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I was right about ATProto key management

notes.nora.codes

51–60 of 198 posts

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#51
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.

> Form should follow function, not the other way around. According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

According to them. They shared their opinion.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done. Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lo…

I honestly can't tell if this comment is trolling.

I'll admit it's a bit charged, but I'm frustrated with bad faith takedowns of ATProto/Bluesky, while Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.

If a scammer, advertiser, or some other form of spammer can get a payout just 1% of the time, they will be willing to pay much more than the average person posting the average tweet. If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.

Penis enlargement spam is worth like $0.00000001 per message. Any number higher than that makes them lose money. The real problem is that nobody will post on a social media network where you have to pay to post.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Form should follow function, not the other way around. According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

According to them. They shared their opinion.

No, they asserted their opinion as a fact.

There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#55
post #22
post #2

It's written in anger, but I'm optimistic that this will eventually get fixed, and documenting bad experiences like this will help.

Peer to peer, not federation, is the way forward. We should only build peer to peer social protocols. Websites and communities should simply sample from the swarm and make it easy for non-technical users to post and consume. They should be optional and not central points of failure (or control). {Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord} should work like {Email, BitTorrent, PGP}. Bluesky and Mas…

Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to them. They shared their opinion.

No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".

> No, they asserted their opinion as a fact.

Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts. I'll be very surprised.

I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person, and upsetting myself on purpose.

You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire. For example, this may have very well been a perfectly cromulent alternative reply:

> Sounds subjective, and indeed, I disagree. Not a fan of dogma like this anyhow.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.

This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.

Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions?

And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".

> No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts . I'll be very surprised. I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'…

There is no ambiguity that needs further clarification, I am talking about the words as written. Their entire message clearly conveys they believe there is an objective design standard that everyone should strive to adhere to, and they are criticising a website for daring to deviate from their ideal standard as though it were an objective flaw and not a matter of personal preference.

> getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, then I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person until I upset myself. You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire.

It's not about cushioning. They are explicitly criticising the website ("pity", "forgot to take basic principles into account"), and saying broadly that everyone should do X, where X is their own preference. That is the fire. That will invariably rub people the wrong way. It is inherently not an amicable way to communicate about differences in design opinions.

That's not to say you can't give critical feedback. "I'm not a fan of the font, I prefer fonts that are easier to read" would be perfectly reasonable. It's specifically the assertion that there is a way that things ought to be done, as though there are not trade-offs depending upon what each person values but rather one objectively superior way, that causes friction.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.

Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.

If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone.

If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it.

If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network.

With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring.

Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.

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