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I was right about ATProto key management

notes.nora.codes

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Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#151

Post by swiftcoder »

Angostura wrote: post #90
mschuster91 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think is wrong about Mastodon? The same problems as always. Allow federation and you get... - federation wars and moderators conducting these wars using their own users as hostages - I left Mastodon years ago when some particularly dumb morons decided to do bitchfights regarding Israel / Palestine. No I'm not interested in your pointless squabble, but I do care when I suddenly don't see posts from a bun…

Sounds like you want to run your own private instance. That way you control your own moderation and federation policies

And then you are also on the hook to be a sysadmin (including all the legal aspects thereof). That's generally a bit much to ask of someone who just wants to chat with their friends online.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#152

Post by account42 »

bramhaag wrote: post #12
wmf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.

I think most Bluesky users were happy with a centralized Twitter as long as the people running it were ideologically aligned.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#153

Post by glenstein »

account42 wrote: post #128
glenstein wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of cri…

This is a flawed argument. If someone wants X they don't need to also support Y just because it's closer to X than other alternatives.

It's not a logical syllogism. And I would hope you have more to say about the coherence of a position than that it's merely not forbidden by logic, which is something less than an affirmative defense of its coherence and its motivations. It's about the perfect being the enemy of the good. "Well it's not forbidden by logic" is about as pathetically empty handed as it gets, in terms of accounting for which battles you're picking.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#154

Post by h3half »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #58
perching_aix wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts . I'll be very surprised. I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'…

There is no ambiguity that needs further clarification, I am talking about the words as written. Their entire message clearly conveys they believe there is an objective design standard that everyone should strive to adhere to, and they are criticising a website for daring to deviate from their ideal standard as though it were an objective flaw and not a matter of personal preference. > getting upset over blatantly su…

Subjectivity is implied. You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made. Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.

And as has been pointed out, you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact (i.e. that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#155

Post by dxdm »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #148

OMG that website's font choices, good god, my poor eyes

Well-deserved criticism. The colors, too. Without reader mode, this is the equivalent of someone shining a high beam into your eyes at night while trying to communicate with you.

This is the kind of thing I click away from unless there's a strong outside signal that the content is worth engaging with.

I hope the author reconsiders these stylistic choices. I'm sure they lose readers because of it.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#156

Post by squigz »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #54
perching_aix wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to them. They shared their opinion.

No, they asserted their opinion as a fact. There is a world of difference between "I prefer x" and criticising something while asserting "everyone should do x (because I prefer x)".

One should not have to preface every single thing with "In my opinion" or some variant for you to realize that that's what they're talking about.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#157

Post by dxdm »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #25
vog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.

> Form should follow function, not the other way around. According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

> According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

It's a well-known design principle to not impede the intended function of things by giving them a form that distracts from it. Of course you can deviate from that, especially if you want to make a point of some sort.

However, I presume they publish their writings so they will be read by others. Making this hard will reduce their audience.

If they are making this trade-off willingly, good for them, I suppose. But maybe they're so smitten with the style that they do not realize how hard to read it is.

There's also a point at which the form gets so bad that it starts to disrespect the audience. Again, that can be on purpose, but it might be unintentional.

This being a personal blog, it's not unreasonable to expect that a main purpose of it is communication. I think it's warranted to draw attention to the fact that its design gets in the way of that goal, big time.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#158

Post by dxdm »

tptacek wrote: post #42
Dwedit wrote: post #15

"View -> Page Style -> Basic Page Style" is required to read any of the text.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd like to add to my sibling comments that this blog's design is so atrocious for its readability that it deserves to be called out.

In fact, I'd like for such a comment to be at the top here, so that I can decide to avoid following the link until I have read enough comments to determine whether it's worth it.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#159

Post by bccdee »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #106
anon7000 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is designed the way it is because of scale. How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Bsky is designed so that the microservices themselves can be decentralized and so multiple different types of apps can be built on the same protocol/infra. Obviously, it’s early days, and hopefully there is even more experimentation in the p2p space. But at…

> How do you make a p2p app that can handle hundreds of millions of posts per day without beefy servers helping? Presumably by fusing the P2P and federated models together. There's no particular reason those two models can't coexist within the same protocol. It just hasn't been created yet. Similar to how a good mesh networking implementation will make use a high bandwidth backhaul such as the internet if it's availa…

ATProto may be the closest we'll get to that. PDSes are granular enough to serve individual users, and you can (theoretically) pull from a relay and index only posts from users you're interested in for your appview, if you're hardware-limited. Relays are fungible and pretty lightweight themselves, so you're not depending too much on any central server.

But people don't want to run an always-online server to send their stuff to peers, so they host it on the main bsky servers. The problem with p2p is UX; people don't want to DIY their server.

Re: I was right about ATProto key management

#160

Post by bccdee »

direwolf20 wrote: post #131
galactus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub supports a less compelling user experience for many people: you only have a partial view of the network (you won’t see all the replies to the posts of people you follow on other servers), no global search, etc

This is how offline social networks work, and it might be fundamentally the only way social networks end up working. If each instance can't filter what it receives, then spam is too easy. If every message is globally flooded, the system scales as O(N^2) and is easily vulnerable to DoS.

AT solves these problems. Even if AT turns out to be a bust, they have an excellent architecture.
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