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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#171

Post by tptacek »

I've wondered for awhile why someone hasn't started the Blogger.com of ActivityPub/Mastodon: 1 "instance" per person, no weird complicated group dynamics, the service handles all the technical details, the user draws from the same cohort as the people who signed up for Blogger blogs in the early aughts.

If there are advantages to ATProto over ActivityPub in this kind of deployment setting, they don't seem clear enough to offset the weird corporate parentage; like, I can see how Mastodon keeps chugging along no matter what companies get sold to who, but I don't see how ATProto survives the death of Bsky.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#172

Post by weare138 »

The AT Protocol has a federated network architecture, meaning that account data is stored on host servers, as opposed to a peer-to-peer model between end devices. Federation was chosen to ensure the network is convenient to use and reliably available. Repository data is synchronized between servers over standard web technologies (HTTP and WebSockets).

https://atproto.com/guides/overview

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#173

Post by neko-moe »

shimman wrote: post #155
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relays are quite expensive to run While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation. The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception abou…

$30 a month is a pretty massive costs for such a program. Why does it require such a beefy VPS, is it just the initial bootstrapping that requires such resources?

Because if you want to relay every single public event for every single user on the entire atproto network in real-time to many consuming apps and services… that's gonna cost something. Not that it costs a lot, but to expect what a relay does to be infinitely cheap is to not understand what it's doing or why it's doing it.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#174

Post by kyle-rb »

dbingham wrote: post #153
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relays are quite expensive to run While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation. The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception abou…

"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay. And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first pl…

I view Bluesky as being decentralized-optional. It's cool because you actually can join first and wrap your head around it later. You can continue using your account you created on the fully 1st-party stack, and you still have the option to switch to self-hosting the parts you care about, without losing your posts or followers.

- If you just want to use your domain name as a username, you set a DNS record.

- If what you care about is the client, you can build your own website or native app. You don't really even need to host a server other than for your own static assets, since the app can request Bluesky network data directly via the logged-in user's PDS (they even have CORS headers!)

- If what you care about is data sovereignty, you can self host your PDS (personal data server) on a low-end VPS. It's cheap because it pretty much just holds your data, passes events to Relays, and proxies data requests to your preferred AppView.

- If what you care about is not needing to trust Bluesky to reliably gather and collate events from each PDS, then you'd need to host a Relay ($30/month) and an AppView (even more expensive) so you'd be best off pooling resources with other people you trust. But that's kind of the nuclear option.

- With a narrower scope though: if you noticed that Bluesky was censoring a handful of legitimate accounts and you still wanted to follow them, I think you could probably have a personal Relay+AppView that only listens to the censored accounts' PDS's, and proxies other requests to the 1st party AppView. (I'm not 100% sure if that would be allowed.)

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#175

Post by danabramov »

1dom wrote: post #81
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…

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 i…

In Mastodon/AP, different instances talk to each other which creates the scale problem you’re mentioning.

AT doesn’t have this kind of issue even without Relays. This is because PDS never talks to another PDS so there’s no quadratic growth of edges. PDS only talks to apps, and there’s limited amount of apps on the network. And end users hit apps which cache stuff, so apps tend to take the user traffic hit.

Relays are helpful more on the app side because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them.

I didn’t dive into Relays in the article because they’re kind of a “next obvious optimization” but not really inherent to the model. There are other models like apps hitting shared backlink caches (like Constellation). Relay isn’t fundamental in the way hosting and apps are.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#176

Post by Klonoar »

ramblurr wrote: post #136
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relays are quite expensive to run While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation. The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception abou…

> their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. Your definition of "most people" must be very different than the literal meaning.

If $30 a month is too much for you, then you probably should be doing something other than trying to run a relay. It is just not a significant amount of money.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#177

Post by shimman »

neko-moe wrote: post #173
shimman wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$30 a month is a pretty massive costs for such a program. Why does it require such a beefy VPS, is it just the initial bootstrapping that requires such resources?

Because if you want to relay every single public event for every single user on the entire atproto network in real-time to many consuming apps and services… that's gonna cost something. Not that it costs a lot, but to expect what a relay does to be infinitely cheap is to not understand what it's doing or why it's doing it.

[dead]

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#178

Post by Zambyte »

jchw wrote: post #113
Zambyte wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ActivityPu…

> Yes and I find it rather egregious that you can pay (a lot) to self-host a full stack [...]

I wrote this other comment that I think does well to address this misconception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601998

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

And an account tied to exactly one of them, that is a pain to migrate if it's even possible with the ActivityPub application you use. This causes decision paralysis and dissuades most people from even considering joining.

> 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.

Within what is effectively a rounding error, everyone that uses ActivityPub uses Threads. Blacksky is definitely a larger percentage of the ATProto network than mastodon.social is of the ActivityPub network.

> 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.

True! Just like if there were hypothetically only two ATProto applications, that would not be very interesting. I think I've used four or five ATProto applications with my identity? Pretty cool stuff!

> 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?

There is nothing in the protocol enforcing this and this expectation has been broken in the past.

https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2224

This is in addition to the fact that "clients" in ActivityPub extend to the monolithic instance itself, and therefore is also broken by the very "defederation" you already mentioned!

---

I am very familiar with ActivityPub. I don't hate it. I ran multiple instances for years (one for my friends, and one for my family). ATProto is simply more flexible (allows applications to scale up to provide an experience that one would expect coming from centralized applications) and easier for non-technical people to use. And it's decentralized, which is awesome.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#179

Post by wolvoleo »

danabramov wrote: post #119
Groxx wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

Yeah I'm kinda waiting for this. I don't like to join bluesky because I want it more decentralised but I can't join blacksky because it's only for black people.

I'm kinda hoping someone sets up a rainbowsky or something for us in the LGBT community. Now that I would join.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#180

Post by krapp »

wolvoleo wrote: post #179
danabramov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I'm kinda waiting for this. I don't like to join bluesky because I want it more decentralised but I can't join blacksky because it's only for black people. I'm kinda hoping someone sets up a rainbowsky or something for us in the LGBT community. Now that I would join.

The obvious question is, which group gets dibs on "redsky?"
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