121–130 of 292 posts
So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you expect the performance characteristics to be compared to querying a database?
I expect them to be unimportant. This has been merged upstream and running on the flagship Mastodon instance for a little while now. There is also a section related to performance available at the link I posted. Third header, "Likely Concerns", second subheader, "DoS/Amplification".
I mean from the user's perspective: when I open a thread, I expect to instantly see the entire discussion happening across the entire network, with the paginated data coming back in a single roundtrip. Moreover, I expect every actor participating in the said discussion (wherever their data is stored) to see the same discussion as I do, with the same level of being "filled in", and in real time (each reply should immediately appear for each participant). It should be indistinguishable from UX of a centralized service where things happen instantly and are presented deterministically and universally (setting aside that centralized services abandoned these ideals in favor of personalization).
With ATProto, this is clearly achieved (by reading already indexed information from the database). How can you achieve this expectation in an architecture where there's no single source of truth and you have to query different sources for different pieces on demand in a worker? (To clarify, I did read the linked PR. I'm asking you because it seems obviously unachievable to me, so I'm hoping you'll acknowledge this isn't a 1:1 comparison in terms of user experience.)
To give a concrete example: is this really saying that replies will only be refreshed once in fifteen minutes[1]? The user expectation from centralized services is at most a few seconds.
[1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615/files#diff-6...
So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.
I thought Bluesky was federalized? How is it not?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a big post that doesn't really explain in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Reading through it, it just sounds like sharding/scaling for a centralized service that's meant to be owned and provided by a single entity.
>in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Each of the pieces I've described (PDS, Relay, AppView) implement the protocol specified at https://atproto.com/ . Anything that acts as an ATProto PDS can be used as an ATProto PDS, anything that acts as an ATProto Relay can be used as an ATProto Relay, and so on. I'm not sure I understand the question so pardon the tautol…
Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert.
So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.
Well git was not really an attempt at decentralization so there is that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>in what way can smaller players federate with ATProto or how the structure allows federation. Each of the pieces I've described (PDS, Relay, AppView) implement the protocol specified at https://atproto.com/ . Anything that acts as an ATProto PDS can be used as an ATProto PDS, anything that acts as an ATProto Relay can be used as an ATProto Relay, and so on. I'm not sure I understand the question so pardon the tautol…
I think what they are asking is: if I run a my own BlueSky AppView, how do I integrate with the bluesky.app so that users signed in on my AppView can interact with users on the the main AppView and vice versa? This is how most of us think about federalisation.
When people "post", their posts go to their PDS's, which means that every AppView ingests data generated by every other AppView by default. There is no way to tell who's using which AppView — in fact, you can log into any AppView and your profile will be there with all your posts.
The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the bi…
In the real world, you can ask people if they would prefer to live in a town with all bespoke mom'n'pop businesses or just a few big box retailers and chain restaurants identical to the ones in the next town over. The intuitive expectation might be that most people would prefer the bespoke stuff because it offers a more personalized service, but it turns out that many people really do want to have the same experience as folks in the next town over. Even among folks who claim to be free thinkers or unique personalities, even among folks who have xenophobia or express a chavinistic sentiment, there is still an impulse to seek the exact same experiences that folks outside of their community are also having. Why is that?
I am sure there are various psychological and perhaps even physiological reasons why people are drawn to homogeneity, but the bigger problem is that bad actors can find ways to exploit these reasons to amass power. Once those actors have the power to shape society, then it becomes a feedback loop where perhaps in the abstract a person might not desire exactly those experiences that are provided by the central authority, but because the structures in society are now pointing toward that being the "best" option, then that's what people come to believe they want.
I suppose the philosophical question is if people come to want to be exploited, is it still okay to exploit them? Personally I think it's not okay. I think it's a worthy goal to present other options. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be structures in society that define open standards that allow people to find the homogeneous experiences they value while still ensuring that no central authority could take ownership over the delivery of those experiences. Perhaps there should be some assurance that those who deliver the experiences aren't also using other levers at their disposal to engineer the desire for those experiences in the first place.
Which is all to say that perhaps social media should be better regulated, and as nerds we might think that one way to do that is build it into the base technology as decentralization or federation. But one would hope that people outside of tech could at least understand the value, since the tech is just a model of real-world systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We haven't seen a distributed Google yet. It's not impossible, but each distributed component would have to be at least a small data center.
> We haven't seen a distributed Google https://yacy.net