like count and half the replies are missing. I
| think it's a dead end.
| rakoo wrote:
| That's a purely personal point of view but I don't think
| the AP people claim that "people want the wrong things",
| but rather that "the things you want have a cost and
| we're not hiding it".
|
| The fact that likes count and half the replies are
| missing is not specific to AP but to implementations not
| willing to actually follow the AP community: in fact the
| SocialHub (https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/)
| community is the place where all coordinated development
| happens, and solutions to those issues have already been
| designed and implemented in multiple softwares, with the
| notable exception of Mastodon. Maybe that's the issue:
| people keep looking at Mastodon to understand AP, but
| Mastodon is one of the worst examples of AP, even when
| talking only about the technical domain. It doesn't
| implement the C2S API, it doesn't have portability, likes
| counts and missing replies as you said, ...
| danabramov wrote:
| Mastodon/AP is difficult to discuss because pointing to
| flaws of Mastodon leads to people saying "it's just a
| Mastodon problem", but AP doesn't by itself specify much
| so it's hard to critique it too. If there's a "flavor" of
| AP that's competitive with what atproto solves (can "walk
| away" without cooperation, can "revive" and "remix" data
| from other apps, can "fork" products with all their
| data), I'd like to read a condensed summary of that
| architecture.
| Kye wrote:
| That's why I always say AP-in-practice. It handily avoids
| any "but the spec says!" diversions.
| zhoukekestar wrote:
| This is all based on the premise that you maintain ownership of
| the DNS. Once you lose control of your domain due to legal issues
| in the relevant country, those references/citations become
| invalid. However, this is still a great improvement over the
| current situation.
| Kye wrote:
| There's still a way:
| https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r
|
| It's one of those in-progress things that will get better and
| easier to use.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| My sibling links a great post on this, but to say it in a
| slightly shorter way, the core of identity is a DID, not a
| domain. You can update the domain associated with your DID if
| you lose control of the DNS and it will all transparently
| update.
| danabramov wrote:
| I've skirted around this in the post to keep conceptual clarity
| but you _can_ always move away from the domain (as a handle)
| without breaking links. This is because there's a more
| persistent identifier that represents your identity (or at
| least there's an option of having one, and that's the default
| mechanism). Links between records actually use that identifier
| instead of the domain handle.
|
| For a more technical overview, see "identity" here:
| https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/
| robertdaniels wrote:
| The AT Protocol's approach to decentralized data repositories is
| excellent for empowering users with greater control, but it also
| creates vulnerabilities to automated abuse, such as bots
| disrupting event streams or fabricating repositories to
| distribute spam. I've integrated Sceptive bl0ck API to access IP
| and behavioral intelligence, which has reduced false positives
| from aggressive crawlers by at least 70% on my setup.
| est wrote:
| I really hope ATProto considered static-hosting by design.
|
| Like RSS, people can host it on github pages, a service would
| poll it periodically to aggregate.
|
| This would lower the barrier of entry by a large margin.
|
| Maybe not all of bsky functions are viable, but I hope certain
| core part of "open social" can happen in this way.
|
| But ATProto chose wss:// isntead.
| Lich wrote:
| What happened to Solid Pod? Tim Berners Lee's project? I feel
| like it's another project of this type, and even predates AT, but
| ever since its announcement hasn't made much waves.
| kyledrake wrote:
| There was this amazing demo I was given at the at proto dev con
| of a working web site using the protocol
| https://danielmangum.com/posts/this-website-is-hosted-on-blu...
|
| It could definitely work as an alternative for the HTTP based
| web.
| bachback wrote:
| DNS is much more foundational and overlooked here. how does the
| world agree that "x.com" resolves the way it does?
| danabramov wrote:
| How is it overlooked? It's mentioned several times, including
| the mention that atproto builds on top of DNS among other
| things.
| parasitid wrote:
| https://solidproject.org/
| geokon wrote:
| the view of social media as just data that can be rehosted i
| think misses a large part of its success
|
| Twitter and Instagram are fundamentally different scenes bc of
| their restricted formats. Twitter has/had character limits.
