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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#51

Post by danabramov »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
danabramov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running your own firehose is not expensive, fwiw, it's $30/mo. If I were making a "serious" app I'd probably do that. Otherwise, relying on community-maintained ones seems fine. Running an AppView for your own app is not expensive at all. It can be as cheap as you want. It's only expensive if you want to store gigabytes of Bluesky posts and serve them to millions of users — i.e. if you want to build the full Bluesky…

> But why would you want to build The problem is that that sounds like "you shouldn't want to compete with Bluesky". Which makes it dangerously centralized.

I don't understand how running your own Relay is related to competing with Bluesky. A Relay is just a dumb websocket broadcaster. Yes, you can absolutely run one on your own if you don't want to rely on any of the existing ones. I don't think this has to do with competition.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#52

Post by h14h »

INTPenis wrote: post #34

ATproto sacrifices true decentralization for consistency, Mastodon and AP does the opposite, sacrifices true consistency for more accessible decentralization. At least that's how I understand it, because running an AP node is much more accessible to regular selfhosters than running one of those content relays in AT. So all you'll ever "decentralize" in AT is your own data, it's more about owning your data rather than…

This is an interesting take because AtProto feels both more accessible AND more decentralized to me (at least with my current mental model).

With ActivityPub, because running an instance requires hosting the data, the application, and dealing with all the subsequent scaling challenges, you kinda have to choose between being taking on active ops responsibilities or tying yourself to someone else's instance (which will probably be one of the bigger, more centralized ones).

If you decide you don't like an instance you picked and decide to move (unless things have changed) you're kinda stuck needing to start fresh.

With AtProto, it's trivial to jump ship to a different application platform and continue using your same identity. Exporting your data from a platform and self-hosting is a bit of a UX challenge, but at least it's possible.

As an example, I recently started using Tangled for the first time and was able to login using my existing bsky-backed domain (h14h.com). No need to create a new account or pick a new username -- it was as if I were already there. Then getting set up w/ self-hosting my git repos on a VPS was an afternoon of work at most, and it's just some backend service chugging away that I almost never have to think about.

The worst that will ever happen is I see a banner message in tangled.org saying something like "your repo is out of date and may be compatible with the latest version of Tangled", which I can solve by simply rebuilding & redeploying a docker image w/ the latest versions.

Granted, AtProto is definitely harder to wrap your head around architecturally. But actually interfacing it with a user is much simpler, IMO.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#54

Post by skybrian »

kajman wrote: post #45
skybrian wrote: post #37

An important distinction is that blogs have their own websites and they're not required to publish full articles in their RSS feed. Bluesky doesn't normally work that way - everything in the PDS gets replicated. They are also encouraging people to put put full blog posts in the PDS for easy replication. So, anyone who wants to index it gets a copy and you have no control over what they do. You don't have to do it tha…

> So, anyone who wants to index it gets a copy and you have no control over what they do. How does this differ from scrapers hitting the blog directly?

Web pages aren’t digitally signed, aren’t necessarily indexed by search engines, and there are ways to block bots with things like captchas. You also have much more control over the UI. If your blog has comments, you can moderate them, for better or worse.

With a PDS, the replication happens first, before anyone reads it, and the UI is out of your control.

Maybe that’s okay, but people should understand the tradeoffs.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#55

Post by jchw »

Let's say I make a post on Bluesky, which is decentralized. My post is very contentious. It is blocked by the moderators, and the moderation service can't be disabled on bsky.app. I am now invisible on bsky.app.

So when this happens where do we go? Forget about "instance brain", your problem is Bluesky is vastly more centralized in practice than the theoretical marketing. Because if it was truly practically decentralized you could actually point to numerous instances of the service, but last time I raised this point there were... 3. Except one of them was actually not running the full appview and we weren't 100% sure the other one was either.

I'm sorry man, but this isn't going to cut it. A lot of people are absolutely right to not be sold on ATProto as it stands: there is no obvious reason to believe it will become more meaningfully decentralized over time rather than less. As it grows larger, the feasibility of having more "instances" that can run completely independently of Bluesky PBC becomes even less plausible.

