Previous discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33252108
At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since others starting intercepting and eavesdrop on non-authenticated traffic, it got a lot less comfy to do so though. It's not like people are adding encryption to stuff for the fun of it.
it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it
Of course not, the context here is ATProto which literally stands for "Authenticated Transfer Protocol", and it uses other protocols than just http/tls, so of course there are other ways :)
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since others starting intercepting and eavesdrop on non-authenticated traffic, it got a lot less comfy to do so though. It's not like people are adding encryption to stuff for the fun of it.
it seems the parent comment isn't referring directly to encryption / TLS, but building everything on top of HTTP / HTTPS, which seems to be the default abstraction these days to build on top of.
I agree, it is always HTTP nowadays. The Librecast project [0] is doing interesting R&D around multicast and social networking, and has been / is being funded by multiple NLnet grants over the years. I think they have plans to use ActivityPub to demonstrate their work. Current active project is LibreCast Studio, a collaboration environment. The linked video on the page is a very interesting watch.
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#14I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)
I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#15Blog post about this new site from February might shed some light: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#16How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#17How common is it to host your own PDS? It's not really clear to me what the advantages/disadvantage are.
It is not common, but it is becoming more common: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#18I didn't understand what this was until I did some more digging around. Apparently, it's a decentralized way to interact with social media. A protocol created by Bluesky which allows social networks to communicate directly. This is similar to how different email clients like Gmail and Outlook can send messages to each other.
Yes, but to nitpick slightly: the focus of this protocol is to let people use their own data with social media sites. It might not matter much while the site is active, but separating data ownership from the site makes moving platforms in the future much, much more feasible. Data like posts, friends lists, block lists, likes, comments, etc.
Obviously, this was informed by people's experiences with Twitter, especially the early power users who built strong communities and then felt trapped.
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#19The summary of what this is about is:
"Atproto is a big-world open social protocol. Users publish JSON records into repositories. The changestreams of those records then sync across the network to drive applications."
It's too bad that information isn't on the front page. You have click "GET STARTED" and scroll down
Re: At Protocol: Building the Social Internet
#20I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)
I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.
That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.