Anyone else read "AT protocol" and thought of old modems?
Yes, and completely agree with the title.
The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
261–270 of 493 posts
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#262Okay 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…
If you’re not implementing a cryptocurrency then how will you incentivize folks to host instances? What DID are you using? Is it unique to AT or something more widely available? Any tips for getting an invite to Bluesky for us nerds on here?
People do all sorts of things without cryptocurrency as an incentive
They host Mastodon instances, contribute to OSS, edit Wikipedia etc etc
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#263Who is this Sam guy? He yells a lot and while he has identified some interesting points, he also seems very... Alarmist. Is there a reason this post deserves attention beyond its content?
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#264Okay 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…
> The schema is a well-defined machine language which translates to static types and runtime validation through code generation. Can you elaborate on this point? There's multiple mature solutions in this space like OpenAPI+Json Schema, GraphQL, gRPC. All try to solve the same problems to varying degrees and provide similar benefits like generated static typed and runtime validation. Was there something unique for you…
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Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Posts are explicitly not immutable, so they do need to be revalidated, and that's fine. OK that's my point. In the AT protocol design the data backing posts is immutable. This makes sync, and especially caching a lot easier to make correct and robust because you never need to worry about revalidation at any level. > People want to be able to edit, and delete Immutable in this context just means the data blocks are…
But to model mutable things over and immutable blocks you need to revalidate which blocks are still valid. You need to know that the user expects you to now have a different view. That you're not mutating individual blocks but replacing them has little practical value. It'd be nice to implement a mechanism that made it easier to validate whole collections of ActivityPub objects in one go, but that just requires addin…
> you need to revalidate which blocks are still valid.
No you don't. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like maybe you don't have a clear idea of how systems like git work. One of their core advantages is what we're talking about here -- that they make replication so much simpler.
When you pull from a git remote you ask the remote what the root hash is, then you fetch all the chunks reachable from that hash which you don't yet have. If the remote says you need the chunk with hash X, and you have a chunk with hash X, then you have the data. You don't have to worry if it has changed. Once you have all the chunks reachable from the latest head, you have the latest state of the entire repository. That's it.
(I mean simple in the sense of clear/direct/correct, not in the sense of "easy". It's certainly the case that a design based on consuming a stream of change events is a lot less code).
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#266Okay 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.
It must be great to wake up to some jerk shitting all over your work on the front page of HN.
Fortunately not something ive had to experience!
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prot…
Sure nothing stops you doing those things, but also nothing makes them seem like a good idea.
Why bother with Mastodon interop? Why bother building on top of a standard that doesn’t do what you want if you don’t think being part of the “Fediverse” is particularly interesting or a goal of the platform you’re building?
Something new is a better bet at this point than being anchored to or seeming like part of Mastodon IMO.
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#268Okay 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…
I have not looked much at AT, but it seems it solves many of the same problems as Matrix. Instead of redoing all the Crypto and everything, why not build on martrix. There were other Twitter like things on Matrix before. As far as I'm aware its developed on Matrix and had some connection with it, so this isn't a case of not knowing about it so there is likely some engineering reasons why this was not done. Would be i…
matrix has implied e2e which most of the incumbent players do not like too much...
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#269It says To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)
I'm really surprised every time anyone complains that a web-application (not just a plain web site) doesn't work without JS.
I mean it's an application, applications contain code and tracking that code state server side can involve a non small amount of additional cost.
Sure they could have a web-side like non-logged in viewer mode and then somehow using hydration magic transition to being a app on demand, but that is a bunch of additional work (i.e. cost) for a very small number of people.
But here is a good thing, it's open source so you or any of the view people which care about no-js could try to contribute such a "view only web-site" functionality, or crate an alternative web client which solely uses server side rendering or similar.
But in the end that's not worth your time right (at least for me it wouldn't be if I where in your situation)? So why expect anyone who doesn't even get any benefits from it to invest that time?
Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
#270For the normal consumer, Twitter is better than Bluesky/Mastodon, Macs and Windows are better than Linux, ChatGPT and Open AI have better predictions than open source LLMs. Its not even competitive the closed source solutions are so much better than open source ones, in these scenarios.