241–250 of 327 posts
But you're just Mastodon-brained, you don't get it!
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I'm one of those "is it decentralized yet" people and to me the real concern is the AppView since I assume that's where censorship would be applied if it ever happens. People keep telling me about PDSes but I don't care about controlling my PDS if other people can't see my posts .
> I don't care about controlling my PDS if other people can't see my posts. Isn't that similar with Mastodon? Someone on an instance that does not federate with yours will not see your posts, and I guess someone on an instance that would censor you would not see your posts? That someone would have to change instance if they disagree with the moderation, and doing so is more painful with ActivityPub than with ATProto,…
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…
If you’re asking about moderation, it works similarly as you’d expect it to work in a everything-RSS world. At the hosting level, the hosting you use will likely ban you for clearly illegal stuff. Same as blogspot dot com or Cloudflare could ban you for certain things. At the application level, application admins/mods would moderate as any app does. This is similar to running any web service today with user generated…
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I don’t know what you mean by “instances” here. Leaflet ( https://leaflet.pub ) is one of those “blogger on atproto” things — is that what you mean?
Literally just Mastodon servers, like Hachyderm, except for a single user.
A "lite" version of Mastodon that dispensed with all of the complexity involved with managing multiple accounts and was optimized for a single user might be nice but with a hosted account you're paying for data storage (which Mastodon seems horribly inefficient with) so in practice that extra complexity is moot.
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How is it any different than a centralized social media service then? Merely the fact that you can get a firehose from the website in a standard format? This was already the case with HTTP. The problem is that websites can leverage their power to make a locked-in ecosystem. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 twitter, etc once had a much more open API. so did reddit. This was just the first stage of their…
Sure, you could say it’s a set of conventions on top of what you’re describing — that imo is sufficient to shift the incentive picture. It’s a firehose of typed JSON that’s canonically stored at URLs that survive hosting changes and can link to other JSON. It’s signed and verifiable and links to other JSON. So the new thing here is that if everyone’s data exists in this format, the competition between apps is guarant…
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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'm one of those "is it decentralized yet" people and to me the real concern is the AppView since I assume that's where censorship would be applied if it ever happens. People keep telling me about PDSes but I don't care about controlling my PDS if other people can't see my posts .
Migrating to a different App View should be painless in theory (app views are not supposed to collect any state that is not saved in the PDS, not sure if Bsky does or not), and you can use multiple app views with one PDS. On Mastodon, you have to migrate both at the same time, and moving content across instances is not yet a fully solved problem.
ATproto sacrifices true decentralization for consistency, Mastodon and AP does the opposite, sacrifices true consistency for more accessible decentralization. At least that's how I understand it, because running an AP node is much more accessible to regular selfhosters than running one of those content relays in AT. So all you'll ever "decentralize" in AT is your own data, it's more about owning your data rather than…
Mastodon also has content relays! But really, I actually would argue the opposite: ATproto is (or at least, wants to be) more decentralized. In the ActivityPub world, identity, application, and hosting are intrinsically linked. If I want to use Lemmy, I can either register a second, permanently separate ActivityPub account on that Lemmy instance, or ONLY use Lemmy to the extent my Mastodon instance knows how to send…
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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'm one of those "is it decentralized yet" people and to me the real concern is the AppView since I assume that's where censorship would be applied if it ever happens. People keep telling me about PDSes but I don't care about controlling my PDS if other people can't see my posts .
Concrete example: Bluesky banned a person, and Blacksky community disagreed with that ban. When Blacksky switched http://blacksky.community app to have its own complete stack (including its own database), that person’s posts became visible there (despite them being banned on Bluesky app) because they reversed that moderation decision. This was possible because the data for this person’s posts still lives on their PDS.
In general, the data being “pulled outside” products is what enables new products (or forks of products) to come onto the scene and immediately begin competing because they don’t have to solve the “cold start” problem. If you log in, all your stuff is “already there”. And it’s the same shared world so the community doesn’t get forked. You’re just looking at the same underlying data under a different lens, and products act like lenses rather than boxes.
This doesn’t mean that “censorship” can’t exist (every layer can ban you, as always) — but it means that every layer of the stack has opportunity for competition that isn’t possible with centralized platforms. In fact, arguably, it’s more flexible than a Mastodon instance because you can’t fork a Mastodon instance “with all its users” and offer a version that reverses some moderation decision. In atproto, you can.
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 enoug…
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> 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 Google / Apple walled gardens don't make it any easier, but even without them, the fundamental issues of battery life and intermittent connectivity don't disappear, walled gardens just force you to design around them instead of hiding your head in the sand and pretending they don't exist.