| Instagram was primary for photo sharing. if you try to cram a
| long political rant in an instagram photo or description.. it is
| fighting against the app format and limitations. This sculpts the
| apps "culture"
|
| im sure it can work, creating a hodge podge of random
| unstructured content.. like the blogosphere or Facebook. But it
| wont displace the walled gardens. You can make a Kiki app that
| only shows images, but youre following someone who is using Booba
| app which allows him to post pictures with descriptions. And
| suddenly nobody really knows what to expect
| xigoi wrote:
| > Twitter has/had character limits. Instagram was primary for
| photo sharing. if you try to cram a long political rant in an
| instagram photo or description.. it is fighting against the app
| format and limitations. This sculpts the apps "culture"
|
| A big part of Twitter's "culture" is creating "threads" to work
| around the character limit, which kind of defeats the point.
| danabramov wrote:
| Designers of atproto actually agree with you so the data is
| _not_ unstructured! It's structured by schemas (called
| "lexicons") controlled by app developers.
|
| Data in user repositories is treated as untrusted input by
| apps, and rejected if it doesn't pass the corresponding schema.
| Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a nudge
| towards future extension (eg open unions are default).
|
| That's exactly why you can't make a 500 character post on
| Bluesky. The Bluesky server will ignore your record as being
| invalid.
| geokon wrote:
| ah okay, i hadnt come across this. seems like a potentially
| viable strategy
|
| > Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a
| nudge towards future extension (eg open unions are default).
|
| unions of schemas? Doesnt that lead to a facebook-ized
| kitchen sink app that does everything?
|
| you can effectivelt filter to .. say .. only photos with a
| photo-only app. But that doesnt form a app/schema culture
| danabramov wrote:
| See here for how schemas are defined:
| https://atproto.com/specs/lexicon
|
| I meant specifically that "unions" default to open. Let me
| give you an example. A Bluesky post may contain different
| types of attachments. Image, gallery, video, etc. That's a
| union of known schemas. However, that union is open. That
| means that generated type will include "or unknown" as the
| last possible value. Apps are expected to ignore that case
| when pattern patching since they wouldn't know how to
| interpret it. However, that leaves Bluesky with ability to
| later officially support other types of attachments.
| Because more potential types could be added to the union
| layer (making some previously "unknown" stuff typed).
|
| This has an interesting consequence that third party
| clients can "recognize" some type before it's official. Eg
| some third party Bluesky client could choose to explicitly
| support a "Leaflet document" attachment to Bluesky posts,
| governed by Leaflet schema. If this pattern gets popular,
| Bluesky could be motivated to also support it, and even to
| reference a Leaflet document as one explicitly noted
| subtype of that union. Or it could keep ignoring it as one
| of the "unknown" values.
|
| More on social issues around lexicons here:
| https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/lexicon-guidance
| darkamaul wrote:
| I'm really impressed by the quality of this post, as others have
| mentioned. It's very well written, and the clarity of the
| drawings adds a lot to the overall explanation.
|
| It perfectly illustrates the old saying: a picture is worth a
| thousand words.
|
| I had never heard of this protocol before (even though I've been
| using Bluesky since the Twitter/X takeover), but after reading
| this, I feel even more confident that the migration was the right
| call.
| suyash wrote:
| I'm curious how did he create those illustrations - by hand or
| AI generated?
| danabramov wrote:
| I've used https://excalidraw.com and exported to SVG. It's
| very nice for quick technical illustrations.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| This is a fine example of technical exposition. Very easy to read
| and understand! Like many others, before this post I hadn't the
| vaguest idea what atproto was; I always assumed it was some
| decentralized thing a la crypto. But this actually makes a lot of
| sense to me and it feels like an objectively good thing.
|
| Except for one thing which has been pointed out by others. Anyone
| can access *all* of my data over this protocol. I like the idea
| that a lot of my data is directly accessible similar to the early
| web. But it would be nice if some of that data was only
| accessible if the accessor was permitted.
