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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

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

#111

Post by bombcar »

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)

I have every post made on BlueSky up to a certain point last weekend and it's only 3 GB.

I have every email I've ever received or sent (and not deleted) and it's only 4GB.

Should something require I download all that every time I login? No. But having a local copy is amazing, and a truly federated system should have and even be able to depend on those.

The Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke; the only enforcement is to remove the server from the list of signup servers; which if it just fell over dead because the admin died/doesn't care/got arrested/got a job will not matter.

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

#113

Post by jbc1 »

pfraze wrote: post #55
lapcat wrote: post #46

> "Additionally, if a Bluesky server goes down, their way of keeping access to your data is by storing all of it on your device!" This seems troubling, if it's accurate. [I've edited the above quote to remove some all-caps and exclamation points.]

You'll store it on your own device, or on another service. I don't understand this criticism; where else do people back up their data?

People might be imagining it as something tightly coupled with the application rather than a data file you can just backup anywhere. Could be worth chucking a "store your profile on your own device, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, or your preferred file storage solution" somewhere.

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

#114

Post by zimpenfish »

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)

As of my last Twitter export, I had 54425 tweets and the tweet data comes to 110M. But there's also 2G of media files that goes with it.

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

#115

Post by tsimionescu »

laserbeam wrote: post #107
jazzyjackson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The discussion here was about archiving each user's tweets on their own client device - this is where the 55k was brought up as a problem. I still think it's a low number, even if it includes plenty of images.

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

#116

Post by sph »

tsuujin wrote: post #94
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 think it’s important to say this: I think asking questions is great, and I’m glad that we’re not just taking statements at face value because making social suck less is a worthy goal. However, you are coming across as highly adversarial here. Mostly because you immediately follow your questions with assertions, indicating that your questions may be rhetorical rather than genuine. I’m not accusing you of anything pe…

Whether on Twitter or Mastodon, people deep into that type of social network love TO SHOUT LIKE THIS to get likes or boosts.

It is why passersby like me can't get into either Twitter or Mastodon when it is a culture of getting outraged and shouting at each other, to collect a choir of people nodding and agreeing in the replies: "well done for saying it like it is."

These people forgot how humans talk and have arguments outside of their Internet echo chambers.

Anger, insults and hate sells more (creates more engagement) than reasoned arguments. No one would have posted this on HN if is was otherwise. So don't worry, they are not hurting their chances, the next topic that can be summarised with an angry title like "xxx is the most obtuse crock of shit" will get great traction on HN.

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

#117

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low.

It happens all the time. mastodon.social, the oldest and biggest Mastodon instance, has filled up with cached ghost profiles of users on dead instances. Last I checked, I could still find my old server in there, which hasn't existed for several years.

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

#118

Post by afiori »

eropple wrote: post #62
justguessing7 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post alleges Bluesky pull based, which would imply it's like RSS but with signatures: > It uses pull-based federation instead of push-based like Mastodon. I was hoping they would employ both: push and pull. Some scenarios I could imagine pull being more efficient, and sometimes push. For instance if I run my own server I don't need to be pushed all content when I sleep. However when I return it could do pulls and…

There are likely scenarios where some level of push-based comms will be necessary, as I understand it. Direct messaging, for example, seems like it'll require pinging a server to pull an asymmetrically encrypted message, or similar.

DMs are not a planned feature of this protocol

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

#119

Post by afiori »

groestl wrote: post #25
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.

Well, rebasing is definitely not a must when using Git.

Rebasing is how the AT protocol handles deleting posts

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

#120

Post by jrmg »

renahlee wrote: post #59

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

I suppose there are exceptions, but through my career (and life), I've found that negative blustering hyperbole like that is a pretty good indicator that I should not take the criticism (and usually the criticizer) very seriously.
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