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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#181
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

OK, but that raises a question. Can I do that right now? If so, I don't understand why more people are doing this. When I looked into this I definitely didn't see anything like this.

> 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.

I like the concept of W3C DIDs, but it's a little soured for me that there was no real solution to the PLC DID problem. It is, quite literally, the exact opposite of being decentralized. (IIRC they do support one of the other DID methods, but it's not default, and I couldn't figure out how.)

Which seems like a common theme. You can absolutely fix the downsides of the Fediverse, it just requires you to reduce how decentralized the network is :)

> 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.

While this is technically correct, Threads is not widely considered an instance in the Fediverse and is missing in "instance lists". Threads is less like a part of the Fediverse and more like a centralized social media service service that supports interoperability with ActivityPub.

> 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!

This is cool but not relevant. I'm more specifically talking about Bluesky vs the Fediverse here, when referring to the protocols. Obviously there are also uses of ActivityPub that are not Mastodon/Misskey as well.

I haven't seen another ATProto application that I found interesting enough to try yet.

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

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

I never suggested it was literally impossible for someone to do it... but the concept of a "Mastodon" app is inherently agnostic to the instance in a way that Bluesky's apps are not.

> 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!

Sure. I'm suggesting you can't actually have decentralization without the possibility of all of ActivityPub's downsides. You can't use technical means to fix the social problems with decentralization; you can only defacto centralize things.

> 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.

ATProto is decentralized, at least to some extent.

Bluesky isn't really, though.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#182
This blog does a great job of explaining the architecture. In practice though I’d thought the “problem” was that Bluesky (the corporation) runs the main app and hosts almost all of the user data.

So at the protocol level it’s decentralised, but in practice the system is still very centralised (in terms of who controls it).

Not saying this is necessarily Bluesky’s fault, but it’s how things have played out so far right?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#183
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

I hope it's shepherds

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#184

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.

https://northskysocial.com/ might work for you!

You can have an account on Northsky and use it with Blacksky's appview!

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you then not be able to see replies from anyone besides the dozen accounts your relay follows too? If I run a personal Mastodon instance and someone replies to one of my posts, their instance will send it directly to mine and I'll see it. My understanding of the ATProto architecture is that it doesn't support directed messaging like that.

The cost for consuming the firehose of the entire network is very low. So the actual cost that can blow up is storage and computation. If you want to filter for events based on some heuristic (e.g. only from follows of server list), you can do that. You can then specialize that further. E.g. for ongoing threads that already pass your filter, you could add their IDs to an array, and accept all replies for those thread…

To refer back to the comment I was replying to: is that the sort of thing you could realistically run on a raspberry pi? At home?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#186

This blog does a great job of explaining the architecture. In practice though I’d thought the “problem” was that Bluesky (the corporation) runs the main app and hosts almost all of the user data. So at the protocol level it’s decentralised, but in practice the system is still very centralised (in terms of who controls it). Not saying this is necessarily Bluesky’s fault, but it’s how things have played out so far righ…

There are other apps, other user data hosting (including personal hosting), and other backend services.

It is decentralised in both theory and practice.

The only thing you could potentially say is that because Blue sky run the biggest parts, it's not decentralised at the community or mind share level, but that's changing.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#187

This blog does a great job of explaining the architecture. In practice though I’d thought the “problem” was that Bluesky (the corporation) runs the main app and hosts almost all of the user data. So at the protocol level it’s decentralised, but in practice the system is still very centralised (in terms of who controls it). Not saying this is necessarily Bluesky’s fault, but it’s how things have played out so far righ…

The "problem" is that people are looking for problems. This "problem" isn't specific to Bluesky, ATProto, or anything else. Look at any organization: profit, non-profit, group of volunteers, etc. and you'll always find someone that folks have a problem with.

I'm not an investor and have no conflict of interest with Bluesky beyond being one of the earliest of users. I also understand the protocol, the company, the website within my own limitations.

The site (and app) works just fine. Folks are really focused on finding problems rather than coming up with bigger and better solutions.

Note: the majority of folks don't want an ad-hoc p2p solution like lemmy or mastodon. they want their content in one place, and they want to be able to hold that entity accountable. Because of this, p2p social networking will never take off. I've seen more drama surrounding both Lemmy and Mastodon than I have ever seen with twitter, reddit, facebook, etc. combined.

That's my 2 cents. Also, apparently my spouse feels the same way. So do my friends.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#188
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical problems give way to philosophical differences but the over-arching problem is that the people behind ATProto really want to make a social media ecosystem that attracts lots of average people who will refuse to understand that the solution you're giving them can't do things Twitter could do back before Musk bought it. People get angry enough at Bluesky not having an edit button, and it's at least possible t…

You can switch to the AppView from https://mu.social/ and you'll get editing working.

mu.social is a "client".

An "AppView" is the API server that most clients connect to that aggregates data from the network and serves it in a more useful way. mu.social still uses bluesky's AppView (api.bsky.app).

The name is confusing. I thought clients were appviews myself for a while.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#189
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I wrote this other comment that I think does well to address this misconception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601998 OK, but that raises a question. Can I do that right now? If so, I don't understand why more people are doing this. When I looked into this I definitely didn't see anything like this. > And an account tied to exactly one of them, that is a pain to migrate if it's even possible with the Activ…

You're refusing to look at the ATmosphere network and instead compare Bluesky to the Fediverse. I can instead compare mastoson.social to the ATmosphere and draw the inverse conclusions. What's the point?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> architecture astronauts Not sure how I haven't heard this one before, but I'm stealing it. Salient descriptor.

Even has a wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

Joel's post was the genesis https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Salient indeed!

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