151–160 of 409 posts
I really dislike that BlueSky named their protocol the "AT protocol" [1], when we already have the AT command set which remains important [2]. [1] https://atproto.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_AT_command_set
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running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?
How about DNS on a blockchain?
Loved the breakdown of a topic I wasn't familiar with. I just can't help but think that the whole ethos of Open Social Media is misguided. I think that social media isn't good for us -- not just because of the big companies making it worse, but because the technology itself doesn't promote health. It feels like trying to make cigarettes open-source. Sure you can stick it to big tobacco but at the end of the day you'r…
1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them? Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now that you aren't allowed to move your account? This isn't some hypothetical scenario, this already happened before. A lot of social medias started off with fairly open features and APIs and slowly choked them out for profit.
2. Users don't really care about protocol, they care about momentum and userbase. Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin are all popular-ish Reddit alternatives using AP. It was already a struggle to reach a point where posts could get over a hundred comments a day, how are you going to convince people to move to another platform again? I'm worried this will just end in splintering an already niche community and cause people to just give up and go back to using popular platforms.
Being able to move accounts is a very neat feature but it's not a reason enough to move. You can already export your settings and make an account on another instance in 20 seconds then import your settings again, which would bring back your subscriptions and blocks and all you set up from account 1. To me it's not a huge deal.
See also: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
[1]: A fediverse Reddit alternative, e.g https://lemmy.world/ and https://programming.dev/ . See also Piefed which I think is better nowadays https://piefed.social/
Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.
Thanks! I’m glad it’s clicking. The comparisons with AP are always frustrating for this reason as it doesn’t try to do anything similar in scope.
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So mysterious, so edgy. Hope you at least feel better, because you've utterly failed to communicate a coherent idea.
It’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to…
No I think it's predicated on creating a product that people like to use. That's the Step 1 that OSS zealots miss when they focus entirely on these niche lofty ideals. I highly doubt the average Instagram user is yearning for - or would even be enticed by - a version of that same experience that has a lower exit cost.
That's the problem with these Twitter clones. "It's just like Twitter, but RESPECTS your data ownership" is not compelling. Just create a freaking compelling and original user experience (the actual hard part that made the big platforms successful) and secretly do whatever you want on the back end.
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Are you trying to run a parallel network, or build on top of the existing one? "run our own atproto instance separately from Bluesky" sounds like you want a fully parallel network, but that should be pretty rare to need or want, so I'm not sure that's what you actually mean. An "atproto instance" isn't exactly a thing.
I’d prefer running our own thing separate from bluesky. We’d give people something like username.page.app and they’d make posts there. If people wanna follow on bluesky they can, and we provide a username that’s just the url. I know we can do all this by just posting to Bluesky. But I want to give usernames, host the data on our end, and I’d prefer using the protocol but not be directly associated or dependent on Blu…
> or dependent on Bluesky.
If you want to take this to an extreme, and are uncomfortable with how did:plc has not yet moved into its own org, then you'd want to also run your own plc server, etc. The problem with doing this is:
> If people wanna follow on bluesky they can
You lose this. Because you're now not running on the main atproto system, but instead a fully parallel one of your own.
Anyway, you could start on this by running a PDS via the reference implementation here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds and then building your own appview (application).
You could also take a look at Blacksky's implementation https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky and if you end up using it, consider throwing them a few dollars. Alternative implementations are super important!
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I mean, this might depend on who your intended audience is? As perhaps pie-in-the-sky my desire is, I'd like to see one of these things replace twitter (as opposed to smaller communities.) And it seems to me that the more frictionless model is the one that looks like something people are used to; just "sign up with a thing." That does leave the interconnection to the servers and others, but that may be how it has to…
Bluesky is incredibly just "sign up with a thing." Except even easier, because you don't have to pick an instance first.
Offloading THAT mentally to a different "service" or "account" I think is easier than this all-in-one thing.
Again, I like the IDEA a lot; if you'd presented it to me like in 2000 before a lot of this stuff took off I would have been all about it.
Today? No, I think it's reasonable to offload that to so-and-so-dot-com, each as a separate account. Like the phrase "I have a facebook" always sounds weird to ME, but I think that's "the way."
I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse 1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance o…