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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#101

Post by NoGravitas »

WorldMaker wrote: post #38

Google Reader feels like an ominous pick for an analogy. Sure, RSS survived the Google Reader shutdown, but not all the communities that used RSS (many that still don't know what RSS is) survived. It feels almost "Freudian" to claim a thing is decentralized and then by analogy keep pointing to a massive (social) centralization of a decentralized ecosystem as a good thing. But especially one that we already know the e…

Ominous, but accurate. Imagine RSS but you couldn't use a desktop or mobile RSS reader, but only Google Reader or a comparably scaled clone.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#102

Post by pfraze »

skybrian wrote: post #37

An important distinction is that blogs have their own websites and they're not required to publish full articles in their RSS feed. Bluesky doesn't normally work that way - everything in the PDS gets replicated. They are also encouraging people to put put full blog posts in the PDS for easy replication. So, anyone who wants to index it gets a copy and you have no control over what they do. You don't have to do it tha…

Honestly that’s just as much because atproto is a raw data protocol. Putting an http frontend on an atproto account is something we encourage and a lot of folks do. I do that on pfrazee.com for instance, and my leaflet blogposts (which are canonically on atproto) render on my blog.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#103

Post by NoGravitas »

jchw wrote: post #72
danabramov wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). So their account only works when seen thorough the Blacksky app. What is a better solution you’d like to see? I think it’s reasonable that there’s a market between these and if there’s enough demand, another app server can become popular. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be…

> I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of, and obviously, it will not be applicable to the vast majority of people. Given the rising cost of hosting combined with the fact that the compute needs of running appviews and relays should theoretically only go u…

Yep. Effectively, there are a low single digit number of ATProto "instances" - they just pull posts from a more decentralized data layer than Fedi instances.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#104

Post by dokyun »

tao_oat wrote: post #84
dokyun wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On fedi there are several distinct pockets apart from the mastodon crowd which although don't dominate in raw headcount have their own flavour and unique view of the network (in 2nd place is "dark fedi", which has more shitposters, hackers and free speech adjacents; there's also a contingent of Japanese users mostly on Misskey instances). What I get out of AT is that this wouldn't really happen, since the content dis…

In AT you also get communities, in the same way that twitter had weird twitter, black twitter, and so on. But because you, by design, don't really see what PDS people use, it's more fluid. I personally think that this actually leads to healthier communities but that may be a matter of taste!

Yeah, I mean a big reason why Fedi is segmented the way it is, is because the Mastodon crowd has a lot of merited and unmerited prejudices against the other parts of the network, and put a lot of effort into splitting it with centralized blocklists. The W3C working group that works with the AP spec (which refuses to cooperate with credible people representative of projects like Pleroma) is now looking to adopt a centralized moderation model similar to Bluesky's. It's one of the issues with the instance model, even though users have the tools to shape their own view of the network, to not have to see things they don't like, instance admins still get to dictate who they're allowed to talk to and what they see. I don't think that's right, even if the reasons are justifiable.

The guy who runs FSE (one of dark fedi's more notable instances) has written a lot of good blog posts on his side of the technical and social details, his one about running FediList is a good picture of the type of one-sided politics involved (and, if you're into the technical stuff, is rich with that too): https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/about-fedilist.htm...

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#105

Post by Zambyte »

jchw wrote: post #72
danabramov wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). So their account only works when seen thorough the Blacksky app. What is a better solution you’d like to see? I think it’s reasonable that there’s a market between these and if there’s enough demand, another app server can become popular. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the apps shouldn’t be…

> I mean, this literally already happened (a person was banned, and Blacksky reversed that ban on their app server). Blacksky is literally the only such example of alternative infrastructure that I know of, and obviously, it will not be applicable to the vast majority of people. Given the rising cost of hosting combined with the fact that the compute needs of running appviews and relays should theoretically only go u…

> It kind of sounds like you're admitting that there is no real difference from a user standpoint with browsing to twitter.com vs bsky.app that have anything to do with decentralization.