If over 99% of the users are using Bluesky PBC infrastructure and placeholder DIDs, almost all of the keys to the kingdom lie in one place, and at that point you have invented Twitter with a ridiculous number of extra steps.

Can you explain to me why I would ever run my own PDS? Why would I pay to selfhost stuff while allowing someone to control almost everything I can see and do?

Unfortunately, this will never get answered. It's very easy to write a long blog post explaining how ATProto is technically decentralized. It's much harder to unpack how it actually isn't really.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#56

Post by JoshTriplett »

danabramov wrote: post #51
JoshTriplett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why would you want to build The problem is that that sounds like "you shouldn't want to compete with Bluesky". Which makes it dangerously centralized.

I don't understand how running your own Relay is related to competing with Bluesky. A Relay is just a dumb websocket broadcaster. Yes, you can absolutely run one on your own if you don't want to rely on any of the existing ones. I don't think this has to do with competition.

I'm saying that if there is any required component of a full ATProto setup whose lowest-friction implementation is "use the One True Central Implementation, which every tool defaults to and which will be very painful to change", then it's not a decentralized protocol. Are there any components of ATProto that are found not through a service discovery mechanism that would seamlessly migrate to a new service, but by every individual app going "here's the hardcoded URL we never expect you to want to change"?

I like the concept of working like RSS. I don't like the idea of having a massive ecosystem coordination problem with game-theoretic network effects, for any component of the system.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#57

Post by danabramov »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #49

I appreciate how this explains the difference between the two. But I also found it a little frustrating, because it answered one part of the question but failed to answer the question so what does ATProto do to solve the problems that instances solve? For example, when this article dismisses defederation as merely a mysterious reason you might not see posts from your friends, it fails to answer "so how does atproto s…

If you’re asking about moderation, it works similarly as you’d expect it to work in a everything-RSS world.

At the hosting level, the hosting you use will likely ban you for clearly illegal stuff. Same as blogspot dot com or Cloudflare could ban you for certain things.

At the application level, application admins/mods would moderate as any app does. This is similar to running any web service today with user generated content. It’s up to app developers to choose. Apps can also provide primitives for userland moderation, like Reddit does, or even ability to plug your own extra moderation services (which Bluesky allows). But again, this is largely how it works on any app with user-generated content.

There’s no “defederation” because there’s no analog of “community instances” that may fight with each other. There’s hosting, there’s apps, and there’s app-level moderation that works according to each app’s developer’s choices.

Does this help clarify it?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#58

Post by kajman »

timbray wrote: post #32
Raed667 wrote: post #3

Semi related post on why the moderation of federated Mastodon instances is a problem: https://blog.raed.dev/posts/mastodon_moderation

To be fair, from 2022. I would argue that moderation in Fedi is holding together reasonably well. There are a few popular instances that lots of people think are overly aggressive/purist in their moderation policies, but the people using them seem to like what they're getting.

I haven't used Mastodon, but my experience with Lemmy was a lot of petty fighting about who should be defederated. The OP's reference to warring fiefdoms was very spot-on for that scene. I imagine it's a huge turn off to casual, well-adjusted people exploring the space. But I wouldn't know.

There's, of course, another sort of grossness to corporate moderation from above, but at least with ATProto you can take your identity and content to another AppView, if it wasn't shown there already. AFAIK, any fediverse migration tooling requires a cooperative host server you haven't already been banned from.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#59

Post by danabramov »

jchw wrote: post #55

Let's say I make a post on Bluesky, which is decentralized. My post is very contentious. It is blocked by the moderators, and the moderation service can't be disabled on bsky.app. I am now invisible on bsky.app. So when this happens where do we go? Forget about "instance brain", your problem is Bluesky is vastly more centralized in practice than the theoretical marketing. Because if it was truly practically decentral…

I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). So their account only works when seen thorough the Blacksky app. What is a better solution you’d like to see? I think it’s reasonable that there’s a market between these and if there’s enough demand, another app server can become popular. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be in control of their own moderation.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#60

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

tao_oat wrote: post #41
RobotToaster wrote: post #18

There's basically only one instance. There's only one PLC directory. There's very few full relays (edit: appviews), none that I'm aware of that don't mirror bluesky censorship/moderation decisions.

Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?

I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.
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