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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#81

Post by 1dom »

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…

Thanks for the fair response, I agree you're being cheeky. Sorry, I'm being lazy not searching here, but have you written anything on if instances of something is a good measure of decentralisation? (FWIW, I feel independently owned/managed instances in the traditional non-mastodon-definition seems like an okay measure of decentralisation.)

I completely agree with the point in your link that relays are different to instances - I love architectures involving dumb-relay or zero-trust type nodes. But I think Relays should still be mentioned in your post, since they're probably the main architectural element which protect PDS instances from the scale issues heavily federated AP instances might face, right? (I only have a high level understanding of ATProto and very little experience with AP, happy to be told I just need to learn more for this to make sense.)

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#82

Post by p4bl0 »

I think the analogy presented here is broken. RSS doesn't depend on Google Reader at all. Even at its prime, RSS depended less on Google Reader than email depends on Gmail now. In ATProto, AppViews heavily depends on Relays to be useful, and Relays are quite expensive to run. Also, the yellow circles which represent blogs in the RSS illustration are really not of the same nature as the same circles which represent posts on Facebook. Blogs are self-sufficient, for example.

I'm not saying ATProto is bad at all, but I feel like this blog post adds more confusion than it clarifies anything.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#83

Post by Melonai »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #11
HashThis wrote: post #6

[flagged]

This sounds like BlueSky without the user-directed self and grouped moderation tools. That’s not censorship. It’s showing you the door if you’re a jerk. And it sounds awful.

I'm pretty sure this comment is not written by AI, but those last few sentences really really made me think it is. It's a little sad that this type of antithesis now always has this AI-written connotation to it.

"That's not you cheating. It's you looking for emotional fulfillment. And frankly? That's courage."

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#84

Post by tao_oat »

dokyun wrote: post #70
tao_oat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

In AT you also get communities, in the same way that twitter had weird twitter, black twitter, and so on. But because you, by design, don't really see what PDS people use, it's more fluid.

I personally think that this actually leads to healthier communities but that may be a matter of taste!

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#85

Post by NoGravitas »

This article is deeply, deeply misleading, in that it leaves out relays and appviews in all of its diagrams of the ATProto network. Like, are ATProto identities namespaced by instance/home-server like Mastodon or Matrix identities? No. Does who you are able to follow dependent on the appview you connect to? Yes. Are you able to run your own appview? Probably not (this answer has been upgraded from "No" in only the last few months).

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#86

Post by cavoirom »

WorldMaker wrote: post #38

Google Reader feels like an ominous pick for an analogy. Sure, RSS survived the Google Reader shutdown, but not all the communities that used RSS (many that still don't know what RSS is) survived. It feels almost "Freudian" to claim a thing is decentralized and then by analogy keep pointing to a massive (social) centralization of a decentralized ecosystem as a good thing. But especially one that we already know the e…

In exchange we have many excellent RSS Reader. Just as recently someone talked about NetNewsWire.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#87

Post by 4lx87 »

If it quacks like a duck... An account has a single Personal Data Server (PDS), right? The DID links to a PDS which is the canonical data feed for a user, and where a user's writes go. Data can be replicated but the PDS is treated as canonical. That's much closer to client/server architecture than distributed architecture. There's no P2P database. There's no writes into a DHT or peers. You write to your PDS, then those writes are optionally mirrored. Also discovery happens via DNS, so you don't even ask peers for data. You connect to a relay not as a peer but as a client asking a server for a copy of data that's canonically hosted by the PDS. I don't think it's a stretch to call the PDS an instance and the relay a mirror.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#88

Post by jdgoesmarching »

All the nitpicking in this thread is missing the forest for the trees. You know what’s really bad for decentralization? The rest of the world living on fully centralized apps mostly belonging to one of 3 billionaires with no public protocol in sight.

ATProto making some idealistic compromises to improve the protocol as a product is a more effective half-court shot at the winning users from the oligarchy of apps than AP will ever be with its current design.

There’s a lot of talent in this community that could be spent building an ecosystem around the protocol far more likely to make a dent in social media centralization, but we’re stuck letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#89

Post by NoGravitas »

chokolad wrote: post #25
RobotToaster wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do remove content directly from relays. They claim they only remove content that is illegal to host, but I don't know how true that is, and there is always the risk it could change in the future. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture#...

If that becomes a massive problem - host a relay with different moderation policy.

The scale-down floor for running an ATProto relay or appview is much, much higher than the floor for running a fediverse instance.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#90

Post by ori_b »

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…

"but where are the instances?" is asking "if Bluesky the company disappeared or turned evil, would there be a Bluesky network that kept going?".
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