|
| I don't really know much about auth tokens but I'm guessing they
| shouldn't be that hard to incorporate into this thing? When
| BlueSky or whatever app queries "@username.com/private/documents"
| the server expects an auth token, whereas it does not when the
| app tries accessing "@username.com/bluesky/posts".
| hirenj wrote:
| I was ruminating about how Atproto would be great for re-
| thinking the peer review system for scientific journals.
|
| Imagine a world where a preprint is "published" onto the social
| web, from which you could aggregate reviews/comments. I
| eventually ended up thinking about exactly what you raise - it
| would be great to have some degree of access control on this so
| both comments and published things can be selectively shared
| (with an option to make everything public later on, maintaining
| all the links).
| danabramov wrote:
| Yes, something like this is planned in longer term.
|
| The team decided to tackle public data first because scaling
| aggregation while preserving meaningful ownership is hard. So
| far I think they've succeeded at that.
|
| Private or semi-private comes with a set of different
| challenges. Indeed scoped tokens are coming (via OAuth scopes)
| but that's used for writes. The same mechanism could be
| extended for private reads in the future, like you describe.
| There's questions about what shape private data would have
| though.
|
| See https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhmtognls2q and
| https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b for recent thoughts
| on this topic from Paul who works on atproto.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It doesn't matter who controls social media; federated or not,
| social media is inherently harmful to humans. In a few years we
| will find out it's like cigarettes. Addictive and harmful, and
| needs regulation, if not outright bans.
|
| But going back to this obsession about data. It's really an
| obsession with control. But none of you really have control. You
| hope that you can "engineer" your way into control of your own
| lives, of your data, even of the way the world works. But
| engineers do not have power. Businessmen do. Until you realize
| that, you will continue writing technical specifications like
| this, making micro-communities, and missing the big picture.
| Control requires power. Power requires money. If you can't
| monetize it, you have no control.
|
| Whatever federated thing you think is going to win, isn't going
| to win, if there isn't enough money to back it. Because someone
| with money will just make the biggest "federated thing" (or not;
| it could be completely proprietary and billions of people will
| still use it), and eventually close it off once they have enough
| users. You cannot engineer your way out of money, politics, or
| human nature.
| danabramov wrote:
| I tried to make the case that the design of web itself creates
| different dynamics than the design of today's social networks
| in a demonstrable way (walking away from hosting is still easy
| so it became commodified). I get your pessimism but I wonder
| how you'd engage with that argument. I think it shows the shape
| of the thing actually matters.
| Kye wrote:
| Anisota is one of the more interesting attempts at a new
| presentation:
|
| https://anisota.net/profile/dame.is
| hollowonepl wrote:
| I think it would be better articulated if comparisons to
| ActivityPub were made. Those are I believe two competing visions
| of Open Social defined as communication protocol, not a platform.
| Otherwise it just sounds like evangelizing employer and that
| compromises the whole "open" concept of the article, fairly.
| lowkeyokay wrote:
| The author surely knows about competing protocols but prefers
| at. It would be just as easy to argue the author is biased if a
| comparison was made. Maybe more informative though.
| danabramov wrote:
| I thought about covering others at first but it ended up
| distracting from the point I wanted to make. I tried to make
| a strong case for this particular vision in this article. I
| could write something separate as a comparison, or maybe let
| other voices speak for their thing.
|
| In short, I don't think ActivityPub solves any of the stated
| problems (ability to walk away without cooperation; forking
| products; giving new life to old data). In that sense it
| doesn't mirror "open source but for data" and doesn't match
| the premise of my post.
| hollowonepl wrote:
| I don't believe anybody else can do it with good start
| you've made. I think above is nice headline for some more
| complete assessment as a follow-up article. indeed!
| wsve wrote:
| The author is talking about _owning_ a domain and how having that
| domain gives you _ownership_ over your data... But I can 't but
| think that, at least in the US, domain names are _rented_ from
| _private_ Internet service providers. There is no ownership
| involved. One way or another, we are still paying a company.
