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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

271–280 of 493 posts

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

#271
post #3

> It turns out using Git, which is almost always used with a centralized 'remote', to do federation, which needs to be weakly consistent, IS A BAD IDEA!!!!! Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? I want to take this critiques here seriously but there's not a ton to grasp onto. It definitely didn't feel great that AtProto built from bare ground, reinvented json-schema & OpenAPI for no…

> Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea?

that by itself is a bad idea

users being able to arbitrary edit tweets in a social network is never a good idea

because the moment you say (i.e. tweet) somethingpublic it's not just your thing anymore,

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

#272
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…

Please consider renaming your protocol to something that is possible to Google for.

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

#273
post #233
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…

> The schema is a well-defined machine language which translates to static types and runtime validation through code generation. Can you elaborate on this point? There's multiple mature solutions in this space like OpenAPI+Json Schema, GraphQL, gRPC. All try to solve the same problems to varying degrees and provide similar benefits like generated static typed and runtime validation. Was there something unique for you…

I don't know what AT is doing but I can say that while JSON Schema is okay as a validation schema it is less okay as codegen schema. I don't know if there is a fundamental divide between these two uses but in JSON Schema there is definitely an impedance mismatch.

For example, the JSON Schema structures: `anyOf`, `oneOf` and `allOf` are fairly clear when applied toward validation. But how do you map these to generating code for, say, C++ data structures?

You can of course minimize the problem by restricting to a subset of JSON Schema. But that leaves others. For example, a limited JSON Schema `object` construct can be mapped to, say, a C++ `struct` but it can also map to a homogeneous associative array, eg `std::map` or a fixed heterogeneous AA, eg `std::tuple`. It can also be mapped to an open-ended hetero AA which has no standard form in C++ (maybe `std::map>`). Figuring out the mapping intended by the author of the JSON Schema is non trivial and can be ambiguous.

At some level, I think this is an inherent divide as each language one targets for codegen supports different types of data structures differently. One can not escape that codegen is not always a fully functional transformation.

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

#274
post #144

It says To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)

You might want to try Brutaldon, a free and open source Mastodon web client that works without JavaScript. Brutaldon can optionally be self-hosted and it also supports Pleroma.

- Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org

- Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

Sure, but that's not really compatible with the "quiet, stealthy beta" thing OP claims they were aiming for. If it was meant to be a quiet beta journalists should probably have been invited at a later point.

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

#277
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…

There's a discourse clash.

AT and Bluesky are unfinished. Not ready for primetime. It's not fair to compare it to mature, well-developed stuff with W3C specs and millions of active users on thousands of servers with numerous popular forks.

But, also, everyone who hates Mastodon and spent the last months-years complaining about it is treating your project like the promised land that will lead them into the Twitterless future, somehow having gotten the impression that it's finished and ready to scale.

I think most critiques of Bluesky/AT are actually responding to this even if the authors don't realize it. They're frustrated at the discourse, the potshots, and the noise from these people.

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

#278
post #144

It says To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)

Add `/embed` to the end of the URL.

Wow, I did not know about that!

Still, it doesn't show the rest of the toots, so content posted on Mastodon is still not readable without javascript. Which is ridiculous, we have medium, twitter, facebook, reddit etc, and they decided to publish somewhere not readable without javascript.

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

#279
post #144

It says To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)

I'm really surprised every time anyone complains that a web-application (not just a plain web site) doesn't work without JS. I mean it's an application, applications contain code and tracking that code state server side can involve a non small amount of additional cost. Sure they could have a web-side like non-logged in viewer mode and then somehow using hydration magic transition to being a app on demand, but that i…

I complain about the content (which is text) being not available. I couldn't care less about the web-application. In general too, but especially here, where people are supposed to share mostly text each other. (We can share web-applications as well, and you won't find me complain there.)

At this point I could just flag every mastodon content, since it is not available. Good idea, I will just do that.

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

#280

I don’t know anything about XRPC and Lexicon, but claiming that OpenAPI is better than them because it’s more flexible, is not a great argument. OpenAPI is a very complex spec, and most of the tooling around it, only supports some subset of it. Sure it’s complex for a reason, it’s design goals are to be able to document the wide array of ways that HTTP APIs can be built, but if you don’t need that complexity, it abso…

Claiming that OpenAPI or JSONSchema can generate good client or server code automatically is a bad joke if the author had bothered to try the current code generators that exist. They might work but the code they produce is really not great nor idiomatic to their language.
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