Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There are no instances in ATProto

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 327 posts

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#291

Post by rimunroe »

kuschku wrote: post #283
danabramov wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we’re just ideologically misaligned here. I think every single little community hosting a copy of every single app is insane, and not where I’d like to end up. It’s like the extreme end of the spectrum compared to centralized Web 2.0. I think atproto’s ethos falls somewhere in the middle — community is mostly a “soft” primitive, and there’s only so many full-scale “copies” of some app as there are strong opinio…

> Maybe we’re just ideologically misaligned here. I think every single little community hosting a copy of every single app is insane, and not where I’d like to end up Well, it's where we used to be — and it solves most of the issues of the modern web. Forums, blogs, IRC, teamspeak, gaming servers, etc, it all used to work relatively well with that approach.

I don’t think the problem I want solved here is replicating forums, blogs, IRC, Teamspeak, or gaming servers. I want something a lot like Twitter but with some way to take my stuff and leave if an asshole takes control. I don’t want Mastodon, because from what I’ve seen of it when friends link me stuff from it it’s extremely clunky and slow. Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#292

Post by krapp »

tptacek wrote: post #289
krapp wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally just set up a Mastodon server and only have a single user. That's what I do, and as far as I know it's the only solution. 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 t…

Right, my point is, someone should stand up a service, like Blogger did for blogs, which were also trivial for people like us to set up and run on our own. The thing there is it destroys the objection people have about having to find and fit in with a particular Mastodon server community. It also makes Mastodon look more like the original blogosphere and less like Twitter, which is a good thing.

There are services that do exactly that. Masto.host is the one I use.

It is just an entire Mastodon instance with one account, though.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#293

Post by cavoirom »

kuschku wrote: post #282
danabramov wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can trivially host an appview for your atproto app on your own. I have a hobby atproto app, and I host an appview for it. I mean — an “appview” literally just means “a server with a database that ingests stuff from the network”. It’s not some mysterious thing or some concrete distribution. It just means you’re aggregating stuff into your database. It’s just as cheap as hosting any webapp. But what you’re asking i…

Say bluesky is applying content moderation techniques I disagree with. What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor: How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice? > To make the comparison fair Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atp…

> And every blue-stodon instance would have to scrape every single PDS. So it's a much much worse O(n²) issue, isn't it?

They could rely on some relays to build their AppViews. The flexibility is already there.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#294

Post by danabramov »

kuschku wrote: post #282
danabramov wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can trivially host an appview for your atproto app on your own. I have a hobby atproto app, and I host an appview for it. I mean — an “appview” literally just means “a server with a database that ingests stuff from the network”. It’s not some mysterious thing or some concrete distribution. It just means you’re aggregating stuff into your database. It’s just as cheap as hosting any webapp. But what you’re asking i…

Say bluesky is applying content moderation techniques I disagree with. What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor: How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice? > To make the comparison fair Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atp…

> What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content?

You can’t “get” the majority of the people to see anything, that’s not how anything works. Neither on centralized systems, nor on Mastodon, nor in real life.

On a centralized platform, if you get banned, there are no steps you can take. Your account is down — goodbye.

On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your account is banned on the instance — your entire identity goes down with it.

On atproto, it depend on whether you’re banned at hosting or app level.

If you get banned at hosting level (usually something clearly illegal would trigger this), you’d have to find another hosting (assuming apps haven’t banned you too).

If you get banned at an app level, people will see you through different apps. You’re right that this presupposes that there are apps that (1) people use, that (2) haven’t banned you, (3) and that display the same type of content.

But, even if you’re looking from solely censorship resistance perspective, atproto at least enables competition in moderation space to happen. If enough people disagree with the lens, it is possible to build a an alternative lens over the network.

This isn’t theoretical — there was a situation like this where a person got banned at Bluesky app, but the Blacksky community wanted to reverse the decision. When Blacksky got an independent app database running, they overrode it. But yes, this does require investment and a subset of community being interested in alternative moderation / features / etc. You can’t “force” people to hear you but there’s a market for alternatives.