|
| The assumption of the article is that ISPs are stable and net
| neutral enough that one would not worry about the ISP going under
| or seeking some personal vendetta against you and booting your
| domain. A separate entity may no longer be hosting our data, but
| a private entity is the gatekeeper of whether anyone is able to
| _see_ your data.
|
| All that to say, if we want true _ownership_ of domains, ISPs
| need to be a nationalized, democratized service.
| infinitifall wrote:
| There are clearnet websites for flat earthers, anti-vaxxers,
| cults, hacker groups, classified document leakers, nazi groups
| and terrorist organisations. Finding a registrar that lets you
| say what you want is a solved problem.
| a2128 wrote:
| Currently most people publish stuff on big platforms so
| governments, activists and billionaires will go after these
| platforms to influence or control what's being talked about.
| I worry that if we never had big platforms, or we moved past
| them, all of the focus would be on going after registrars and
| hosts instead. It's not a bulletproof system unfortunately
| gr__or wrote:
| While I agree with the sentiment, I think it confuses ISPs with
| registrars. There are still many ISPs that do that service as
| well, it's less common than it used to be.
|
| It is quite common for national TLDs (like .de, .jp or .cn) to
| be managed by not-for-profit entities, under contract with
| their respective governments... which might also not be great
| wrt censorship.
|
| There is also the general issue of equal access, where shorter,
| more memorable domains get more expensive and hodling domain
| names is only disincentivized for people without enough funds.
| I would very much like to see an alternative system to domain
| names, probably something more in the web of trust space.
| nairboon wrote:
| There are alternatives to DNS, like GNS (GNU Name System):
| https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Opennic too, they even allow you to host your own tld.
|
| https://opennic.org/
|
| It's getting harder to change DNS settings on Windows, even
| systemd makes it a PITA to update DNS entries.
| ryangibb wrote:
| The difficulty with the GNS is getting the public keys that
| enable the decentralisation. Key signing parties seem to have
| their limits.
|
| There's a bunch of alternative DNS roots out there, that are
| similarly hierarchical, but really interesting: https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root#Implement...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Or, at the risk of saying the unpopular thing, Ethereum Name
| Service? (ENS) This sort of thing is pretty much exactly what
| ENS is for.
| rambambram wrote:
| The most safe way to accomplish what you want is using postal
| pigeons, made stealthy with black spray paint.
|
| All jokes aside, an educated guess on what to trust (or not) is
| necessary. Otherwise you wind up on a slippery slope that goes
| in circles and always results in 'we need more laws'.
|
| Long way to say that I think 'owning' a domain name and
| publishing on there is way better than the silos we're
| accustomed to nowadays. The open web never stopped working as
| intended, the genie is out of the bottle for 30+ years yet,
| make use of it if you want.
| nenenejej wrote:
| Easy. Trust cryptography. I generate a private key and sign
| everything as me. This takes out all the BS. Of course you
| cant age verify and anonymous accounts and spam become easy.
| But that is your trade-off. Nostr allows relays to filter out
| shit they dont like. So you can have your 4chan but also your
| more moderated sites too.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I think the article's argument is more about relative control
| than absolute sovereignty
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Governments can and do censor domains. A theoretically
| censorship-proof system is impossible; even communication over
| bluetooth or radio can be shut down by signal jamming and
| physical persecution.
|
| Also, you technically "own" your data on any social network. If
| you put a public key in your bio and archive every post, you
| can move to another network. Then use friends and close
| followers to broadcast your new location; those who care will
| probably find you without much effort, but if not, Open Social
| doesn't solve this problem either.
|
| However, I still think Open Social is an improvement. Most
| social networks are really bad these days: manipulated
| engagement-driven algorithms, locked-down data accessible via
| poor UI, toxic community, and inconsistently-applied unspoken
| rules. These issues all have workarounds, and can still happen
| on Open Social (BlueSky's community is toxic, I don't know if
| its algorithm is gamed or its global moderation is reasonable).
