Blogs are also hosted on instances, similar to the Mastodon diagram. The only difference is that the reader aggregator doesn't necessarily have to run on the blog host instance.
There are no instances in ATProto
121–130 of 327 posts
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#122Earlier 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…
Both Blue Sky and Mastodon are that, if you squint.
(NOT ATProto and ActivityPub. Those are platonic ideals of protocols which have no real-world implementations. ActivityPub, especially, was obviously designed by architecture astronauts.)
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#123I really want AT to succeed.
It seems to be the nexus of federation + https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#124Earlier 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…
blacksky does now run the entire stack themselves
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#125If 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…
Yeah sure that’s a fine way to phrase it. It’s not what most people who talk about Mastodon mean by “instance”. In Mastodon, “instance” is a coupled and inseparable data hosting + app + community + moderation pairing.
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#126Earlier 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…
> Web pages aren’t digitally signed, aren’t necessarily indexed by search engines
Neither of these prevent scraping, and the lack of the first one actually makes it worse because every scraper has to go to the original server and bog it down instead of getting it from anyone with a copy of the data that they can verify using the signature.
> there are ways to block bots with things like captchas
These don't work if you have anything resembling high value content, because AI can solve them now or do the same proof of work as a real user when all they need is to get a few hundred articles once. If they want it enough they can also pay someone in a low income country to download them manually. Fundamentally if you post something that any human can access then someone can copy it. Public is public.
And if the content is the equivalent of blog comment posts, they can probably still get it, but in that case why even care if they do? Notice that this is the same thing that happens on the centralized services, e.g. Facebook uses your Facebook posts to train AI.
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
Can they? 99.8% of the Blue Sky app data is hosted on the Blue Sky company servers.
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Based on my understanding, PLC is centralized primarily because there needs to be a global, authoritative source of truth for the current state of a given plc. You could in theory namespace a plc to a particular directory instance with a backwards reference or something, but I don't think it buys you anything when in theory you can just choose to trust a different PLC directory at the read/application layer if you really need.
At the end of the day, truly fully decentralized systems are literally impossible, there's always a centralized aspect (at least for bootstrapping) and it's usually DNS-shaped.
That being said, PLC directories are a problem that blockchains (yuck) actually solve very well: trustless, public ledgers. I would not be surprised if we see a separate implementation based on an architecture derived from such systems.
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Currently, just over 3000: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses
Re: There are no instances in ATProto
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’ repositorie…
it's somewhat similar, yeah. minus the part where bluesky itself is by far the majority host of people's data. that puts it more in the realm of "Office 365 Online + OneDrive storage" than "Word" - a lot of people will lose a lot of data, though something resembling it can be started up again. and people with backups (their own PDS) will just move to OpenOffice for a bit.
Blacksky finishing their full forking does finally give them a much stronger leg to stand on for "bluesky is decentralized", though.
PDSes are great and I really wish Mastodon would support something similar. Mastodon's lack of account portability / data ownership / lightweight hosting is a massive issue.