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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

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Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#131

Post by pxoe »

epicsponge wrote: post #66
iptq wrote: post #56

It seems to me that a lot of the problems discussed in this thread (it's using a new protocol that doesn't work with existing tools, it uses crypto, handles auth in the protocol, server can goes down) are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something complete…

> are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something completely different. AtProto is designed to be a federated protocol. The issue I have is that it is not interoperable with the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub. You can b…

this seeming belief that activitypub - or rather, mastodon - is be-all end-all and the only thing that anybody should be concerned with and cater to, is kinda off-putting

personally I hope it doesn't actually become "the one thing" with how opinionated and callous it is about some features

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#133

Post by doctor_eval »

tazjin wrote: post #102
renahlee wrote: post #59

There was no reason for that toot to be that aggressive :(

The tone of that whole thread in combination with posts like > Imagine if I had to store the 50k+ tweets I've made on Twitter on my device, and upload ALL of them to a new server whenever a community server went down. doesn't make this person seem particularly competent. I'm getting a vague feeling that this is normal discourse on Mastodon though, and that not using social media much shifts your personal overton wind…

Yea I was like, 50K tweets converted to bytes is like… well it’s one second to upload on my home internet connection.

After that, it just felt like rant.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#135

Post by thepostman0 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

It's not that bad. ATZ and ATDT are the main two you have to remember. Wait, is that not what we're talking about? So, it has a confusing name too?

It's not bad when considering they needed to not get in the way too much with 300 baud and less and work from human input.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#136

Post by vidarh »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

The recovery key bit is the one part I actually like.

But improving on the ActivityPub user migration store is also a minor/trivial change away from doing much better than today: you just need to change ActivityPub Ids to either fully a contentadressable hash or referencing a base that is under user control, plus a revocation key style mechanism for letting the user sign claims about their identity in order to allow unilateral moves.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#137

Post by romeoblade »

tsuujin wrote: post #94
epicsponge wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

I think it’s important to say this: I think asking questions is great, and I’m glad that we’re not just taking statements at face value because making social suck less is a worthy goal. However, you are coming across as highly adversarial here. Mostly because you immediately follow your questions with assertions, indicating that your questions may be rhetorical rather than genuine. I’m not accusing you of anything pe…

I agree, thank you for stating that in a respectful way.

The linked article/toot and certain replies seriously makes me want to just shutdown my personal mastodon server and move on from the technology altogether.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#138

Post by chrismorgan »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on top of it in order to fix the authenticity problem.

On the contrary, email has no solution to the authenticity problem that’s being talked about. Even what there is is a right mess and not even slightly how you would choose to build such a thing deliberately.

If you want to verify authenticity via SPF/DKIM/DMARC, you have to query DNS on the sender’s domain name. This works to verify at the time you receive the email, but doesn’t work persistently: in the future those records may have changed (and regular DKIM key rotation is even strongly encouraged and widely practised).

What you are replying to says that AT wants to be able to determine authenticity without polling the home server, and establish whether a record has been deleted. Email has nothing like either of those features.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#140

Post by wink »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low.

Everything else aside, this is completely untrue.

I self-hosted my first fediverse account on Mastodon and got fed up with the complexity of it for a single person instance and shut it off one day (2018 or so?).

On another account at some point 50% of my followed people vanished because 2 servers where everyone in that bubble were on just went offline. Took a while to recreate the list manually.

This may be anecdotal but I've seen it happen very often. Also people on small instances blocking mastodon.social for its mod policies comes close to this experience.

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