| But it certainly makes them harder to form and easier to avoid:
|
| - If everyone's data is available raw via API, it's easier to
| create your own algorithm and frontend (or realistically, use
| someone else's which is better designed and more suited to you
| personally than what a generic social media company would make)
|
| - With all data available, it's more likely people will develop
| better algorithms to filter out toxicity and discover
| interesting posts. At minimum, it's more acceptable and easier
| to create whitelisted groups, where one person maintains an
| "algorithm" that simply selects posts they (and others who are
| granted invites) have determined are not trolls.
|
| - If data access and ban lists are separate, the same network
| can have multiple ban-lists, so being banned isn't "all or
| nothing". You can choose a ban-list with rules you agree with
| and continue to see posts that most others would prefer banned.
| If no ban list is dominant, there's a good chance the rules
| that the ban-lists share are reasonable; you can worry less
| about being banned inconsistently or for a widely-considered
| unfair reason (e.g. upsetting a specific moderator), because in
| those cases you'll only be banned from one list.
|
| - If having a public key and archive of your data is the
| default, and your followers' frontends automatically recognize
| the key and find your new domain/hub (e.g. if someone links it
| to the old hub), it's easier to move. If BlueSky shuts down
| tomorrow, some clients can just be updated to point to another
| domain with all the data and continue working as if nothing
| changed. Whereas if Reddit shuts down, in theory one can
| develop a clone from scratch and populate it with the archived
| data, but users would have to re-register and it would be a
| huge mess (+ legal issues).
| danabramov wrote:
| _> The author is talking about owning a domain and how having
| that domain gives you ownership over your data_
|
| I've actually tried to separate the two in the article although
| it might be subtle (because I didn't want to make it
| confusing).
|
| Owning a domain means you own your _handle_. Not data. In
| atproto, a domain is just a handle -- you can swap it out
| without breaking links. (This relies on a centralized auditable
| repository which is currently being moved out of Bluesky as a
| separate independent entity. If you don 't want to rely on
| that, yes, you'd have to tie your identity to the domain.)
|
| Owning "data" is not related to owning the domain per se. It
| has to do with the fact that you can point your identity at a
| different physical server over time without breaking links. So
| your hosting doesn't have any real leverage over you. That's
| what I mean by meaningful ownership.
|
| I've sort of conflated domains and persistent identity in the
| article to simplify the picture a bit. Your identity is not
| tied to a domain, but a domain serves as a bidirectionally
| verified user-friendly alias for it. If you lose control over
| the domain, you can tie a different one to the same identity
| later. This doesn't break links between records or
| functionality.
| wilt6269 wrote:
| I can't help but cringe whenever I see a Bluesky fan stubbornly
| clinging to the past by calling X 'Twitter.' This one went even
| further - using the old logo and even the outdated URL.
| dave1010uk wrote:
| That was an example of a social media company changing, with
| users not being able to migrate their data. Scroll a bit
| further and you'll see X.
| danabramov wrote:
| My post retraces a historical progression of social media, and
| it was indeed called "Twitter" at the time. You can scroll a
| bit down and you'll see "X" a bit below. In general, actually
| reading the articles you comment on won't hurt you.
| utopiah wrote:
| Any implementation if I don't care? Like if I want my Web
| application to support either ATProto, AP, and eventually
| whatever else is around the corner even if it means only have the
| lowest common denominator?
| danabramov wrote:
| If you just care about the identity part, atproto uses a flavor
| of oauth.
| utopiah wrote:
| Thanks. Well that's a good question, namely what do I
| actually expect out of federation.
|
| In my case it's to remix pedagogical exercises. So I need :
|
| - actual content (e.g. exercise and assets) to remix (imagine
| changing the language)
|
| but also optionally
|
| - author ID for attribution - a stable URL for provenance,
| again from attribution but possibly metadata (e.g. how many
| times played on origin server, language, etc)
| cy6erlion wrote:
| Great post. Why use Social Media when you can use your own blog
| with RSS. I think it's because of Network effects, Social Media
| gives you an identity/address within a social network that has
| demand for your posts and a supply of posts that interests you.