> How do I build a relay that fetched all content from people I follow, plus all replies to those posts (no matter who sent them), plus automated backfilling if I click on the profile of someone who I'm not following yet?

The realtime part is trivial. You just filter the stream of everything as it comes in.

Backfill would either require you to index the network yourself or to rely on existing indexes. You could use Constellation (https://constellation.microcosm.blue/) to fill up threads (query by thread root ID), and you’d hit the user’s PDS to fill up their profile page.

You could actually see that in practice now at https://reddwarf.whey.party/ which my article links to. It’s a Bluesky client that doesn’t have a server at all (and doesn’t hit Bluesky API). It’s lazily getting stuff on the client purely from PDS’s and from Constellation. It’s a bit slower than an appview-backed experience but it works fine.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#295

Post by zoul »

danabramov wrote: post #196
allwashedup wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#296

Post by kuschku »

cavoirom wrote: post #293
kuschku wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say bluesky is applying content moderation techniques I disagree with. What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor: How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice? > To make the comparison fair Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atp…

> And every blue-stodon instance would have to scrape every single PDS. So it's a much much worse O(n²) issue, isn't it? They could rely on some relays to build their AppViews. The flexibility is already there.

I feel like you're missing the point of a decentralized protocol if at every step you suggest to use centralized services instead.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#297

Post by kuschku »

danabramov wrote: post #294
kuschku wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say bluesky is applying content moderation techniques I disagree with. What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor: How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice? > To make the comparison fair Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atp…

> What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? You can’t “get” the majority of the people to see anything, that’s not how anything works. Neither on centralized systems, nor on Mastodon, nor in real life. On a centralized platform, if you get banned, there are no steps you can take. Your account is down — goodbye. On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your acc…

> On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your account is banned on the instance — your entire identity goes down with it.

You're constantly looking at it from the wrong perspective. I don't care about the instance I'm on banning me because I am the one that hosts my instance.

What I care about is that I am able to connect with any of my friends without the data going through any central arbiter that can decide what we get to see or not.

And on mastodon, if one instance defederates from me, pretty much everyone else will still be able to interact with me anyway, it's not the end.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#298

Post by kuschku »

rimunroe wrote: post #291
kuschku wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we’re just ideologically misaligned here. I think every single little community hosting a copy of every single app is insane, and not where I’d like to end up Well, it's where we used to be — and it solves most of the issues of the modern web. Forums, blogs, IRC, teamspeak, gaming servers, etc, it all used to work relatively well with that approach.

I don’t think the problem I want solved here is replicating forums, blogs, IRC, Teamspeak, or gaming servers. I want something a lot like Twitter but with some way to take my stuff and leave if an asshole takes control. I don’t want Mastodon, because from what I’ve seen of it when friends link me stuff from it it’s extremely clunky and slow. Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a hug…

Twitter became a global phenomenon with the same UI and an even slower ruby on rails implementation behind it, despite the constant fail whale.

> Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.

As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#299

Post by cavoirom »

franga2000 wrote: post #241

TL;DR: people complaining why there aren't bluesky instances are misunderstanding atproto. There are no "instances" like in Mastodon, atproto is different, it uses many "hostings". Except those hostings are just instances of the hosting software. And there in fact aren't that many. But you're just Mastodon-brained, you don't get it!

Compare to the number of users, that is not many, but still more than 3000.

https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#300

Post by dminik »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #267

The OP's article and replies in the comments here seem like someone who's comparing an idealised view of what Bluesky could be versus a cynical view of what Mastodon currently is. This troubles me because it overlooks the massive problems with Bluesky as it currently exists. It is hyper-centralised, much more so than Mastodon ever was. Virtually all users have their data stored by Bluesky PBC, aggregated by Bluesky P…

Not much different from threads then.
Post reply on HN