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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#61

Post by cavoirom »

1dom wrote: post #44

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly. I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto spe…

I found the distinction and comparison about Mastodon and ATProto are necessary. The fediverse model is easier to understand given existing social networks. ATProto is a novel concept that give users data sovereign and also the scalability of the centralized social networks.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#62

Post by JoshTriplett »

danabramov wrote: post #57
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…

> Apps can also provide primitives for userland moderation, like Reddit does, or even ability to plug your own extra moderation services (which Bluesky allows).

This is the part I would be looking for, in an article talking about "there are no instances". Is there a standard protocol for this, so that anyone can spin up a shared moderation service that people can subscribe to if they're aligned with it, and be able to plug that into any standard app built on the protocol (not just Bluesky-the-company's app)? Or is this something specific to Bluesky-the-company?

If this is a standardized part of the protocol, then that answers the question of "how does ATProto solve the same problems defederation solves".

There are several other things I can think of in the category of "how do you solve the problems that ActivityPub uses instances to solve", but they're things I've already asked in other parts of this thread, namely "how do you make the parts of the system not shown in the tidy hosts->apps M:N graph decentralized, too".

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#63

Post by danabramov »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #47
danabramov wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- There's no "instances" so I don't know what you mean by this. - Re: PLC directory, indeed, there is only one of those. I think this is a legit point but it's worth considering the whole point of PLC directory is to be the single minimal stateless open source part that lifts identities out of apps and hostings. PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization ( https://atproto.com/blog/plc-…

> PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization ( https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org ). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that…

Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying.

I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up with it other than refusing to update requests. The threat model is very limited and it would immediately be obvious that this is happening, killing the credibility.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#64

Post by lyu07282 »

danabramov wrote: post #36
axus wrote: post #9

So all the censor needs to do is cut off one host? And then you upload everything to different host and connect that?

What kind of censor? Whoever operates hosting can decide to ban someone from hosting. This isn't different from how Cloudflare would ban you for hosting something illegal. Whoever operates an app can decided to ban someone from that app. This isn't different from how a forum moderator can ban you for something they don't like. Whoever operates services in the middle may decide to ban someone for network spam/abuse, s…

Exactly this, people seem to confuse decentralization with federation. The Blockchain is decentralized, the fediverse is federated, big difference. I think it's because what we actually want and need right now (with western regimes dialing up censorship and repression to eleven) is decentralized social media, but that doesn't exist yet unfortunately.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#65

Post by JasonSage »

danabramov wrote: post #50
1dom wrote: post #44

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly. I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto spe…

I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization. My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader i…

From my perspective, I care about the centralization/decentralization aspect a lot, and if I'm coming into the discussion with a much better understanding of the Mastodon side then _of course_ I'm going to ask about the instances--that's the vocabulary I'm going to use to try to probe for flaws and gaps. It's not necessarily that it's the instances specifically I care about, or that I'm somehow technically misguided.

What I hoped to read in the article is how we approach topics like centralization, censorship, moderation, data ownership--and with a technical lens. But I feel like all I got was "here's why instances are the wrong vocabulary" without substantively talking about the part I personally care about and want to marry the technical understanding with. Maybe I just read too shallowly and need to sit with it.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#66

Post by kajman »

jrm4 wrote: post #31
timbray wrote: post #17

ATProto is an interesting protocol and there is lots of room to argue about its plus and minuses (and about Fedi/Masto's), but lots of people are already doing that so I won't. My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more powe…

"Seems to have worked OK for email" THANK YOU. It seems like far too few in this space really understand the benefits of actual decentralization. ATProto feels like "centralized, except also we get other people to do the hard work with few of the benefits."

I think email is a pretty poor example of decentralization in the modern internet. I pay a company to not have to worry about hosting my own and I've still had emails blackholed by the massive providers for unknown reasons I can only assume are some combination of the custom domain* and the provider. I went back to using Gmail on my resume and for applications after nearly missing out on an interview because of it.

*: Not an .xyz, has proper SPF and DKIM records

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#67

Post by danabramov »

JasonSage wrote: post #65
danabramov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization. My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader i…

From my perspective, I care about the centralization/decentralization aspect a lot, and if I'm coming into the discussion with a much better understanding of the Mastodon side then _of course_ I'm going to ask about the instances--that's the vocabulary I'm going to use to try to probe for flaws and gaps. It's not necessarily that it's the instances specifically I care about, or that I'm somehow technically misguided.…

I see! That's a huge topic by itself since you're raising a lot of questions. Maybe this could be a different article. My aim with this one was just to clarify the network topology because it is a prerequisite to having the other discussion, and too often that prerequisite is not there.

If you ask a list of specific questions, that would help a lot. I might be able to write something or reply inline here.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#68

Post by cavoirom »

One thing I like about the ATProto is the stable identity, I could change the hosting as the author did recently and the other users see no difference.

The one down side of the system is the cost. It's cheap to host a PDS but expensive for other components. Users could not relies on "someone" for running those components for free forever.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#69

Post by [deleted] »

danabramov wrote: post #50
1dom wrote: post #44

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly. I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto spe…

I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization. My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader i…

[deleted]

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#70

Post by dokyun »

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?

On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content distribution would dominate your view with Bluesky posts regardless of your relationship with the rest of the network.
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