131–140 of 327 posts
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If that becomes a massive problem - host a relay with different moderation policy.
The scale-down floor for running an ATProto relay or appview is much, much higher than the floor for running a fediverse instance.
If it quacks like a duck... An account has a single Personal Data Server (PDS), right? The DID links to a PDS which is the canonical data feed for a user, and where a user's writes go. Data can be replicated but the PDS is treated as canonical. That's much closer to client/server architecture than distributed architecture. There's no P2P database. There's no writes into a DHT or peers. You write to your PDS, then tho…
Yeah sure that’s a fine way to phrase it. It’s not what most people who talk about Mastodon mean by “instance”. In Mastodon, “instance” is a coupled and inseparable data hosting + app + community + moderation pairing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that becomes a massive problem - host a relay with different moderation policy.
The scale-down floor for running an ATProto relay or appview is much, much higher than the floor for running a fediverse instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a comm…
The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps. Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on S…
And maybe that's a good thing.
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> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its U…
All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a comm…
I think the analogy presented here is broken. RSS doesn't depend on Google Reader at all. Even at its prime, RSS depended less on Google Reader than email depends on Gmail now. In ATProto, AppViews heavily depends on Relays to be useful, and Relays are quite expensive to run. Also, the yellow circles which represent blogs in the RSS illustration are really not of the same nature as the same circles which represent po…
> Relays are quite expensive to run While relays are among the more intensive parts of AT Protocol infrastructure, their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. What is truly expensive and difficult is something that will be immutably so regardless of how centralized or decentralized you are: moderation. The author of this piece wrote about this common misconception abou…
Your definition of "most people" must be very different than the literal meaning.
Yes, and this is exactly why ATProto is worse and more dangerous. Instances are safer. precisely because they are more genuinely decentralized. The ability to forever tie your stuff to a person, strongly, is exactly what the surveillance state would want. Mastodon's model gives you plausible deniability. It's safer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing by plausible deniability you mean that ActivityPub essentially forces you to shred your old account if you need to move instances? Apart from the fact that AT also doesn't impose a "one DID per human identity rule" (yet?), allowing you to move between AT identities and PDS instances as much as you like, there's no hindrance to anyone that really wants to track your account movement between AP accounts of they even slightly want to do so. By default ActivityPub leaves a little entry on your old account saying "the person behind this account move to instance so-and-so", which is what allows you to migrate your followers with you in the first place, but that leaves just as much of a trail than your DID moving from PDS to PDS, and if you want that message to not be there, giving you said plausible deniability, you're just back to creating fresh accounts every time, just like AT.
I mean I think it's hard to say that one platform is better than the other in that regard because the platforms are really really similar to each other from a broad perspective. If you take ActivityPub, break up the concept of an instance into one part that keeps the data and one part that shows the data, scrap the usernames in favor of random IDs, and stick a few more services in between, you've already arrived at the AT protocol, the oversimplification aside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps. Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on S…
> You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. And maybe that's a good thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its U…
All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a comm…
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This sounds like BlueSky without the user-directed self and grouped moderation tools. That’s not censorship. It’s showing you the door if you’re a jerk. And it sounds awful.
I'm pretty sure this comment is not written by AI, but those last few sentences really really made me think it is. It's a little sad that this type of antithesis now always has this AI-written connotation to it. "That's not you cheating. It's you looking for emotional fulfillment. And frankly? That's courage."