I didn't write this for the HN crowd, but here we go anyway: https://gagliardoni.net/#20250818_battle_of_socials Happy to correct any factual inaccuracies.
I think that your description of ATproto relays is a conflation of the role of an AppView (or backend) in ATproto and a Nostr relay. Relays (by default) are not designed to be a permanent archive of content, and are really meant as content streams for backends to ingest and index appropriately. The storage cost is also overestimated, as people have begun to host third-party variants of the Bluesky AppView (which is p…
Introduction to AT Protocol
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Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that your description of ATproto relays is a conflation of the role of an AppView (or backend) in ATproto and a Nostr relay. Relays (by default) are not designed to be a permanent archive of content, and are really meant as content streams for backends to ingest and index appropriately. The storage cost is also overestimated, as people have begun to host third-party variants of the Bluesky AppView (which is p…
Thank you for the detailed reply, your points make sense but many of these are, I think, too technical for the intended audience of my blog post, and do not change my overall impression of BlueSky. I will see if I manage to incorporate some of your points in a more digestible way, but reading the blog post you linked (which I didn't know, thanks) confirms my fears: 18 TB and 200$/month to run an instance which is bas…
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I would also say that the protocol is much less mature than ActivityPub or Nostr, but the rate of progress that I've seen is pretty rapid (compared to APub at least, Nostr is also a rapidly-developing protocol but its harder for me to track its progress as there's no reliable source for protocol updates that is not on Nostr afaik) and with the active developer community surrounding it I firmly believe that most of these issues will be solved within the next few years at worst. Zeppelin has also progressed on bringing back some of these missing features, as video processing and chat have been introduced to the AppView (albeit proxied through Bluesky's services so it's a moot point).
There's an important distinction to make between AppViews and an APub instance, which is that AppViews handle solely the application portion of the user experience while APub instances typically manage the entirety of the user's experience. As a result, ATproto users can hop between any AppView without any lock-in to a specific AppView provider as their accounts aren't bound to their existence (which means that anyone can switch from using the Bluesky AppView to the Zeppelin AppView with little difficulty (or any other AppView)), while users on the Fediverse cannot easily do the same (applications can authenticate with a Fediverse account to confirm their identity but there are limits to what you can do, such as federating with the identity of that user). They're also not designed to be closed/single-user instances, mainly because the PDS handles the role of user management and platforming users and is where most of that responsibility is placed at. In regards to active usage, enough moderation controversies have happened with Bluesky Social's policies to the point that a small (at this moment) market has opened for a Bluesky with truly user-controllable moderation, and that Zeppelin will be one of the main products to serve that market. The costs also aren't that large compared to some of the larger Mastodon instances, so for the amount of content that it's storing it could be way worse (mstdn.social saved 180 euros when moving to another server apparently but there's definitely other examples of Mastodon unnecessarily ballooning instance costs as it grows in scale, because it's bloatware compared to what's out there. mstdn.social is also a fraction of the activity size of the ATproto network's output on off-peak hours, so eh).
I will say that this isn't a core attribute of the Fediverse, the base protocol is only slightly less extensive and modifiable than Nostr as projects like ActivityPods and "nomadic identities" (over a decade old!) exist which can perform a similar role to an ATproto PDS but with the Solid protocol but it's seen little adoption due to the lack of focus towards implementing "next-gen" features like these in the current set of APub server software.
Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#113Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
email has come a long way with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and its cool that anyone can purchase a slice of the global namespace that is transferable between providers, but AFAIK the biggest road block to using email in a distributed self sovereign way is reputation and getting your messages delivered to google and outlook users partially because of the nonstop spam. Do we have any new tools to prevent spam in a post-email…
There’s a fairly direct route to solving this with email. The problem that needs to be solved is that knowledge of an email address is the only thing needed to send to it. Introducing recipient consent as an additional requirement solves spam and phishing. The first email a sender sends to a recipient has an attachment that serves as a request to email them for a specific purpose (e.g. human:human, mailing list, tran…
Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a fairly direct route to solving this with email. The problem that needs to be solved is that knowledge of an email address is the only thing needed to send to it. Introducing recipient consent as an additional requirement solves spam and phishing. The first email a sender sends to a recipient has an attachment that serves as a request to email them for a specific purpose (e.g. human:human, mailing list, tran…
If I comment here, would I be giving anyone who reads the comment consent to reply? Or maybe I'd give me consent key to hackernews and then it would give it to whoever wants to reply that has a valid account?
Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#116would love fb marketplace disruptor on atproto
Re: Introduction to AT Protocol
#117If you want to find other apps that are using Bluesky and ATProto we run https://blueskydirectory.com for that. Feel free to add any apps you find to it!