Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There are no instances in ATProto

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 327 posts

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#161

Post by danabramov »

dbingham wrote: post #153
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay. And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first pl…

This isn't about "average user". Relays have nothing to do with using atproto as a user. They're about developers making new apps.

By "most people" it's implied we're talking about most people who want to run a web app in their spare time. Do you mean a different definition? If you want to run a web app (which is the only reason you'd want a relay) and you're able to pool with ten other developers who want to do the same, you can make the cost to $3/mo. Is that feasible? What do you normally pay for web app hosting?

And again, if you're a hobbyist developer, you'd just use a community relay that already exists and is free. I assume that, if you want to run your own, you have a specific reason to do so.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#162

Post by snailmailman »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #60
tao_oat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?

I think the centralization on mastodon.social is a bit over estimated. According to fedidb.com there are over 1.1M active users in the fediverse. Of these mastodon.social has about 273k. That means mastodon.social has about 1/4 of the active users. The rest are scattered over nearly 43k servers. So I'd say the fediverse is pretty decentralized. That would make it pretty resilient.

This is the real strength of ActivityPub compared to ATProto. I follow a lot of accounts on mastodon, and only a handful of them are on mastodon.social. Globally though looks like 1/4 of the accounts are there.

If the instance goes down, the network stays up and continues to work, minus only the accounts on mastodon.social. This is not the case on bluesky afaik. They got DDosed a few months ago and the whole network was down because of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802330

In ATProto there aren't 'instances', and its technically 'decentralized' but theres really only bluesky.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#163

Post by skybrian »

ramblurr wrote: post #136
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> their cost of operation is still something most people can afford: approximately $30/mo now. Your definition of "most people" must be very different than the literal meaning.

How about, less than what many people pay for a tank of gas?

Most people won't do it, but they don't have to, and it's not a particularly expensive hobby.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#164

Post by knotbin »

dbingham wrote: post #153
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay. And I honestly think this is one of the fundamental problems with the push back towards protocols and decentralization. We're overestimating the bandwidth and capabilities of the average user and we haven't fixed the problems that pushed everyone towards centralization in the first pl…

> "Most people" cannot afford $30 /month. And of those who can, most of those cannot afford the time and effort required to run a relay.

??? that's not the point. the goal isn't that some non-technical 40 year old will run their own relay. the goal is that relays will be cheap enough to run that there can be hundreds of relays for developers of apps to choose from.

relays are DEVELOPER facing only, meaning the developer of the app chooses which to use, and can even use none at all and build the functionality of the relay into their app itself.

no matter where your account is hosted, it will be crawled by every relay (unless it's banned from some of them) so users or people who "don't have the bandwidth to think about this" don't have to worry about relays at all. anyone who will ACTUALLY BENEFIT from an independently hosted relay (app dev) will perceive them as an incredibly marginal cost.

> This is because I do not have the time or mental bandwidth to even pick an "instance" that would be better suited to me and migrate, let alone run my own.

Idk what to say to that. So I'll just say that you can run `npm create pds` and have a single-user PDS hosted for free on Cloudflare in minutes.

But I think what you meant to say (stop me if I'm wrong) isn't that you don't have the "mental bandwidth", it's more that you (and the average user) don't actually _want_ to migrate because there's no tangible benefit.

To this I would say: migration is not the path to spreading users out across instances at a large scale. Migration to me is more of an insurance against a service going down or turning evil. The real way to get people to spread out across different PDSes is to make it so there are more "entry points" to the atmosphere, so more people are onboarded to the atmosphere in more places other than Bluesky, where they can sign up and automatically be on another instance. If more independent atproto apps are created with their own PDSes for onboarding, that's what will solve the problem imo, not encouraging users to migrate (although that can also be done at smaller scales, as Blacksky and Eurosky have proven)

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#165

Post by danabramov »

ryukafalz wrote: post #159
chokolad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can scale down as much as you want. You don't need to run full relay if you want to follow only a dozen of accounts. I bet you can run something like that on a raspberry pi or something similar. You will not get the search over all of the network, but that's something you don't get with your personal mastodon instances either.

Wouldn't you then not be able to see replies from anyone besides the dozen accounts your relay follows too? If I run a personal Mastodon instance and someone replies to one of my posts, their instance will send it directly to mine and I'll see it. My understanding of the ATProto architecture is that it doesn't support directed messaging like that.

The cost for consuming the firehose of the entire network is very low. So the actual cost that can blow up is storage and computation.

If you want to filter for events based on some heuristic (e.g. only from follows of server list), you can do that. You can then specialize that further. E.g. for ongoing threads that already pass your filter, you could add their IDs to an array, and accept all replies for those threads as well into your DB.

You already get a stream of everything so you can scale down what you write to DB to exactly the characteristics you need. Including keeping threads cohesive.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#166

Post by danabramov »

4lx87 wrote: post #132
danabramov wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a user’s perspective: To use Bluesky I need to create an account, and to create an account I need to choose the server where that account is hosted. Once I have an account I can follow any account even if hosted w/ someone else. That’s the same UX as Mastadon (leaving aside that moving PDS might be easier in ATProto than ActivityPub).

Well I think "can move later" makes all the difference because the initial choice doesn't matter to the individual user. It isn't even blocking. Most people don't know they're making that choice, and I think that's fine. In Mastodon, the choice is very high stakes.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#167

Post by skybrian »

shimman wrote: post #155
notthemessiah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

$30 a month is a pretty massive costs for such a program. Why does it require such a beefy VPS, is it just the initial bootstrapping that requires such resources?

That's for a server that downloads and forwards all Bluesky traffic.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#168

Post by pjc50 »

echelon wrote: post #112
embedding-shape wrote: post #99

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…

P2p networks either kill your phone battery or require you run a hosted instance somewhere, which cuts out about 99% of potential users.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#169

Post by afavour »

fabrice_d wrote: post #134
danabramov wrote: post #115

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.

Perhaps, but that isn’t what users want.

Coming up with a new model for social media and also dictating what features are good and bad for users is going make user adoption a tough challenge.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#170

Post by danabramov »

cavoirom wrote: post #116
danabramov wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say other components are expensive. Common ones are: - Relay as an optimization. That's cheap-ish ($30/mo) or free-ish if you pool with others. - Your own app server. That's on par with normal web apps as long as you can keep a socket open. What's expensive is if the app you're making is a fully capable copy of Bluesky itself with gigabytes of existing posts — but is that the app you're making? The economi…

> What's expensive is if the app you're making is a fully capable copy of Bluesky itself with gigabytes of existing posts This is the implicit idea in my comment when I said it's expensive. If Bluesky banned me and I could not find another AppView with comparable reach and audience, I lose, the ban is effective. Another problem is ATProto users don't usually associate then with an AppView the same way Mastodon users…

>This is the implicit idea in my comment when I said it's expensive. If Bluesky banned me and I could not find another AppView with comparable reach and audience, I lose, the ban is effective.

Okay, but that's always the case when you get banned from a service. The difference here is that it's possible to build a competing service with different moderation decisions being a lens over the same data.

Post reply on HN