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

The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 493 posts

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#101

Post by sevenlake »

pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

"We _thought_ that this would be a quiet, stealthy beta for us while we finished the technology and the client"

Then maybe don't invite journalists onto your Quiet Stealthy Beta!!!

I hope you get rest, work is not that important

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#102

Post by tazjin »

renahlee wrote: post #59

There was no reason for that toot to be that aggressive :(

The tone of that whole thread in combination with posts like

> Imagine if I had to store the 50k+ tweets I've made on Twitter on my device, and upload ALL of them to a new server whenever a community server went down.

doesn't make this person seem particularly competent. I'm getting a vague feeling that this is normal discourse on Mastodon though, and that not using social media much shifts your personal overton window for what is acceptable communication until you essentially don't overlap with the very online crowd anymore.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#104

Post by ameliaquining »

pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

I would definitely be curious for elaboration on what requirements the project had that weren't met by OpenAPI or gRPC or Cap'n Proto or Apache Thrift or any of the other existing things that solve this general category of problem.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#105

Post by im_dario »

rektide wrote: post #3

> It turns out using Git, which is almost always used with a centralized 'remote', to do federation, which needs to be weakly consistent, IS A BAD IDEA!!!!! Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? I want to take this critiques here seriously but there's not a ton to grasp onto. It definitely didn't feel great that AtProto built from bare ground, reinvented json-schema & OpenAPI for no…

It doesn’t really use Git, but it has Git semantics. They borrowed some basic concepts (repository, commit, etc).

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#107

Post by laserbeam »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #74
epicsponge wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) theyre tweets, how much could they cost? @ 280 bytes each, that's like 15MB. double it for cryptographic signatures and reply-to metadata. is that really too much to ask for the capacity to transfer to another host at anytime? (also, leaving aside the fact that 55k tweets puts you in the 0.1% of most prodigious users)

How did we get to 55k tweets being a nightmare for any social media platform?

A quick search got me to twitter stats from 2013 when people were posting 200 billion tweets per year. Thats 5-6 orders of magnitude more. You don't get a 10000x improvement just by federating and hosting multiple nodes.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#108

Post by raggi »

solarpunk wrote: post #79
lapcat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue. This has actually happened. It's a real problem. For example, "Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html As far as I'm concerned, the Mastodon Server Covenant…

there's also a trend of most servers not even being compliant with the 'covenant'

Y’all should see the dead letters in the publish queues from dead indie servers of which thousands have gone offline but whose addresses will get looked up forevermore

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#109

Post by codetrotter »

capableweb wrote: post #16
barathr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My limited understanding of the problem about git as the basis for user data storage is that it then would expose the complexity of git rebasing and the rest via federation. Git is great with a centralized remote (like I believe the original post is getting at) but less so in a federated setting.

Rebasing and similar operations are only a hassle because multiple authors can edit the same files, so you end up with conflicts. In the scenario where every authors can only change their own files, you can avoid those sort of conflicts, as they'll never happen. Remaining is how to solve files referencing other files (in the case of a federated social media, posts that are replies to other posts) which are way easier…

> every authors can only change their own files, you can avoid those sort of conflicts, as they'll never happen

A single author can still run into these issues with git if they use multiple devices.

Can the same happen in this social media network for a user that uses the same account on their phone, their tablet and their computers?

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#110

Post by brundolf »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> That's equivalent to Gmail storing all of your emails on your device in case you want to immediately pack up and move to another email provider. That is an extremely high cost (I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) for an outcome that is very unlikely.

If your identity is separate from your Gmail account (as it can be with a custom domain, for email and for bluesky), this seems like a very plausible and desirable thing to be able to do. Just recently there was an article about how Gmail is increasing the number of ads in the inbox; for some people that might change the equation of whether Gmail's UX is better than it is bad. If packing up and leaving is low-friction enough, people might do it (and that would also put downward pressure on the provider to not make the experience suck over time)

And that's not even getting into things like censorship, getting auto-banned because you tripped some alarm, hosts deciding they no longer want to host (which has happened to some Mastodon instances), etc.

Post reply on HN