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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#111

Post by danabramov »

NoGravitas wrote: post #94
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…

It doesn't solve those problems, except in an alternative universe where there are a very large number of appviews capable of consuming the entire firehose and you can freely choose between them and cheaply run your own. ATProto is like RSS in a universe where you can only read RSS through Google Reader (or a clone of Google Reader running on the same scale).

I don’t know what you’re saying.

I’m running an atproto app and it’s perfectly capable of ingesting the entire firehouse as it comes in. It costs me maybe $10/mo and mostly because I haven’t fixed some memory leaks.

Of course, few of records that come through are relevant to my app so I don’t store them.

If I wanted to store gigabytes of records (like Bluesky) for millions of users forever then yes it would be more expensive. Which would be the case with any tech! What are you comparing it to? How is this a downside of atproto?

Mastodon instances aren’t a valid comparison point because by definition they’re small-world. They don’t serve millions of users.

If your point is that you want small-world atproto, that’s absolutely possible. Take the Bluesky server codebase and make it so that it ignores incoming content beyond some criteria (like “follows of server member list”). You can recreate Mastodon experience on atproto, it just hasn’t been very interesting to anyone so far AFAIK.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#112

Post by echelon »

embedding-shape wrote: post #99
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…

> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its U…

All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media.

Swarms of content.

Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution.

Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability.

Immutability in general.

Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten).

Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts.

You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a common platform. 3rd party tools and extensions can filter content, provide trust graphs, interest graphs, etc.

You can just slurp up and score whatever might interest you. Your agent or algorithm might do pre-filtering against your preferred heuristics to downsample to relevancy.

You could write any client for this in any shape or form. Completely different look and feel for different people and interests / focuses.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#113

Post by jchw »

Zambyte wrote: post #105
jchw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

> 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. Bluesky users can interact with Blacksky users and vice versa unless Bluesky has applied moderation to the Blacksky user, because they are decentralized via ATproto. ~Twitter~ X users cannot interact with users on any other applicati…

> Bluesky users can interact with Blacksky users and vice versa unless Bluesky has applied moderation to the Blacksky user, because they are decentralized via ATproto.

Yes and I find it rather egregious that you can pay (a lot) to self-host a full stack then still be locked out of the majority of the audience of an entire "decentralized" platform by a single centralized entity.

For all of the problems with ActivityPub defederation, at least with ActivityPub you have:

- Many options of places to go in the Fediverse, with a wide spread of different ideologies and approaches to moderation.

- The option to feasibly self-host your own instance that is completely independent. You can be blocked by the major instances still, so they still have the ability to moderate just the same. However, as far as I know no AP server has more than half the active users of the whole network, which is a much more robust split.

It's true that Bluesky architecture enables something like Blacksky to exist. But if there were just two independent ActivityPub hosts and one of them was many multiples the size of the other the protocol would've been declared a massive failure for good reason.

And as far as I know the Fediverse mobile apps and clients are agnostic to your instance, so the apps don't have any influence over what you're able to see. Isn't this what is expected from something that is decentralized?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#114

Post by danabramov »

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…

Well, the whole point of atproto is that the social graph also lives in the “blogs/RSS” part. The apps just index it.

So in this analogy, anyone would be able to bring Google Reader back to life or compete while using that same graph.

That’s actually how http://leaflet.pub works now if you’re curious.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#115

Post by danabramov »

echelon wrote: post #112
embedding-shape wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its U…

All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a comm…

The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps.

Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps.

But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and others.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#116

Post by cavoirom »

danabramov wrote: post #79
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 economi…

> What's expensive is if the app you're making is a fully capable copy of Bluesky itself with gigabytes of existing posts

This is the implicit idea in my comment when I said it's expensive. If Bluesky banned me and I could not find another AppView with comparable reach and audience, I lose, the ban is effective.

Another problem is ATProto users don't usually associate then with an AppView the same way Mastodon users associate with the instance, it's hard to raise fund to sustain the infrastructure cost.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#117

Post by [deleted] »

4lx87 wrote: post #87

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 tho…

[deleted]

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#118

Post by small_scombrus »

danabramov wrote: post #42
toomim wrote: post #10

AT does have instances. They are just grouped differently. In BlueSky, there is only one single "AppView" instance in the entire network. There is one instantiated "Firehose". Each user can instance his own "PDS". In ActivityPub/Mastadon, the instances are "sender's server" vs "receiver's server." The difference isn't that there aren't "instances" in AT proto. It's just that the instances are segmented differently.

Sure, there are servers, but the different grouping is the whole point because they're not coupling hosting to apps. When people say "where are Bluesky instances", they're asserting that it's useful to run many copies of the Bluesky database server. My article is an attempt to show that this way of thinking is very Mastodon-brained because these "instances" are the only unit of decentralization that's available in Ma…

You're treating Mastodon as the protocol here, and sure it's a combined frontend/backend, and it is the most used one, but its just one implementation of the AP protocol. You can plug your favourite AP app/frontend into any Mastodon instance.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#119

Post by danabramov »

Groxx wrote: post #110
danabramov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If atproto app goes down and it’s open source, anyone can put it back up with all public data intact. Even if it’s not open source, anyone who wants to write the code can still get it back up with all public data intact. I think it’s a substantial difference with “takes the whole thing down”. Can we acknowledge that?

if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own. > "But where are all the Bluesky instances?" I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto . there are no other i…

I’m speaking about the hypothetical situation where an app is blown from the face of the earth, not temporarily goes down. I thought that’s what the parent discussion was about. I’m not sure what we’re discussing now.

All I’m saying is that if a developer forever takes down some atproto app, another developer can put up a new app that shows the old app’s data because the data is actually inside the users’ repositories. This is similar to how if Microsoft ever discontinued Word, you could still open Word documents in Google Docs. Does that make sense?

Re: Blacksky, they do fully run on their own infra now. So it doesn’t depend on Bluesky’s database.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#120

Post by Vinnl »

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 felt the same: when folks ask this question they might not be using the correct terminology, but what they actually want to know is how many different PDSes (that's what you mean by "atproto hostings", right?) there are in a typical feed.
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