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Open Social

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Re: Open Social

#181

Post by losvedir »

tetrisgm wrote: post #102
jrowen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am deeply concerned about the apathy people have towards the idea of ownership, openness and interoperability. It gives the idea that people just want to be fed TikTok and Instagram reels. Can you expand on this feeling? Why is it deeply concerning? Why should people care about the abstract concept of data ownership? People were totally fine when they had zero ownership or agency over media and they were fed TV, bo…

It matters because your posts aren’t just entertainment in the moment — they’re your history, your proof of existence online. Platforms treat them as disposable. If Instagram dies or bans you, your years of photos, writing, and connections vanish. Owning your data means your work and identity survive these issues, if you want.

Sure, this might matter to "very online" people. But I don't think it's the norm.

Re: Open Social

#182

Post by steveklabnik »

bonoboTP wrote: post #174

How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here. How does blocking work? How do people make sure to distance themselves from political enemies? Do the aggregator cache servers block certain user domains? How do you ensure that the aggregator returns valid and non-forged comments and likes?

> How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here.

Anyone can run a moderation service. Users subscribe to the services they want. When you flag a post or account for moderation, you choose which service you send the report to.

> How does blocking work?

Blocking works by publishing a "hey I've blocked this person" record in your database. Applications then can use this to enforce that.

> How do people make sure to distance themselves from political enemies?

I'm not sure what this means.

> Do the aggregator cache servers block certain user domains?

They could, and this is also a property that's not really about blocking, that is, you could choose to cache only part of the network if you choose, which could be useful for various reasons.

> How do you ensure that the aggregator returns valid and non-forged comments and likes?

Cryptography, basically.

Re: Open Social

#183

Post by steveklabnik »

tetrisgm wrote: post #176
steveklabnik wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so this sounds like you'd want to run an appview + pds. (and possibly a relay, depending on some details.) Except for one thing: > 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 thi…

Thank you for the detailed answer! Totally comfortable with the did implementation. Just trying to separate from their brand and just use the standard :) We already built our own platform independently from Bluesky, so we have a timeline in the wrong post and everything. I’m just trying to give our users into opera ability. So that when they make a post on our platform, people can also follow your Bluesky and see on…

You're welcome, yeah then that's a lot easier.

> Am I correct to assume then that we would not require our own app view?

Well, given that you have built a platform, and you then want to interact with the atproto eocsystem, that means you'd be making your platform an appview, in a sense. An appview is just a service that reads the underlying data from the network and does something useful with it.

Re: Open Social

#184

Post by steveklabnik »

INTPenis wrote: post #173

This has already been covered many times but the design of the AT protocol requires a lot more resources than AP. Meaning it will be reserved for large organizations, while AP has a lower entry of threshold. I want both to thrive, but I prefer AP for small communities.

Depending on what exactly you mean, this isn't the case. For example, running your own PDS is very cheap.

If you want to fully run a full copy of everything yourself, it's going to be more expensive, sure, but those costs have gone down dramatically over time. The most expensive bit is running $34/month: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

Re: Open Social

#185

Post by doctorpangloss »

_cart wrote: post #137
ceayo wrote: post #30

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.

The AT vs AP issue is full of nuance. Our community has gone back and forth on this: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/18302

This is not meant as a criticism at all, I like Bevy. Are you familiar with the Mr. Beast PowerPoint that said:

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

When I glance at the Bevy discussion link you shared, my reaction is:

> Your goal here is to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine possible. It's not to make the most performant game engine. Not to make the game engine that powers the best games. Not to make the best looking graphics in a game engine. Not the highest quality game engine or game editing experience. It's to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine.

Re: Open Social

#186

Post by bonoboTP »

steveklabnik wrote: post #182
bonoboTP wrote: post #174

How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here. How does blocking work? How do people make sure to distance themselves from political enemies? Do the aggregator cache servers block certain user domains? How do you ensure that the aggregator returns valid and non-forged comments and likes?

> How does blacklisting / moderation etc. work here. Anyone can run a moderation service. Users subscribe to the services they want. When you flag a post or account for moderation, you choose which service you send the report to. > How does blocking work? Blocking works by publishing a "hey I've blocked this person" record in your database. Applications then can use this to enforce that. > How do people make sure to…

> I'm not sure what this means.

I'm trying to imagine how a situation analogous to Gab vs Mastodon may arise and play out here, or if the setup is different. Like would they just live side by side, with various frontend aggregators that present one or the other world to you?

> Cryptography, basically.

How do I, the user with a browser verify that? Do I need to use a different client program, or a browser extension? The aggregator site can show me a green checkmark or whatever, but that's just a claim by the aggregator. Am I expected to fire up a terminal window to compute signature validations to check if Alice really put a like on that comment?

Re: Open Social

#187

Post by F3nd0 »

self_awareness wrote: post #160
popcar2 wrote: post #155

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…

I know that Mastodon is not the same as ActivityPub, but I don't know how can it be treated seriously if it allows disappearing replies. Whatever we write will disappear after some time. Sometimes. Because sometimes not. Maybe it's an implementation problem, I don't know, but it was one of my two reasons for my exit from Mastodon.

I think it’s ultimately up to your instance whether it keeps your posts indefinitely or not. I think most do, but others might delete posts after a period of time, in which case they should mention this to their users (on their ‘About’ page, for example). Personally, I can’t say I’ve encountered this problem, but then again I’ve mostly used Pleroma (which is a different program implementing the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon).

Re: Open Social

#188

Post by xrisk »

steveklabnik wrote: post #163
popcar2 wrote: post #155

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…

> considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically, stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows the details of) and so talking about the structure of things ends up working differently. > what's stopping them from…

If your pds refuses to serve you your CAR file I don’t think you can do anything about it, can you?

Re: Open Social

#190

Post by Kye »

steveklabnik wrote: post #158
tetrisgm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, so this sounds like you'd want to run an appview + pds. (and possibly a relay, depending on some details.) Except for one thing: > 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 thi…

There's hope for an independent but synchronized PLC directory: https://tangled.org/@microcosm.blue/Allegedly
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