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We need a federation of forges
191–200 of 424 posts
Re: We need a federation of forges
#192Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. Obviously this post was timed well with the 2-3 GitHub-hating posts that made it to the top of HN yesterday, but I commend the attempt here. I hope it takes off in a meaningful way.
> Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point.
What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me.
Look, I'm going to make my labor of love available to the world on your platform. I'm not going to earn a dime from it. It's just free work I'm gonna put out there. If I'm going to do that, I'll choose a platform where I can be reasonably sure that there won't be a rug pull 5 years down the line.
The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.
The Git hosting services I use today are those where I can pay as a paying customer or I can pay as a paying member. As a paying customer, I know what I am getting into. As a paying member, I have the right to vote on decisions that affect the platform.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#193A federation of forges makes no sense if everything gets centralized again in the hands of the people operating Tangled (sure, someone else could run an alternative AppView, but then if you are only on the alternative you are invisible to anyone who is only on Tangled).
https://gitgrasp.com/ fixes this.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's why Tangled didn't go with ActivityPub (Mastodon protocol) and went with ATproto instead, which is specifically built to solve that problem, so individual servers are all aggregated by centralized AppViews (that anyone can host) that give a singular unified "view" of the network that is just as cohesive as a centralized network feels.
ATProto simply ignores the need for decentralizing incentives on a human/community level. What we get is a sort of a "top-down" federation rather than a grass-roots one. Whoever invests in the infra ends up running a domain. I mean, practically no one is aware of any other ATPROTO provider other than Bluesky whereas the issue with AP is merely the lack of better implementations, so mastodon.social got the most attent…
There’s no such thing as “running a domain” or “atproto provider” in atproto. You’re approaching it with a Mastodon/AP mindset and it doesn’t match that.
In atproto, there’s two axes.
One is hosting. Bluesky offers hosting but some people host on their own (it’s just a Docker container with sqlite), some on Cloudflare, some on community-hosted nodes like https://npmx.dev and https://selfhosted.social. From app perspective it looks exactly the same way (unlike in Mastodon where “hosting” = “choosing a community”) and you can switch hosting anytime.
Another axis is apps. Apps aggregate from data from all hosts. Bluesky is an app, Tangled is an app, Leaflet is an app, Wisp is an app, Semble is an app, and so on. Those can all aggregate over the same data (which enables cross-app interop) but they don’t have to (eg Bluesky doesn’t overlap with Tangled much except that Tangled can reuse Bluesky avatar on login). Generally you don’t have people running copies of the same app (as in Mastodon) which is why there aren’t many “blueskyes”. But when someone has an incentive, they can. (Eg Blacksky is a complete fork including server and DB, allowing their own moderation decisions over same data.) Similarly you can build your own app on top of distributed Tangled data.
Hope that helps clarify why “atproto provider” as a concept doesn’t make sense. You have hosting, which is as distributed as you want, and you have apps, which anyone can make.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#195Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. Obviously this post was timed well with the 2-3 GitHub-hating posts that made it to the top of HN yesterday, but I commend the attempt here. I hope it takes off in a meaningful way.
> and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. What points towards bootstraping being impossible? Sure, it's difficult, that's almost in the name so makes sense, but impossible? Especially if you're aiming for the federation-angle, then you should be able to build cheaper infrastructure, not the same/more expensive.
>What points towards bootstraping being impossible?
Even just the security concerns and having any confidence in the implementation is likely a specialized skill, so you'll need to convince someone to work for free or be able to pay them. Now do that for other major lines of work like UI/UX, Ops, and QA.
Take a look at all of the features from GitHub or any code platform that you'd need to get people to sign up these days (because they are used to GitHub/others) and it's a very tall list. Think something like https://www.enterpriseready.io/ but definitely larger (maybe 2x, 3x as large).
Oh and if someone writes a long rant about it and it gets to the top here, it likely becomes dead in the water, and you can't get the time back, making it a risky proposition. At least with VC money, you got paid a salary.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#196Crazy... I actually hashed out a plan to begin bulding a successor to github earlier this week and this blog post describes EXACTLY what I was thinking about with atproto+git. Good validation imho.
If you've got ideas for things Tangled doesn't do, it's all open source too:
https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core
So you could theoretically either fork it and use it as a good starting point, or (even better) contribute the ideas you have straight into Tangled itself! :)
Re: We need a federation of forges
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
ActivityPub and atproto are differently shaped. Pitting them against each other is like asking “why need web when we have email”. ActivityPub is email-shaped. Servers are inboxes sending messages to each other. atproto is web-shaped. User repositories host data (like personal sites or git/RSS), while apps aggregate from repositories (like Google Reader). Different topologies lead to different properties. Eg atproto l…
Calling AP services a bunch of small "centralized" services in this context removes all the meaning from that term. You might as well call any web server centralized while comparing them to clouds. Proper federation is exactly such bunch of small services messaging each other. On the hand, what ATProto leads to is at most a handful of large-scale providers each running the own portion of the network.
There’s a clear difference in architecture between
1) a layer of app-agnostic hosting providers + a separate independent layer of apps aggregating over data from those (like personal sites with RSS + aggregators like Google Reader)
2) a circle of flat instances where each node couples app+hosting (like many little Twitters)
One doesn’t couple hosting with apps, another one does.
Mastodon/AP model is (2), atproto model is (1). You should be able to see the outcomes from different network shapes.
In atproto, you can build a new app that works with existing data, but in AP you can’t. In atproto you can move hosting with zero effect on your identity or how you show up in apps, in AP you can’t.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#198A federation doesn't mean the forges talk to each other. It only means there's more than one, and data flows between them. This can occur by developers pushing and pulling from different remotes. You already have a different remote for each fork, you lose nothing if they're also on different servers. Communication about the project can also happen in many places.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#199I'd like to preface I'm pretty active in atprotocol ecosystem, so my experience is more than likely a bit more biased, but thought I'd share some of my thoughts as a big fan of tangled. I've really enjoyed Tangled. It has so far been what I've wanted from a GitHub replacement, is simpler and does not have as many features, but it has been the main social/git provider I've been using for personal open source projects…
I'm afraid that atproto will suffer from Bluesky's irrelevance. Not sure if that's a valid fear.
atproto will suffer from centralization via Bluesky and its user wanting it to be centralized.
Re: We need a federation of forges
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...
Pick whichever. We much harder problem (gossiping git!) and rather elegantly at that.
Do you think it will be possible to use them together? Having some sort of unified distributed system is intriguing to me. (e.g. can the Radical foundation and AT-proto foundation integrate, even?)