Bluesky users can interact with Blacksky users and vice versa unless Bluesky has applied moderation to the Blacksky user, because they are decentralized via ATproto. ~Twitter~ X users cannot interact with users on any other application, because X is not decentralized.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#106

Post by danabramov »

INTPenis wrote: post #34

ATproto sacrifices true decentralization for consistency, Mastodon and AP does the opposite, sacrifices true consistency for more accessible decentralization. At least that's how I understand it, because running an AP node is much more accessible to regular selfhosters than running one of those content relays in AT. So all you'll ever "decentralize" in AT is your own data, it's more about owning your data rather than…

I think that’s a part of it but doesn’t state it fully.

AT doesn’t just give consistency, but a shared data model across apps. So apps can reference and render content from other apps. It’s really kind of like a web of typed JSON. Different apps are lenses through which you can see the same network. Anyone can build new experiences on top of old data. There’s nothing remotely equivalent in AP.

AP couples data to apps. In AT, it’s more like there’s one global database with entire world’s data that every app can query.

I don’t understand why the discussion always bumps into Relays. Running a Relay if you want to is cheap-ish ($30/mo) these days. There’s multiple existing ones (Bluesky or community) you can use for free. And many apps don’t use one at all and rely on community indexes like Constellation (https://constellation.microcosm.blue/). Some don’t even run their own server or database.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#107

Post by pfraze »

timbray wrote: post #17

ATProto is an interesting protocol and there is lots of room to argue about its plus and minuses (and about Fedi/Masto's), but lots of people are already doing that so I won't. My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more powe…

It doesn’t fully resolve your concerns, but I do want to highlight that atproto now has an IETF working group to home its spec development

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#108

Post by pfraze »

danabramov wrote: post #63
JoshTriplett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PLC governance and maintenance is being spun out into a Swiss organization ( https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org ). Longer term the idea is for it to have a similar role to ICANN. And since that sounds like a massive centralization problem, how do we have a dozen more of them with independent governance that aren't all controlled by either the same legal entity or by whoever has legal leverage to compel that…

Well, I think you also need to consider what PLC is. It’s an open source implementation of an open source spec. The implementation holds zero private state and exposes a verifiable log of operations for audit. There’s ongoing work on mirrors and replicas. Also, its output itself is cryptographically self-verifying. I get that it’s not ideal but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s not much you can mess up…

I’d also call out that activitypub has the same threat model in the form of ICANN, as it’s also heavily dependent on DNS for identity. I believe these are reasonable trades to make; realistically the alternative is to use a blockchain, which few people are keen to do.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#109

Post by threetonesun »

danabramov wrote: post #80
threetonesun wrote: post #77

I feel like the charts could be clearer if they showed the primary user experience difference between RSS and AT/AP, which is how do the arrows flow for Bob's response to Cat's post. I understand it fairly well for AP, I don't think I actually get it for AT.

I have a different article that goes into this here: https://overreacted.io/open-social/#open-social Also here: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/#links TLDR: at the hosting layer, it's like links, but in JSON. Links can refer to other person's repo (even if it's hosted somewhere else). And then apps index everything, so they can present a coherent aggregated view (like a post thread).

Hah, well that's my bad for not reading articles I've saved, after reading those I remembered Puzzmo mentioned this recently and they, of course, got inspired by that second article: https://blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2026/03/02/atproto/

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#110

Post by Groxx »

danabramov wrote: post #100
Groxx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a comparison they are directly inviting, by constantly claiming it's decentralized. And then its defenders get upset when people rightfully point out that there is only a single instance, because that single instance going down takes the whole thing down. Like in Google Reader.

If atproto app goes down and it’s open source, anyone can put it back up with all public data intact. Even if it’s not open source, anyone who wants to write the code can still get it back up with all public data intact. I think it’s a substantial difference with “takes the whole thing down”. Can we acknowledge that?

if mastodon.social goes down, people would rightfully say that mastodon.social went down even though it's open source and anyone could run their own.

>"But where are all the Bluesky instances?"

I agree that it doesn't mean "atproto went down", and I don't mean to imply that. but "bluesky went down" is completely accurate, and bluesky is the one claiming to be decentralized due to using atproto. there are no other instances in bluesky's network, only partial ones (blacksky, last I heard they were still working on a major piece?), hence the "no it's not" responses. and that's also how they're directly encouraging people conflating the two.

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