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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#71

Post by danabramov »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #62
danabramov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Great questions! The protocol does have suggested app-agnostic moderation primitives (see https://atproto.com/guides/labels, https://atproto.com/guides/creating-a-labeler). That's the basis of how Bluesky's own moderation works under the hood. There's also Bluesky-specific tools and APIs like Ozone (https://atproto.com/guides/using-ozone), but they build on top of those primitives.

Of course, nothing stops an app from doing moderation differently and not using any of that. This is more for better composability and interoperability.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#72

Post by jchw »

danabramov wrote: post #59
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…

> I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server).

Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of, and obviously, it will not be applicable to the vast majority of people. Given the rising cost of hosting combined with the fact that the compute needs of running appviews and relays should theoretically only go up, I have a strong feeling that there will not be a lot more of them, either. It's already bigger than ActivityPub I believe and we're in the very low single digits at best.

Meanwhile, if we really did get a lot of these instances, then it really begs the question what the actual benefit of Bluesky's ATProto architecture is: if someone is banned on Bluesky and not Blacksky... won't users see a totally different view of the world? Isn't that the same problem ActivityPub sees? How does this really differ from defederation in practice?

> 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.

If I knew how to fix this, I would probably be trying to help rather than criticizing ATProto. I don't think it can be fixed, so I don't have any suggestions.

> I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be in control of their own moderation.

It kind of sounds like you're admitting that there is no real difference from a user standpoint with browsing to twitter.com vs bsky.app that have anything to do with decentralization.

I know I'm not going to win a popularity contest here, you don't even have to bother responding, honestly. But just being honest, I know you're a pretty intelligent person and the work you have done has benefited my life as a developer. I have a feeling deep down you also realize there is an inherent contradiction with Bluesky and ATProto's marketing pitch. I wish you would be honest about it.

The Fediverse has value specifically because of its downsides. A version of decentralized social media without those downsides inherently picks up almost all of the disadvantages of centralized social media. To me it seems apparent that all you can do is move the sliders around a bit, and Bluesky appears to net a very tiny percent of benefit from decentralization while bearing immense cost for it.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#73

Post by cavoirom »

skybrian wrote: post #54
kajman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How can people control the comments about their blog post on Hacker News? I think my example is closer to what happen in PDS and App View.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#74

Post by Groxx »

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…

It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#75

Post by JasonSage »

danabramov wrote: post #67
JasonSage wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I appreciate that a lot! The article has a deliberate and explicit scope, and covers it well.

I'm hoping that perhaps my personal perspective shades why "instances" comes up, or why the reaction on HN seems to include the wider scope than the article itself covers.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#77

Post by threetonesun »

I feel like the charts could be clearer if they showed the primary user experience difference between RSS and AT/AP, which is how do the arrows flow for Bob's response to Cat's post. I understand it fairly well for AP, I don't think I actually get it for AT.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#78

Post by doublepg23 »

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…

Perhaps ATProto vs. ActivityPub will been seen as the Fediverse's East-West Schism.

Instead of decrees over the "filioque" we get blog posts about the definition of "federation" where both parties talk past each other.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#79

Post by danabramov »

cavoirom wrote: post #68

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.

I wouldn't say other components are expensive. Common ones are:

- Relay as an optimization. That's cheap-ish ($30/mo) or free-ish if you pool with others.

- Your own app server. That's on par with normal web apps as long as you can keep a socket open. What's expensive is if the app you're making is a fully capable copy of Bluesky itself with gigabytes of existing posts — but is that the app you're making? The economics here are identical to normal web app stuff.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#80

Post by danabramov »

threetonesun wrote: post #77

I feel like the charts could be clearer if they showed the primary user experience difference between RSS and AT/AP, which is how do the arrows flow for Bob's response to Cat's post. I understand it fairly well for AP, I don't think I actually get it for AT.

I have a different article that goes into this here: https://overreacted.io/open-social/#open-social

Also here: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/#links

TLDR: at the hosting layer, it's like links, but in JSON. Links can refer to other person's repo (even if it's hosted somewhere else). And then apps index everything, so they can present a coherent aggregated view (like a post thread).

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