| The Social Network itself should be vybrant for strong Network
| Effects to take place, this is inherently centralizing sorta like
| super markets. Thus the idea of Decentralization and Social Media
| don't go well together.
|
| Decentralization is also more complex for the developers and
| particularly for the users, this creates a market for people
| offering services to operate decentralized systems, which ends up
| centralizing the network. This is how the WWW, Email, Git, BTC
| all got more and more centralized.
| vollbrecht wrote:
| What would in practice happen in a two user scenario where user A
| replied to user B, and later user B's repository gets completely
| deleted.
|
| We have this cache thing via wss connections. Do they invalidate
| this messages from user B? Is user's A worldview now completely
| dead?
|
| Owning a thing in the internet is a complicated topic i guess.
|
| Preserving past information via copying what a user said so that
| it does not get lost maybe also in the interest of some users
| (equivalent to the webarchive). I understand that this contradict
| the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it
| was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?
|
| Whatever content is produced in this "open social" network, some
| of it may have long lasting "value" to an individual. Is there
| anything to make sure that what they interacted with can not
| completely broken by the other site of the party?
| danabramov wrote:
| If the user _chooses_ to delete their account, it is a separate
| event on the network, which well-behaved apps should respect
| (and update their caches accordingly). So an app like Bluesky
| would display this as a reply to a deleted post.
|
| If the user's repo just goes down (e.g. the host is down), then
| indeed it won't be available upstream and only cached versions
| will remain. It might be that the user is having problems, and
| the repository will be up on a different host later. It's up to
| each application how to handle this, but it seems reasonable to
| keep serving cached content since there was no explicit
| deletion instruction. E.g. I presume Bluesky would keep showing
| both replies in the conversation.
|
| _> I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your
| data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first
| place the thing always can be copied right?_
|
| Yeah this is a tricky thing. The general guideline is that the
| user expresses intent (e.g. can delete post or entire repo) and
| well-behaved apps respect that intent. But of course there can
| be non-well-behaved apps that don't, or that permanently
| archive everything ever emitted.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| "Open source has clearly won." is this a joke?
| danabramov wrote:
| Dominant programming languages, servers, package managers, UI
| libraries and components, and much development tooling (IDEs,
| language servers) is largely open source. This wasn't the case
| when I started programming.
| js8 wrote:
| The thing I miss the most in social networks is the ability to
| verify the provenance of information through social graph (chain
| of trust).
|
| Ideally, if I see a post or comment, a process that I control
| should be able to establish whether the user is trustworthy, by
| asking the intermediate nodes whether the next hop is
| trustworthy. Essentially, I should be able to walk that chain of
| trust to see whether the information comes from a trustworthy
| source (and possibly input user's own evaluation of the chain
| links and nodes).
|
| Unfortunately, social media companies do not let users access the
| social graph, because not being able to ascertain provenance of
| information is what makes paid advertising possible. It would
| also greatly help to combat bots.
| Kye wrote:
| The social graph, at least in Bluesky's own collection[0], is
| made up of the sum of follow records in individual repositories
| on PDSes. Anyone can enumerate them.
|
| [0] A collection is basically an app's particular set of
| records stored in a user's PDS repository. Here's an example
| using the Bluesky CTO's follow records:
| https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:ragtjsm2j2vknwkz3zp4oxrd/app....
|
| These are summed up by Bluesky's app server (app view) and then
| used to fill out following lists in apps that connect to that
| server through its API.
|
| A fact checking or web of trust tool could pull these records
| down and use it for exactly this purpose. It could even weight
| by who they repost, for example.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| It captures something that I think a lot of us in tech have been
| feeling but haven't quite articulated: that the social web feels
| increasingly rented, and the rent keeps going up
| ronbenton wrote:
| We'd be lucky if the rent was paid in dollars but, instead,
| it's paid in psychological manipulation
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Psychological manipulation is only being performed because it
| generates dollars.
