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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

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

#241

Post by OJFord »

iptq wrote: post #56

It seems to me that a lot of the problems discussed in this thread (it's using a new protocol that doesn't work with existing tools, it uses crypto, handles auth in the protocol, server can goes down) are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something complete…

> , it uses crypto, handles auth

Good? HN also uses crypto. Unless I'm missing it, it's not using cryptocurrency or 'tokens' or anything, just good old fashioned cryptography.

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

#242

Post by godzillabrennus »

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…

If you’re not implementing a cryptocurrency then how will you incentivize folks to host instances?

What DID are you using? Is it unique to AT or something more widely available?

Any tips for getting an invite to Bluesky for us nerds on here?

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

#243

Post by OJFord »

samtho wrote: post #197
wmf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Hayes AT command set is still the primary way to talk to embedded modems. I would argue quite a few people outside of HN care about it to this day while very few people outside of HN know or would care about the AT Protocol.

I would say most of the people who know or care about either are on (or know about) HN - but that doesn't mean either's unimportant, it's just the nature of what it is, a technical detail behind the scenes that some of us work with.

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

#244

Post by bandrami »

anticristi wrote: post #83

Anyone else read "AT protocol" and thought of old modems?

I typed in AT commands today to connect to my mobile provider. YMMV. (In fairness it's only because I hosed my ModemManager config earlier this week and haven't had time to figure out what I did wrong yet, but still.)

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

#245

Post by godzillabrennus »

bombcar wrote: post #111
jazzyjackson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) theyre tweets, how much could they cost? @ 280 bytes each, that's like 15MB. double it for cryptographic signatures and reply-to metadata. is that really too much to ask for the capacity to transfer to another host at anytime? (also, leaving aside the fact that 55k tweets puts you in the 0.1% of most prodigious users)

I have every post made on BlueSky up to a certain point last weekend and it's only 3 GB. I have every email I've ever received or sent (and not deleted) and it's only 4GB. Should something require I download all that every time I login? No. But having a local copy is amazing, and a truly federated system should have and even be able to depend on those. The Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke; the only enforcement is t…

How have you pared down your email to just 4GB?

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

#246

Post by OJFord »

asimpletune wrote: post #236
OJFord wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if the receiver could append a signed message upon receipt with something like “the sender’s identity was valid upon receipt”. That's exactly what does happen, if you view the raw message in GMail/iCloud, you should see DMARC pass/fail header added by the receiving server (iCloud in your example). (Well not exactly , it's not signed, but I'm not sure that's necessary? Headers are applied in order, like a w…

Thanks for the response. Do you know if this extra “dkim sig was verified header” is part of a protocol or is it just something that is done bc otherwise bad stuff happens? I’m also curious how this plays into the original comment about dkim/spf/dmarc not being sufficient due to key rotation still factors into the conversation after having discussed this?

I'm not sure off the top of my head, I'd guess it's a MAY or SHOULD. Verifying DKIM/SPF/DMARC is optional anyway, if you want to just read everything without caring you can; you've received the message by that point, I can't see what bad stuff would happen if it wasn't added.

Key rotation would have the same effect as 'DNS rotation' (if you stopped leasing the domain, or changed records) - you might get a different result if you attempted to re-verify later.

I just don't really see it as a problem, you check when you receive the message; why would you check again later? (And generally you 'can't', not as a layman user of GMail or whatever - it's not checked in the client, but the actual receiving server. Once it's received, it delivers the message, doesn't even have it to recheck any more. Perhaps a clearer example: if you use AWS SES to receive, ultimately to an S3 bucket or whatever for your client or application, SES does this check, and then you just have an eml file in S3, there's no 'hey SES take this message back and run your DKIM & virus scan on it again'.)

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

#247

Post by ciroduran »

sevenlake wrote: post #101
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…

"We _thought_ that this would be a quiet, stealthy beta for us while we finished the technology and the client" Then maybe don't invite journalists onto your Quiet Stealthy Beta!!! I hope you get rest, work is not that important

The issue there is that journalists is a good reason why Twitter became mainstream, it makes sense to invite them to your Twitter clone

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

#248

Post by aboodman »

vidarh wrote: post #239
aboodman wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one important difference is: > expected Because the URI is only _expected_ to be immutable, not required, servers consuming these objects need to consider the case where the expectation is broken. For example, imagine the serving host has a bug and returns the wrong content for a URI. At scale this is guaranteed to happen. Because it can happen, downstream servers need to consider this case and build infrastructure t…

The URI is expected to be immutable. The URI can be used as a key. Whether the object is depends on the type of object. A hash over the content can not directly be used that way, but it can e.g be used to derive an original URI in a way that allows for predictable lookups without necessarily having access to the origin server. Posts are explicitly not immutable, so they do need to be revalidated, and that's fine. For…

> Posts are explicitly not immutable, so they do need to be revalidated, and that's fine.

OK that's my point. In the AT protocol design the data backing posts is immutable. This makes sync, and especially caching a lot easier to make correct and robust because you never need to worry about revalidation at any level.

> People want to be able to edit, and delete

Immutable in this context just means the data blocks are immutable. You can still model logically mutable things, and implement edit/delete/whatever. Just like how Git does this.

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

#249

Post by Wowfunhappy »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #87
MattRix wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also all the media to go along with them.

Ok, so add some more megabytes to that. Most people don't have that much microblogging data.

I actually think photos could potentially add up to quite a lot!

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

#250

Post by chicargocult »

lapcat wrote: post #43
jug wrote: post #4

With all that screaming from a user on the main competing network, I really need to hear a response from the Bluesky team to form an opinion here. And understand better why this guy is so upset about this destined-to-fail network to curse and foam about it.

> With all that screaming from a user on the main competing network Isn't everyone on a "competing" social network before they join Bluesky? I managed to snag an invite (sorry, I don't have any others), so I'm on both at the moment. Though I've found Bluesky to be pretty boring and don't check in much. > And understand better why this guy is so upset about this destined-to-fail network to curse and foam about it. It…

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