51–60 of 99 posts
The intention is good. I like the reviews idea. Since the author has hit the limitations of ATProto, could ActivityPub be an answer?
I doubt it, since you'd own your data even less as a user than with ATProto. (stuck to a server without the ability to fully move backlinks, data, and identity to another. at least all those things stay the same when you move between PDSes!)
What's even the point of publishing anything online any more if you don't hope to become an influencer? The nature of the game has changed, and now does everything possible to discourage it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't even get paid to be in this cult, that's how organic it is
Apologies if "worship" came across as calling you a cult, but it doesn't seem that you took what I said too seriously either. Good luck on ATProto, certainly don't want to deal with this kind of replies from you or Dan every time criticism or concerns come up, maybe once the protocol leaves BlueSky, but let me guess, it's planned for some point in the far future like every other concern?
ATProto and its advocates increasingly sound like all the crypto-based decentralized platforms that failed. The difference is that crypto people actually had reasons to run nodes, they got paid to, while ATProto expects enthusiasts to do so for the love of the game or act like bluesky and have 99% of the "decentralized" platform on a centralized node. It never catches on with application developers because it require…
We don't even get paid to be in this cult, that's how organic it is
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apologies if "worship" came across as calling you a cult, but it doesn't seem that you took what I said too seriously either. Good luck on ATProto, certainly don't want to deal with this kind of replies from you or Dan every time criticism or concerns come up, maybe once the protocol leaves BlueSky, but let me guess, it's planned for some point in the far future like every other concern?
Seriously, the entire separation of Bluesky from ATProto not happening is my main reason for not trusting it at all. You can't have a protocol owned by a for-profit entity and seriously call it "open"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've followed the ATProto space (and seen you around the space) a bunch over time, and honestly for the private data portion of it, I'm quite bearish on the idea of an ATProto shaped thing winning here. I do think "small social" is winning in almost every definition of the word. There's Discords for everything, each non-technical person I know is in 10s of group chats, folks on Instagram or Twitter seek their "commun…
strong agreement here > Ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social. For me, it is less about the technical reasons and more about the movement away from corporate control to community ownership. The desire among people is there because the growing shared belief that what we have today is not healthy for our self or society. One thing Bluesky nailed was simplicity for the average user. UX is super…
I think you need someone to build out a good UX more than anything else. They who builds the UX will win the spoils IMO. There's plenty of protocol prior art to bolt on underneath the fact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
strong agreement here > Ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social. For me, it is less about the technical reasons and more about the movement away from corporate control to community ownership. The desire among people is there because the growing shared belief that what we have today is not healthy for our self or society. One thing Bluesky nailed was simplicity for the average user. UX is super…
Agree that you need a well designed protocol, but I think for small social, we're drowning in good protocols. A lot of the issues with ActivityPub, for example, come about because of socializing In the Large. Once you're just hanging out in a community it doesn't matter if someone trips and bans you or deletes all your messages; this is par-for-the-course for small social drama. What makes AP so fraught for large sca…
Will definitely "distill" several ideas from them tho! I maintain a space on my chalkboard for it.
I've been building a board game community on ATProto. The idea revolves in trying to build the feeling of local clubs but online, instead of "PLAY NOW" being on the landing page (although you can play now if you want) it's organized around clubs. I also wanted to move away from one game oriented community. I play Go and Chess and I would love clubs to be for mixed games. You can create leagues, or tournaments, etc. A…
How do you prevent a player from manipulating game state outside of the app view? There is a subgroup in the Atmo working on games, have you found them yet?
So far they are mostly trusted authority rather than peer systems. But, since each player owns their own PDS state, one could perhaps just hash the previous state they are working off of. That can at least detect if a game is consistent/agreed to by both sides, allow one player to detect the other's tampering.
Luke's feedback on the permissioned data proposal is pretty interesting. The current proposal has a kind of locational element to permissions, where a record's URI reflects the access control, and I can understand why that would be jarring. I'm talking with the team about whether we think that's something that could change, and what a change like that would cost. We're still in the collecting feedback phase so it's g…
a meta-note that i think deserves attention: we never ever seen such a level of engagement around a social media protocol as this. count the number of mastodon protocol discussions that have happened, or dispora, or activitypub. they exist as background. matrix maybe comes close if you look at raw count anywhere, but i'd say has no-where near the visibility, doesn't surface/emerge into the public. atproto is succeedi…
Luke's feedback on the permissioned data proposal is pretty interesting. The current proposal has a kind of locational element to permissions, where a record's URI reflects the access control, and I can understand why that would be jarring. I'm talking with the team about whether we think that's something that could change, and what a change like that would cost. We're still in the collecting feedback phase so it's g…
a meta-note that i think deserves attention: we never ever seen such a level of engagement around a social media protocol as this. count the number of mastodon protocol discussions that have happened, or dispora, or activitypub. they exist as background. matrix maybe comes close if you look at raw count anywhere, but i'd say has no-where near the visibility, doesn't surface/emerge into the public. atproto is succeedi…
Speaking as the CTO at Element (and proj lead for Matrix), i feel like i've spent a bit too much time coming to chat about Matrix on HN over the years ;)
That said, I agree that Bluesky is doing well in terms of breaking through into mainstream awareness - much more so than Matrix (although obviously big-world-social-media is something of a different beast to distributed-instant-messaging).
The reason Matrix hasn't done better here is primarily economic: we spent too much time and money building out Matrix for everyone in the early days... and not enough time focusing on building either consumer (as Bluesky has) or enterprise or government specialised products. We then got traction at Element on the government side of things (https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe etc) as it turns out governments love their digital sovereign communications - which in turn meant that in order to get sustainable and survive we had to focus hard on building stuff for that market. Now, ideally the stuff which works for Govt would work for mainstream too (after all, we're generally competing with Signal and WhatsApp, which are of course mainstream apps) - but in practice it has been hard to get that balance right. You can see my TED Talk FOSDEM 2025 talk about the road to mainstream matrix here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk
Meanwhile, the plan on Matrix is to get to profitability via Govtech and then invest the money back into improving Element (and Matrix) so it also works well for mainstream usage - so hopefully we'll get back on the radar then. It's a long haul though. Meanwhile, kudos to Bluesky for getting to focus on the mainstream use case; I'm jealous, and I hope they find a good sustainability model!