| ronbenton wrote:
| Correct
| strgcmc wrote:
| True of course that dollars is the end goal, but frankly
| it'd be better if they just took the dollars out of my
| pocket directly, instead of poisoning my brain first so
| that they can trick me into giving some dollars...
|
| Obviously I'm being hyperbolic, but I think eventually if
| society survives past this phase, our descendants will look
| back and judge us for letting psychological manipulation be
| a valid economic process as a way to generate dollars, in
| much the same way we might judge our ancestors for ever
| building up a whole industry to hunt whales for oil for
| fuel (meaning, they might acknowledge that fuel is
| important and necessary to power an industrializing
| society, but they would mock us for not understanding how
| to refine petroleum sooner, and how silly going through the
| tech tree of fucking whale hunting is, just to get some
| fuel).
|
| It is fucking silly/absurd/dangerous, that we go through
| the tech tree branch of psychological manipulation, just to
| be able to sell some ads or whatever.
| vvpan wrote:
| Check out Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, he really
| expands on the idea of web being mostly rent-seeking and not
| productive.
| mountainriver wrote:
| The protocol is cool, but Bluesky continues to trend downward. My
| experience on it wasn't positive.
|
| It could be interesting to see what other apps may be born out of
| the protocol though!
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
|
| Yes, down in every measure over the last 6 months. I think it's
| primarily used by a lot of people to organize sockpuppet-aided
| raids on twitter towards people who are instantly banned by
| mass-reporting the second they create an account on bluesky.
| It's basically old 4chan for unfunny people who think they're
| better than everybody else.
|
| I'd be positive about any distributed social protocol, though,
| no matter who delivered it. The problem is that this was a
| Dorsey project that he already abandoned and denounced because
| it took a bunch of VC and is just waiting for the rugpull. Now
| you're supposed to trust a bunch of people you never heard of
| and a few famous paid evangelists.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Very well done. I hope this happens soon. I'm an engineer but not
| the software kind and I will look into this area more closely and
| try to support it. Thank you.
| dark_mode wrote:
| Awesome read!
|
| Question:
|
| > What's more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar
| based on my Bluesky profile. It didn't need to hit the Bluesky
| API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my
| repository.
|
| I'm a bit confused by this. If a bluesky avatar contains an
| image, isn't that stored (at least by default) within bluesky?
| Meaning that Tangled will have to hit the Bluesky API?
|
| Or maybe Dan is saying that his own repository is not hosted with
| Bluesky in which it would make sense, if wherever his repo is
| stored is getting hit to retrieve the image.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The "Bluesky API" is the appview, but the avatar is stored in
| your PDS. Even if you're using a PDS hosted by Bluesky, it's a
| different component that's being asked to serve the avatar.
| dark_mode wrote:
| Interesting. Ok just saw this https://github.com/bluesky-
| social/pds
|
| > Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal
| Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider
| ATProto network.
|
| So pds (personal data server) is like the container where you
| chose to store the data and it follows a certain standard.
|
| If the container is hosted is bluesky, i still consider it a
| "bluesky api" but I understand the nuance better now.
| Infernal wrote:
| If I understand correctly it doesn't matter where the user's
| profile is hosted, the point is the user has a store of data
| that can be accessed by multiple apps via the AT protocol, only
| naming convention separates one app's data from another's
| within a given user's profile.
| dark_mode wrote:
| Yeah I understood that part, was just confused by this
| particular sentence
| paool wrote:
| What is the incentive of someone to create an app and just pay
| for all the hosting involved?
|
| Also, does everyone need to have their own domain name in order
| to have an identity cuz that seems like a non-starter.
| dark_mode wrote:
| > What is the incentive of someone to create an app and just
| pay for all the hosting involved?
