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The AT Protocol

atproto.com

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Re: The AT Protocol

#101

Post by _abox »

gojomo wrote: post #95
dchnshA wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I have seen so far it is different for the sake of being different, not because they found a better way.

Two of the three pillars highlighted on the atproto.com homepage – portable accounts, and algorithmic choice – would require significant retrofitting counter to ActivityPub server customs to achieve. (And the third, "federated social", is arguably an area that at-proto is erring by staying too close to the ActivityPub approach. We know what happens to 'federated' systems under network-economics: they trend toward sem…

But the fediverse doesn't use any algorithms, it just shows you what/who you subscribe to. This is the way social media should be. If I don't want to see something or someone I can just block them.

It's only gone downhill since the sites started adding algorithmic crap and filtering things out to increase 'engagement'. This made facebook totally useless for me to keep in touch with my friends.

Portable accounts are indeed important and a big thing missing from ActivityPub, I agree there.

But I'm completely over to IM now to keep in touch with friends. Social Media has invalidated its own usecase for me.

Re: The AT Protocol

#102

Post by GekkePrutser »

RF_Savage wrote: post #83

An unfortunate name collision. I thought this was some historical article about AT-commands used to command old phoneline modems. But also appropriated to control modern GSM and LTE chipsets, SCADA radio modems and who knows what else. I hope my search results won't get polluted with this too badly.

Indeed, the Hayes commandset. This is what I expected too, which is why I didn't open this article until I heard about this in the news elsewhere.

It's pretty exclusively in the domain of embedded development now though.

Re: The AT Protocol

#103

Post by miloignis »

adenozine wrote: post #99
miloignis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that quality on the fediverse is quite high, but takes curation and exploration to find people you want to follow. Once you have a good seed of people, it grows pretty organically as you follow people with interesting posts boosted by people you do follow. It's the only social network that I've actually stuck with and enjoy, having tried and fallen of both twitter and facebook. A big part of that was unfol…

I understand that some people gain some sort of satisfaction out of this, but it mostly defeats the purpose for the average user. Imagine you walk into a bar, and it’s clearly filled with neonazis. Someone says to you, “Hey! This is a great bar. You’ll have to curate your friends in here, but once you do you’ll find some great folks.” It’s just silly to think the average person is even remotely interested in that. I’…

I strongly disagree with the analogy - it's much more like welcome to the big city! Where all would you like to hang out and make friends? The park? The sports bar? Sex club? Political rally? Neonazi hangout? Anarchist collective? In the analogy each place is a different instance that you start following people on, with its own culture and interests.

I've not run across any neonazis that I'm aware of, I believe they tend to be blocked by most servers pretty quickly, though one could seek instances filled with them if they wish. I could see that if you were seeking political discussion the Fediverse might be less attractive, since I imagine it would tend to be more extreme (right and left).

Re: The AT Protocol

#104

Post by onqtam »

qualudeheart wrote: post #58
wmf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

Bullish that Dorsey is involved. Dorsey as a high status rich guy could attract lots of users and developers. He’ll also kill activitypub as AT protocol will soon be much better funded with more developers.

he was involved. But now he's doing his own thing which anchors to bitcoin & uses the ION network:

https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsf...

https://twitter.com/namcios/status/1535302090360250368

Re: The AT Protocol

#105

Post by topranks »

pfraze wrote: post #48
jonhohle wrote: post #44

I’ve not gotten fully through the spec, but why does the server hold the client’s signing key? That puts a lot of responsibility on a PDS that could be handled by the client, doesn’t it? If the client has their complete repo anyway, why can’t the PDS verify changes with a public key? If it’s to aggregate likes, comments, etc., why not use a mailbox encrypted with the public key for unmerged data and allow the DID to…

Basically -- to keep it simple. Holding the signing key in the PDS simplifies linearization and reduces device-pairing actions. We spent most of the summer planning to store the signing key in the user device(s) but during a late design session we examined why exactly we wanted that, and realized the main reason was for account portability^1. Thing is, we dont need the primary signing key to be local for account port…

Is this a typo then?

This is to be used in adversarial situations in which a user's signingKey leaks or is being held by some custodian who turns out to be a bad actor.

In a situation such as this, the signingKey may be used to rotate both the signingKey and recoveryKey.

From: https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#account-recovery

Seems to suggest the signing key is all that’s needed to change the keys for a user? I was expecting it to say the recovery key could be used for that (which only I have).

Re: The AT Protocol

#106

Post by topranks »

gargron wrote: post #78
pfraze wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root gets updated with each update, and the diff gets exchanged as part of the sync protocol. Deleting and purging is no different than other federated protocols in that regard.

Rewriting the user's entire database on each delete sounds like it might become a problem. Especially as some users like to automatically delete old posts on a regular basis.

It’s literally the dumbest idea ever.

Why use a merkle tree if you need to give users the ability to remove stuff?

Just store it in some other struct and have each message signed by the user. Let them add and remove messages at will.

Re: The AT Protocol

#107

Post by cxr »

gargron wrote: post #76
pfraze wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're open to that possibility. We know the broad idea we want to apply with schema extensions, but we're still figuring out the right DX on the execution.

You're about to reinvent JSON-LD.

This isn't unfamiliar territory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117583>

https://web.archive.org/web/20190606173136/https://pfrazee.h...>

Re: The AT Protocol

#108

Post by palata »

dchnshA wrote: post #86
pie_flavor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The specification may be terrible, and everything good about it may be implementation-specific, and every touted feature you're looking for may be missing from the only implementations anyone uses, but you can always just break compatibility from all the de facto standards, and so that's no reason to come up with your own base standard' seems flatly wrong, and that actually is a pretty great reason to come up with y…

> The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter? I never was on Twitter, but I am a Mastodon and Pixelfed user. I have zero interest in the cesspool that is Twitter joining the Fediverse and if they did I would probably instance block them. This is about standards and my suspicion, that they want to keep all the control an…

Well there is an IRCv3, so it is evolving. And honestly Slack/Discord don't bring that much IMO, at least for the cost of running on a damn ElectronJS app in a proprietary system. All that for what? Reactions to messages?

The fact is that average users don't make any considerations about privacy/freedom/technical merit: they just jump on whatever is used by their own contacts. Nobody is using Mastodon because nobody is using Mastodon. It feels like one solution to that would be marketing. And given who is behind ATProto, they may have a shot at convincing many people to use their new shiny app.

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