Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Social

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 409 posts

Re: Open Social

#161

Post by tetrisgm »

verdverm wrote: post #136
tetrisgm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Blu…

So it sounds like multiple things then 1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting, handles) 2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on if you want to intermingle Bsky data 3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation and al…

I think 1 is the main thing. We have our own posts and UI but we just want to give people usernames and a way that shares posts in a way that interop with Bluesky. Any advice on a simple way to self host a PDS?

Re: Open Social

#162

Post by nunobrito »

danabramov wrote: post #74
nunobrito wrote: post #20

Good article, very clear. Can you also do one for NOSTR? The functioning is similar, albeit there is no need for hosting user data since it can be sent to multiple relays and live reachable to others from there. Thanks in advance.

I probably won’t do it myself but this one should be helpful: https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html

Thanks for sharing. By coincidence (or not so much) I had lunch this week with a founder of bluesky along with a others and many names were mentioned that I'd never heard about. They were mentioned on that article and now understand better.

Quite a lot of food for thought today. Thank you for that.

Re: Open Social

#163

Post by steveklabnik »

popcar2 wrote: post #155

I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance o…

> considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol,

Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically, stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows the details of) and so talking about the structure of things ends up working differently.

> what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them?

This is absolutely a real concern. I believe they have shown themselves to be good stewards, and they also recognize this concern. As the ecosystem grows, this will be fixed.

> Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now that you aren't allowed to move your account?

This is built into the protocol! You can back up your CAR file and move it to another host without the approval of your current host.

> You can already export your settings and make an account on another instance

This doesn't work on masto to the same degree as atproto. You lose a lot of stuff when you move on masto, but it's 100% transparent on atproto.

Re: Open Social

#164

Post by [deleted] »

popcar2 wrote: post #155

I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance o…

[deleted]

Re: Open Social

#165

Post by steveklabnik »

jrowen wrote: post #157
dgaffney wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to…

the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs No I think it's predicated on creating a product that people like to use. That's the Step 1 that OSS zealots miss when they focus entirely on these niche lofty ideals. I highly doubt the average Instagram user is yearning for - or would even be enticed by - a version of that same experience that has a lower exit cost. That's the problem w…

The reason I like Bluesky is that they understand this, and that's why the protocol stuff isn't front and center. They're focused on product first, technology second. The tech serves to create a good product, they don't build the tech first and then hope people find the product acceptable.

Re: Open Social

#166

Post by psnehanshu »

tetrisgm wrote: post #124
steveklabnik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.

I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Blu…

You mean you want to host the personal repositories (PDS) for your users?

Re: Open Social

#167

Post by psnehanshu »

tshaddox wrote: post #13

The bit about aggregation is interesting, but it's not clear to me what the performance characteristics will be for very popular accounts. Presumably Justin Beiber's repo cannot be expected to handle 100 million WebSocket connections, all of which push out a message the instant he posts something. Is it vital to have more centralized hosts which can implement the sort of hybrid push vs. pull models that Twitter famou…

And if Justin's pds goes down, then his followers won't be able to consume his content.

Re: Open Social

#168

Post by BinaryIgor »

Sometimes I wonder - maybe websites were enough? Most people on most platforms are readers/consumers, not producers anyways. Maybe having a personal website was a good filter for publishing after all? Maybe personal websites + sites like hackernews that allows us to discuss our and other people's work is the best the Internet could be.

Re: Open Social

#169

Post by woah »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #168

Sometimes I wonder - maybe websites were enough? Most people on most platforms are readers/consumers, not producers anyways. Maybe having a personal website was a good filter for publishing after all? Maybe personal websites + sites like hackernews that allows us to discuss our and other people's work is the best the Internet could be.

Maybe pianos were enough. Radio has made it so families no longer gather round and sing in the evenings and TikTok is even worse than radio

Re: Open Social

#170

Post by ltjbukem »

advisedwang wrote: post #115

I'm a little saddened to see that each app has it's own collection type, even if they are able to use each others collections. That means that apps will only interoperate to the extent that they are explicitly designed to. One of the beautiful (but perhaps not that practically relevant) things about ActivityPub is that a Mastodon user can subscribe to a Pixelfed user without anything special being done. It's like if…

AP intercompatibility is fun, but it starts to fall apart once you leave the safety of the "Note" (statuses) and "Question" (polls) types (which is what Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, Pleroma, etc. all use as their primary elements). Everything outside of it becomes either loosely converted to a note (Mastodon does this for a lot of things, see https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/activitypub/#payloads) or is discarded by the instance. The only types that I know of which have been able to have native support from multiple AP implementations are micro-blogging and Lemmy's community system, with everything else essentially being a monoculture (or just extremely one-sided towards a specific implementation) due to a lack of interest from other implementations in providing full, standardized support. This isn't an inherent protocol limitation, but I do think that the community could do better in organizing standards outside of the core documents.

ATproto's system is a bit more well defined (you HAVE to abide by the lexicon/schema of the data collection to be accepted by implementations, reference implementation and some third-party ones have schema validators to do so) and allows for easier intercompatibility, but I do think that it could be a bit looser than it is right now (selective support for additional fields) to provide proper "sidecar" values in a record (they'll be in the user's PDS but it won't validate and could be rejected by indexers). Bridgy Fed does this to include the originating URL from APub and the original text, which third-party clients could certainly take advantage of if they detect that the post comes from a Bridgy account. (https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-fields)

Post reply on HN