|
| If you're creating a social app, website, or whatever, you
| still have to host all your users' data regardless. This is
| just about the protocol you use which enables universal
| compatibility, meaning users have the choice to store
| elsewhere.
|
| > Also, does everyone need to have their own domain name in
| order to have an identity cuz that seems like a non-starter.
|
| Not really. Bluesky is a good example; when you first sign up
| it does it for you under their own top domain by default iirc,
| but the great thing is you can actually use your own domain.
| dark_mode wrote:
| I wonder if there's a at protocol usecase for replacing something
| like Disqus in blogs, personal websites etc.
| tomgag wrote:
| Personal opinion: Bluesky is "fedi-washing". Better Mastodon or
| Nostr.
|
| https://gagliardoni.net/#20250818_battle_of_socials
| dark_mode wrote:
| I like the skepticism against Bluesky, and I agree that where
| VC money is involved things are mostly sketchy.
|
| However, this post was about the at protocol, which seems like
| you just hand-waved in one sentence:
|
| > The AT Protocol used by Bluesky has some interesting
| features, although to be honest I don't know how many of these
| are just impossible to achieve on ActivityPub or are just WIP
| lagging behind due to funding constraints.
|
| I don't think the debate between them is super useful because
| their architectures are very different.
|
| You also mentioned an issue with the bluesky relay, but others
| already exist so it's not techincally tied to Bluesky. Heck, I
| think the fact multiple can exist at the same, while degrades
| the social aspect, still makes it decentralized.
|
| As for the identity management issue, they announced just last
| week that it's getting branched to an independent entity:
| https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org
| tomgag wrote:
| > I don't think the debate between them is super useful
| because their architectures are very different.
|
| Sure, that's true, but I, personally, care mostly about one
| question: Who holds the keys to the kingdom? In this respect,
| I think the AT Protocol fails spectacularly, mainly due to
| the lack of a credible strategy to implement really self-
| custodian identities.
|
| > You also mentioned an issue with the bluesky relay, but
| others already exist so it's not techincally tied to Bluesky.
| Heck, I think the fact multiple can exist at the same, while
| degrades the social aspect, still makes it decentralized.
|
| Yes, but this is also true for Nostr, Diaspora, Mastodon,
| etc. The difference being, last time I checked (and of course
| things might have changed in the meantime) with AT Protocol
| it was only possible to self-host part of the infrastructure
| (and hosting the relay is insanely demanding).
|
| > As for the identity management issue, they announced just
| last week that it's getting branched to an independent
| entity: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org
|
| This is another example of gaslighting from Bluesky that just
| makes me angry. How in the holiest of Hells does an "Identity
| directory controlled by a Swiss Association" make the whole
| thing better?
|
| Sorry, not buying it. I don't have a horse in the race, but
| won't fall for the marketing.
| tneely wrote:
| I've always thought it would be interesting to apply this sort of
| approach to health data. I own my data and control where it's
| stored and how it's accessed. And hospitals anywhere can interact
| with my data as needed while labs, doctors notes, etc. all live
| with the hospitals.
| zumu wrote:
| I've been on and off thinking about this problem for years. Very
| excited to see an ecosystem popping up.
|
| But I wonder, why JSON if the web is already built on HTML
| documents? Is it possible to just store our data in a web of
| authenticated html documents and have the protocol be built on
| that? Are there other open standards we can leverage to reduce
| the amount of new infra / protocols? I wonder if there's a less
| complex "good enough" mvp version.
| fogzen wrote:
| AT seems cool -- but it's not built on the web. That's a
| dealbreaker for me.
|
| I can't link to a Bluesky post. I can't use Bluesky from the
| browser. It's a silo'd network.
|
| The indie web has the right idea: Use the web, build ontop of
| blogs, degrade gracefully. We could have central aggregators just
| like Bluesky crawling the web with microformats.
|
| The polished experience with Bluesky has little to do with the
| tech and everything to do with financing and talent. Give me
| millions of dollars in grants and I'm sure I can build a polished
| UX too.
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