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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

#181

Post by afiori »

groestl wrote: post #139
afiori wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rebasing is how the AT protocol handles deleting posts

That's.. interesting.

It must be noted that in the context of the AT protocol the "file tree" is (likely) mostly append only, flat, and with globally unique ids, that is because the commits are not for files but for database entries.

If I am correct then conflicts are impossible and you are the only one that can write to your* "branch"

* I doubt that forking and merging are possible so it does not really have any practical UX relations to git rebase.

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

#182

Post by vidarh »

barnabee wrote: post #156
epicsponge wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As far as I can tell ActivityPub is (at least part of) the problem. If it’s not, then Mastodon is simply not trying to be a “Twitter replacement” or a useful global social network at all. The only worse idea than Bluesky using ActivityPub would be to build something new making all the same design decisions. Deciding “ActivityPub is the standard” (seriously?!) and demanding we give up already is the opposite of what w…

Fediverse posts are signed with public key crypto (e.g. I'm looking at signatures for my post literally in the window next to my browser right now). It could use a multi-sig model so you'd be able to unilaterally prove claims about your posts, but that's not an ActivityPub limitation or issue. If you want to store it locally first, the only thing stopping you currently is that current servers are clunky, not the protocol. You don't give much detail of the specifics of why you think the protocol is the problem, so I can't address much more than that.

ActivityPub is very generic; it can accommodate all kinds of changes. E.g. if you want to introduce activity / object types that have improvements over what Mastodon supports, you can do so. If you want to introduce vocabulary within existing object types that Mastodon wouldn't understand, you can do so without breaking federation with Mastodon or other Fediverse servers. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to anyone who decided to extend ActivityPub.

The minimum viable subset of ActivityPub is largely: Provide an endpoint that returns an Actor with a list of the required endpoints (inbox, outbox, follower, following etc.) - the spec requires a list of them, but you don't even need all of them for basic interop - and handle POST's to your announced inbox, and GET requests to the outbox. Add unique URL's as "id" fields in the JSON, and support GET to them. Follow the format of the JSON to provide at least the minimum set of fields to address the activity, provide a type, and provide the minimum fields for the given type.

For interop w/Mastodon you'd want to support Webfinger to find the Actor. Nothing stops you from also supporting other mechanisms, like BlueSky's domain validation.

Nothing stops you from supporting additional federation mechanisms. Nothing stops you from providing additional fields. Nothing stops you from storing data locally. Nothing stops you from adding additional ways of signing claims about individual objects or a whole repository of objects. Nothing stops you from providing additional mechanisms for distributed lookup of objects by id. Many of those things would be welcome if people wanted to do it on top of ActivityPub.

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

#183

Post by sgtnoodle »

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…

Not having read the article, I got pretty far into your second paragraph before realizing you all aren't talking about configuring a modem over a serial link. It's funny because the "Hayes AT command set" protocol is also an obtuse crock. I was really hoping you were going to open my mind with some deep wisdom straight out of 1981.

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

#184

Post by pxoe »

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…

you say "objectively" a lot when most of what you write seems to be just overly emotional flashy wringing

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

#185

Post by topspin »

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."

No. Just no.

If (IF!) some distributed social network breaks through and hundreds of millions or billions of people are participating, they are going to do things that The Powers That Be don't like. For better or worse, when that happens they will target servers, and servers WILL just disappear. Domains will disappear. Hosting providers will disappear. You can take that straight to the bank and cash it.

Uncoordinated moves are table stakes for a real distributed social network at scale. The fact AT Protocol provides this affordance on day one is a great credit.

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

#186

Post by vidarh »

jeroenhd wrote: post #169
doctor_eval wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, when a server does go down and thousands of people start uploading their 50k skeets that all need to be cryptographically verified, other major servers will have quite the scaling challenge. Cryptographic verification is intentionally compute heavy after all. 50k entries isn't a whole lot but as people hosting Mastodon servers have found out, things start slowing down when 1000 people transfer th…

Mastodon does not currently support importing posts from your old account. Just followers/following. It's a nuisance, and there's nothing preventing it per se, since the posts are signed, but that part could be better.

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

#188

Post by sgtnoodle »

newswasboring wrote: post #121
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…

My reaction whenever I see such headline is always "there must be an engineer out there who worked on this, I wonder how they feel about this". I had the same reaction today, opened comments and you were at the top. I love HN sometimes.

A few years ago I had to work with an obscure 90's era embedded microcontroller with a proprietary language and IDE, and a serial adapter based programmer and debugger. The IDE sucked, and programming would fail 9 times out of 10, but at least the debugger was solid.

By complete chance, I happened to interview someone that had, "wrote the debugger for that obscure microcontroller back in the 90's," tucked away in their resume. It was hard not to spend the entire interview session just picking their brain for anecdotes about it.

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

#189

Post by vidarh »

epicsponge wrote: post #70
eropple wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The open source community's spent how many years designing a non-proprietary protocol and putting out reference implementations (and extending it to Facebook-like and Youtube-like and Wordpress-like offerings)... And it's awkward to write code for and the people who inhabit it range from right-wing reactionaries to, as was so effectively put, the homeowners' association . Turns out that people don't care about "ope…

> and I think the AT Protocol docs identify real and probably intractable shortcomings in ActivityPub Except that they are objectively wrong about nearly everything they talk about with regard to ActivityPub. Quoting from the FAQ: > Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. There is a widely-accepted account portability protocol built on top of ActivityPub that multiple server…

To add regarding the signatures and portability, Mastodon at least signs its posts with JSON-LD signatures. They're in the downloaded archive I got from mastodon.social when I moved off it, for example. So is the key required to validate them.

The only thing missing there to make this better - and this is not an ActivityPub thing - is including those JSON-LD signatures in more contexts, so that you don't need to rely on the export functionality (of Mastodon) to get an archive, allowing clients to choose to keep a local copy (or nominate someone to back it up for them), and providing an upload functionality for posts (Mastodon doesn't do this, but that's also a Mastodon thing, not an ActivityPub thing).

I wouldn't have had an issue if they added extensions to ActivityPub. There are even things Mastodon refuses to add that I'd applaud people for forcing the issue on by adding extensions to support. But their choice to reinvent everything puts me off.

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

#190

Post by TMWNN »

sph wrote: post #126
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?

+++ATH0 I hope I have just disconnected someone browsing this page with a dialup modem.

That's ridiculous. No way that sti&(*&(

NO CARRIER

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