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There are no instances in ATProto

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#191

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

skybrian wrote: post #54
kajman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, anyone who wants to index it gets a copy and you have no control over what they do. How does this differ from scrapers hitting the blog directly?

Web pages aren’t digitally signed, aren’t necessarily indexed by search engines, and there are ways to block bots with things like captchas. You also have much more control over the UI. If your blog has comments, you can moderate them, for better or worse. With a PDS, the replication happens first, before anyone reads it, and the UI is out of your control. Maybe that’s okay, but people should understand the tradeoffs…

Aren't the vast majority of web pages nowadays signed? Almost nobody downloading and storing the content on websites will retain these signatures, but they exist and can be verified with enough information. IMO archive.org and archive.today should, to prove they haven't tampered with contents.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#192

Post by allwashedup »

danabramov wrote: post #57
JoshTriplett wrote: post #49

I appreciate how this explains the difference between the two. But I also found it a little frustrating, because it answered one part of the question but failed to answer the question so what does ATProto do to solve the problems that instances solve? For example, when this article dismisses defederation as merely a mysterious reason you might not see posts from your friends, it fails to answer "so how does atproto s…

If you’re asking about moderation, it works similarly as you’d expect it to work in a everything-RSS world. At the hosting level, the hosting you use will likely ban you for clearly illegal stuff. Same as blogspot dot com or Cloudflare could ban you for certain things. At the application level, application admins/mods would moderate as any app does. This is similar to running any web service today with user generated…

How is it any different than a centralized social media service then? Merely the fact that you can get a firehose from the website in a standard format? This was already the case with HTTP. The problem is that websites can leverage their power to make a locked-in ecosystem.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 twitter, etc once had a much more open API. so did reddit. This was just the first stage of their penetration strategy.

The decentralization is totally irrelevant due to the way it's implemented. The problem is that Apps are sticky, so app developers have undue power to control their users.

The "content hosts" "moderators" etc need to be completely cut out of the picture to be at the same level of censorship resistance as an RSS-shared blog. I can host a blog on my own computer, and you can subscribe to it without that many intermediaries.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#193

Post by danabramov »

ryukafalz wrote: post #185
danabramov wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thread…

To refer back to the comment I was replying to: is that the sort of thing you could realistically run on a raspberry pi? At home?

Yeah! In fact some popular ecosystem services are (or at least have been) running on Raspberry Pi. See here: https://bsky.bad-example.com/can-atproto-scale-down/

Also the best algorithmic “For You” feed on the app runs off someone’s gaming computer at home

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#194

Post by wolvoleo »

quasigod wrote: post #184
wolvoleo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm kinda waiting for this. I don't like to join bluesky because I want it more decentralised but I can't join blacksky because it's only for black people. I'm kinda hoping someone sets up a rainbowsky or something for us in the LGBT community. Now that I would join.

https://northskysocial.com/ might work for you! You can have an account on Northsky and use it with Blacksky's appview!

Oh thanks! I wish they'd have their own appview but I guess that might take time.

I'll definitely try it out!

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#196

Post by danabramov »

allwashedup wrote: post #192
danabramov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re asking about moderation, it works similarly as you’d expect it to work in a everything-RSS world. At the hosting level, the hosting you use will likely ban you for clearly illegal stuff. Same as blogspot dot com or Cloudflare could ban you for certain things. At the application level, application admins/mods would moderate as any app does. This is similar to running any web service today with user generated…

How is it any different than a centralized social media service then? Merely the fact that you can get a firehose from the website in a standard format? This was already the case with HTTP. The problem is that websites can leverage their power to make a locked-in ecosystem. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 twitter, etc once had a much more open API. so did reddit. This was just the first stage of their…

Sure, you could say it’s a set of conventions on top of what you’re describing — that imo is sufficient to shift the incentive picture. It’s a firehose of typed JSON that’s canonically stored at URLs that survive hosting changes and can link to other JSON. It’s signed and verifiable and links to other JSON.

So the new thing here is that if everyone’s data exists in this format, the competition between apps is guaranteed. Because a competitor doesn’t start with nothing: they start with the same userbase and the same content. They can immediately start competing on features, moderation, product experience, etc, without first “luring” everyone to register again and start their entire graphs from scratch.

I think that makes a big difference. Don’t you think?

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#197

Post by allwashedup »

danabramov wrote: post #36
axus wrote: post #9

So all the censor needs to do is cut off one host? And then you upload everything to different host and connect that?

What kind of censor? Whoever operates hosting can decide to ban someone from hosting. This isn't different from how Cloudflare would ban you for hosting something illegal. Whoever operates an app can decided to ban someone from that app. This isn't different from how a forum moderator can ban you for something they don't like. Whoever operates services in the middle may decide to ban someone for network spam/abuse, s…

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Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#199

Post by jchw »

Zambyte wrote: post #189
jchw wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wrote this other comment that I think does well to address this misconception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601998 OK, but that raises a question. Can I do that right now? If so, I don't understand why more people are doing this. When I looked into this I definitely didn't see anything like this. > And an account tied to exactly one of them, that is a pain to migrate if it's even possible with the Activ…

You're refusing to look at the ATmosphere network and instead compare Bluesky to the Fediverse. I can instead compare mastoson.social to the ATmosphere and draw the inverse conclusions. What's the point?

Uhhh, I'm comparing Bluesky to the Fediverse because that's the main applications of ActivityPub and ATProto? I don't care about the broader ATmosphere.

How is comparing Mastodon/the Fediverse and Bluesky unfair? Are you kind of admitting that Bluesky isn't actually practically decentralized by suggesting the AP analog of Bluesky is the largest Mastodon instance rather than the federation of them? This seems to contradict what you and much of the marketing around Bluesky says.

Re: There are no instances in ATProto

#200

Post by allwashedup »

danabramov wrote: post #196
allwashedup wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it any different than a centralized social media service then? Merely the fact that you can get a firehose from the website in a standard format? This was already the case with HTTP. The problem is that websites can leverage their power to make a locked-in ecosystem. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 twitter, etc once had a much more open API. so did reddit. This was just the first stage of their…

Sure, you could say it’s a set of conventions on top of what you’re describing — that imo is sufficient to shift the incentive picture. It’s a firehose of typed JSON that’s canonically stored at URLs that survive hosting changes and can link to other JSON. It’s signed and verifiable and links to other JSON. So the new thing here is that if everyone’s data exists in this format, the competition between apps is guarant…

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