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

The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 493 posts

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#171

Post by jeroenhd »

wmf wrote: post #53
0xTJ wrote: post #45

Even after reading some of that thread, I have no idea what this AT protocol is. Did someone reuse the name for the thing used in modems?

AT Protocol is used by the Bluesky app. And yeah, no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more.

No one outside HN cares about AT Protocol either, they just want Twitter 2.0 and have found a promising exclusive club over at BlueSky. I doubt anyone but a small minority of BS users will even know that you can theoretically run your own server and that eventually other servers will join the network.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#172

Post by randunel »

rvz wrote: post #153
danielrhodes wrote: post #134

Seems like Mastodon/ActivityPub and AT Protocol are solving for opposing problems. Maybe the compromise is a centralized service?

> Maybe the compromise is a centralized service? Yes. Centralization is inevitable and normal users only care if they can use it easily or not and don’t have to choose a instance or set up their own mail server, instance, or whatever. As always with typical techies, the emotions put into this post were already running high given Bluesky itself has gotten someone extremely angry over the tiniest things.

> normal users

You (probably) and I have both had a more tech oriented upbringing. Current and future urban generations seem to be more tech oriented, anyway, so perhaps we, who probably form the majority of tech consumers, will become these "normal users" we condescendingly refer to in this forum.

With sufficient investment in education or at least awareness, the "normal users" may eventually be privacy and freedom oriented.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#173

Post by topspin »

"Instead you have a 'DID:PLC', which is a kind of 'DID' (invented by, not a surprise, CRYPTO PEOPLE)"

Interesting. About two weeks ago at the HIMMS conference (Healthcare Information and Management Systems) in Chicago I ran into this. DID has crypto stink on it and people are actively avoiding it as a result. In this case it was the CTO of an established US consortium involved with CMS standards.

This is a shame and it seems irrational to me. Is W3's work on DID doomed? Do they know just how bad the optics of DID are?

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#174

Post by gregw2 »

pfraze wrote: post #73
seattleeng wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're familiar with this, what was wrong with how Farcaster approached name registration? Signing up or rotating your key is (relatively) cheap on Ethereum mainnet, and client apps could front the cost of signing users up. The user registry doesn't need to be maintained by a closed group in the long run (could start out that way, with Bluesky maintaining the contracts but eventually removing upgradeability whe…

I’m concerned about the transaction cost variability that we’ve seen with ethereum.

Consider Avax?

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#175

Post by jeroenhd »

archgoon wrote: post #32

When he was ranting about crypto, I had assumed that Bluesky had done another silly Coin or something. Nope, this is just apparently a dislike of public keys and signing messages, which seems like a great idea for a federated protocol.

Parts of the BlueSky protocol do use stuff designed for "web3" cryptocurrency stuff (https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/), but there's no cryptocurrency in use for the AT protocol.

I'm not sure why they're even using this because the docs state that the current DID stuff is all placeholders until they can find something better.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#176

Post by fsckboy »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

It's not that bad. ATZ and ATDT are the main two you have to remember. Wait, is that not what we're talking about? So, it has a confusing name too?

ATDT? fancy! I started out using ATD

but, when I upgraded to touchtone, I remember the local access number for Compuserve in Watertown MA played The Camp Town Ladies (without the doo dah)

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#177

Post by x-complexity »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> > The DID system uses the recovery key to move from one server to another without coordinating with the server (ie because it suddenly disappeared).

> Why is this necessary? The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low.

The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing at any point in time is low. The likelihood of said server disappearing altogether, based on the 20+ years of the internet, can & will approach 100% as the decades go on. Most of the websites I know in the early 2000s are defunct now. Heck, I have a few webcomic sites from the 2010s in my bookmarks that are nxdomain'd.

Also, as noted by lapcat, these sudden server disappearances will happen. Marking this problem as a non-issue is not, in any realm of possibility, a good UX decision.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883409

This is coupled with the fact that Mastodon (& ActivityPub in general) don't have to do anything when it comes to user migration: The current system in place on Mastodon is completely optional, wherein servers can simply choose to not allow users to migrate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883570

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35884682

> There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue.

*The Covenant is not enforced in code by Mastodon's system, nor by AcitivtyPub's protocol.* It's heavily reliant on good faith & manual human review, with no system-inherent capabilities to check if the server actually allows user data to be exported.

> You're storing all of a user's post history on their own device in the case of an immediate outage. That's equivalent to Gmail storing all of your emails on your device in case you want to immediately pack up and move to another email provider. That is an extremely high cost (I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) for an outcome that is very unlikely.

An outcome *that can still happen*. As noted by the incidents linked above, they're happening within the Mastodon platform itself, with many users from those incidents being unable to fully recover their own user data. Assuming that this isn't needed at all is the equivalent of playing with lightning.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#178

Post by jdblair »

pfraze wrote: post #54

Okay well. I work on Bluesky and helped build the AT Protocol. I'm sorry Sam differs with us on this, and I'm glad that Activity Pub is already there for him. However, Sam doesn't understand the ATProto very well and I want to clear it up a bit. Before I do, let me just say: Bluesky and the AT Proto are in beta. The stuff that seems incomplete or poorly documented is incomplete and poorly documented. Everything has m…

Thanks for the great perspective.

I want to say that "if there was something off the shelf that met all our needs we would've used it" has been the justification for many over-engineered, not-invented-here projects. On the other hand, in many cases it is completely legitimate.

Re: The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

#180

Post by jeroenhd »

I've tried to read through the AT Protocol specs but they're very vague and clearly unfinished. Their view on federation isn't exactly what I'm looking for ("a bunch of Twitters that can theoretically interoperate" rather than a decentralized platform) but I suppose only having one or two main servers does solve the "I don't know whether to pick outlook.com or gmail.com" problem that many new Mastodon users seem to face.

ActivityPub is no walk in the park either. It's a protocol closer to "the HTTP of social media" than a way to interoperate with other servers. Basic functionality is easy, all you need is a few static JSON files, but if you want to write an application around it you're going to have to dive deep into the docs.

What I don't really see is why BlueSky decided to make its own protocol. Like Mastodon is an API that works on top of ActivityPub, BlueSky could've just been a better ActivityPub server as far as I can tell. Most of the big problems ("my toots disappeared after the server shut down") can be resolved without an entirely new protocol.

Going back to the drawing board seems like an excellent way to find all the hurdles every other protocol already encountered. The recent "official" s3 account is just one example of that, and I'm sure there will be more.

Maybe the value add of the AT protocol will become clearer once it's finished. I'm sure there will be ATProto ActivityPub bridges to make both networks integrate for the people who wish to do so. As far as I can tell, BlueSky is just a new, exclusive Twitter with an API at this moment.

Post reply on HN