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ATProto for distributed system engineers

atproto.com

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Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#4

Post by wmf »

omnicarinha wrote: post #2

One thing I still didn't quite grasp with BlueSky yet is if it's a decentralized platform or not... ATProto seems technically capable of supporting decentralized platforms.

It's pretty decentralized. You can run your own PDS, relay, and appview (some of these are more expensive than others). I'm not sure if you can configure the official clients to use an alternate server.

Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#5

Post by jazzyjackson »

omnicarinha wrote: post #2

One thing I still didn't quite grasp with BlueSky yet is if it's a decentralized platform or not... ATProto seems technically capable of supporting decentralized platforms.

Bsky wants to be one entry point into a decentralized network but there's little incentive to spin up your own Personal Data Server (since you're still subject to the moderation of the one front end everyone uses (AppView in ATProto parlance)) and still less incentive to host your own front end since you'd just be burdening yourself with all the same moderation problems bsky is trying to stay on top of

IMO the devs have been so overburdened with trying to nail moderation that they're actually disincentivized from onboarding new populations, since multiple entry points to the network just lands in their lap as more difficult moderation problems - that is, they're still figuring out how to moderate people on their own servers and haven't yet decided how they're going to moderate with a federation of servers with different cultures than their own

I don't think they're avoiding the big problems, but it does seem like they're taking the slow careful route, maybe this is for the best.

Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#6

Post by __loam »

apitman wrote: post #3

Has anyone played around with ATProto yet? ActivityPub is pretty easy to get started with, especially if you just ignore JSON-LD and parse what you see. I'm curious how ATProto compares.

There's a lot fewer resources for AT than ActivityPub. Last time I checked which was a few months ago, the official documentation for AT was pretty sparse if you're interested in building to a spec. You'll find a lot more in the ActivityPub specs, plus a lot of open implementations and helpful guides.

Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#8

Post by m_eiman »

__loam wrote: post #6
apitman wrote: post #3

Has anyone played around with ATProto yet? ActivityPub is pretty easy to get started with, especially if you just ignore JSON-LD and parse what you see. I'm curious how ATProto compares.

There's a lot fewer resources for AT than ActivityPub. Last time I checked which was a few months ago, the official documentation for AT was pretty sparse if you're interested in building to a spec. You'll find a lot more in the ActivityPub specs, plus a lot of open implementations and helpful guides.

> You'll find a lot more in the ActivityPub specs, plus a lot of open implementations and helpful guides.

I've read that there's a problem with interacting with Mastodon if you only rely on the protocol specs, that they do things their own way and have different requirements than the official specs.

Is this still a problem? If it is, are Mastodon moving to be more closely aligned with the spec, or to doing more of their own thing?

Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#9

Post by openrisk »

What might be useful for the re-decentralized web community is a detailed comparison of the ATProto, ActivityStreams/Pub and maybe Solid specifications, protocols, standards, vocabularies (or whatever exactly these blueprints actually are).

As the blog post illustrates quite nicely (literally), ATProto is a fairly complete, bottom-up type specification that makes concrete various server/database aspects that in the ActivityPub spec are somewhere in the remote background, "left to the implementation". One could almost think of implementing AP over ATProto, and sure enough somebody wrote about this [1].

One can also not miss the (at least) linguistic affinity of a Personal Data Server with a Personal Data Store (Solid) and sure enough somebody did and asked [2].

[1] https://berjon.com/ap-at/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/ywrw3f/whats...

Re: ATProto for distributed system engineers

#10

Post by shafyy »

omnicarinha wrote: post #2

One thing I still didn't quite grasp with BlueSky yet is if it's a decentralized platform or not... ATProto seems technically capable of supporting decentralized platforms.

In theory it is decentralized. But if you compare it to Mastodon for example, it's pretty centralized in practice. I haven't come across any people running their larger own servers, like I do on Mastodon.
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