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Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

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Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#61

Post by account42 »

danabramov wrote: post #56
1shooner wrote: post #3

>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future. I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?

>that also runs the only viable instance? This is a category error. There are no "instances" in atproto. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ It segments the network differently (into "hosting" and "apps"), and on both axes anyone can run their independent app-agnostic hosting, as well as an independent hosting-agnostic app.

This "gotcha" might get cheers from your fellow AT proto fans but only eye rolls from everyone else.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#62

Post by danabramov »

chowells wrote: post #24
kmeisthax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances . Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky". When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView ; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critica…

Bluesky has a data store, handles account authorization, and runs a web app that provides a UI to access the backend services. That's an instance, whether they call it one or not. Refusal to admit this is obfuscation for reasons I cannot understand.

The reason is that "why aren't many people running Bluesky instances" is a loaded question — it presupposes that's something you should expect. But it's like asking "why aren't many people running Google". It's expensive to store billions of posts!

This is usually compared to Mastodon, but it's not apples to apples since "running a Mastodon instance" always mean a tiny partial view of the network. You can do a partial view of atproto too for the same cost, it's just not very interesting because what's the point? Every app can "see" the entire network (unlike in ActivityPub) so there's a lot less motivation to create these fragmented views into it.

I've already linked elsewhere, but I've written an article on precisely this topic, curious to see if this can clarify it for you: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so...

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#63

Post by danabramov »

hack1312 wrote: post #18
kmeisthax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances . Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky". When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView ; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critica…

> I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration. This is exactly where I’ve landed re: ATProto. If you actually want to self-host everything you lose one of the biggest draws of it, the migratable IDs. I was looking into it to build an alternative to Threads/IG/TikTok for one of my hobby co…

I don't know what you mean by this. You absolutely can self-host all your data on your own. And if you also don't want to rely on PLC for identity, you make a `did:web` identity, and then you're completely decoupled from Bluesky-operated infra.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#64

Post by danabramov »

isodev wrote: post #21
1shooner wrote: post #3

>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future. I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?

Nothing Bluesky does is really independent. This is such a transparent playbook and yet folks keep falling for a couple of open source repos and whatever hot takes Dan Abramov posts to reframe “instances” to “open social” bs.

If you have concrete counterarguments to what I said in my articles, I would be happy to debate these counterarguments here.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#65

Post by account42 »

herrkanin wrote: post #28
nar001 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean? As in you can run different instances or as in it's a false open protocol?

ATProto is closer to how RSS works than ActivityPub. In the same way talking about "RSS instances" makes little sense, the same goes for "ATProto instances".

Even if that was the case, Google Reader's death almost took RSS with it so the concern remains valid.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#66

Post by wwalexander »

danabramov wrote: post #56
1shooner wrote: post #3

>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future. I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?

>that also runs the only viable instance? This is a category error. There are no "instances" in atproto. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ It segments the network differently (into "hosting" and "apps"), and on both axes anyone can run their independent app-agnostic hosting, as well as an independent hosting-agnostic app.

[flagged]

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#67

Post by wwalexander »

danabramov wrote: post #55
eqvinox wrote: post #25

Cool people use ActivityPub. Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when.

>Cool people use ActivityPub. ActivityPub solves a completely different (arguably, smaller) set of problems. This is like saying "Cool people use email instead of web". I have a few diagrams here that may help see just how different they are: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so... >Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when. Yeah, which is why atpro…

The author of this comment is an engineer at Bluesky.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#68

Post by danabramov »

account42 wrote: post #61
danabramov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that also runs the only viable instance? This is a category error. There are no "instances" in atproto. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ It segments the network differently (into "hosting" and "apps"), and on both axes anyone can run their independent app-agnostic hosting, as well as an independent hosting-agnostic app.

This "gotcha" might get cheers from your fellow AT proto fans but only eye rolls from everyone else.

I don't mean it as a linguistic gotcha ("ha, you said instances! but we call them something else"). I'm saying this is a category error because the network topology is different. This is like saying that web is not free because people aren't running Google-scale indexes in their garages.

Tried to clarify this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932956

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#69

Post by danabramov »

wwalexander wrote: post #66
danabramov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that also runs the only viable instance? This is a category error. There are no "instances" in atproto. https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/ It segments the network differently (into "hosting" and "apps"), and on both axes anyone can run their independent app-agnostic hosting, as well as an independent hosting-agnostic app.

[flagged]

I haven't worked at Bluesky for over a year now. I'm genuinely excited about the protocol, and have written a bunch of things about it while I had free time between jobs. (Ironically I had no time to write about it while at Bluesky because I was too busy working around React Native bugs.)

>it's impossible to actually participate in Bluesky using an alternative relay

I don't know what you mean by this. https://blacksky.community/ is definitely running their own relay. Here's a community listing of some relays: https://atproto.at/relays.

Here's an example of connecting to one of them: https://pdsls.dev/firehose?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Feurope.fireh.... From an app's perspective, they're completely interchangeable, so as an app developer you can switch to any relay you want, or run your own.

Many apps don't even use a relay at all, instead relying on caches like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/.

Re: Bluesky Trademarks ATProto

#70

Post by trial3 »

wwalexander wrote: post #67
danabramov wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cool people use ActivityPub. ActivityPub solves a completely different (arguably, smaller) set of problems. This is like saying "Cool people use email instead of web". I have a few diagrams here that may help see just how different they are: https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/#so... >Single vendor owned & controlled standards always turn out badly, just a question when. Yeah, which is why atpro…

The author of this comment is an engineer at Bluesky.

this is no longer true as of a year ago. also “the author” is dan abramov lmao
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