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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

#291

Post by lucideer »

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…

Reading this I hear someone passionate about technology for the sake of technology. Which is cool, I totally get the desire to build things oneself, but it doesn't really address the substantive questions people are asking about AT:

An open protocol exists that broadly does what you want to do. That protocol is stable and widely used. That in itself, regardless of the quality of the protocol, already represents an OKish argument to strongly consider using it. If you're going to go NIH your replacement needs to not just be better but substantially better, and you should also show understanding of the original open spec.

Sofar, Bluesky's already been caught redoing little things in ways that show a lack of reading/understanding of open specs (.well-known domain verification), and the proposed technological improvements over ActivityPub fall into three categories:

1. Something ActivityPub already supports as a "SHOULD" or a "MAY": there's arguments to be made these would be better as "MUST", but either way there's no reason AT couldn't've just implemented ActivityPub with these added features.

2. Highly debatable improvements - as highlighted by this article. I do think some of this article is hyperbole but it certainly highlights that some of the proposed benefits are not clear cut.

3. Such a minor improvement as to be nowhere near worth the incompatibility.

All that coupled with the continuous qualifiers of it being incomplete/beta/WIP when there's a mature alternative really just doesn't present well.

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

#292

Post by FinnKuhn »

mmiyer wrote: post #191
pavlov wrote: post #159

> "Imagine if I had to store the 50k+ tweets I've made on Twitter on my device, and upload ALL of them to a new server whenever a community server went down." This... doesn't seem too bad at all? Let's assume an average of 150 bytes of text per tweet, and an additional 50 bytes of actually important metadata. That's only 10 megabytes for the entire archive of 50,000 items. A single HDR photo from a modern smartphone…

What about images in tweets?

Most users probably have the pictures they uploaded to Twitter still stored on their phone without having a capacity issue due to them.

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

#293

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Seems like a sane approach.

IMHO, any protocol that isn't signing content (like mastodon) is merely moving the problem. Signatures allow people to authenticate content and sources and allow people to build networks of trust on top of that. So bluesky is getting that right. Unsigned content should not be acceptable in this century.

Signed content immediately solves two issues:

- reputation: reputation is based on a history of content that is liked and appreciated by trusted sources that is associated with an identity and the associated set of public keys. You can know 100% for sure whether content is reputable or not. Either it is signed by some identity with a known reputation or it is not.

- AI/bot content could sign content with some key of course but it would be hard to fake reputation. Not impossible of course but you'd have to work at it for some time to build up the reputation. And people can moderate content and destroy the reputation of the identity and keys.

The whole problem with essentially all social media networks so far is a complete and utter lack of trustworthiness. You could be reading content by an AI, a seemingly bonafide comment from somebody you trust might actually come from some Chinese, Russian or North Korean troll farm, or you are just wading through mountains of click bait posted by "viral" marketing companies, scammers, or similarly obnoxious/malicious publishers. Twitter's blue tick is laughably inadequate for dealing with this problem. And people can yell whatever without having to worry about their reputation; which causes them to behave in all sorts of nasty ways.

Signed content addresses a lot of that. You can still choose to be nasty, obnoxious, misleading, malicious, etc. but not without staking and risking your reputation.

Mastodon not having a lot of these issues (yet) is more a function of its relative obscurity rather than any built in features. I like Mastodon mainly because it still feels a bit like Twitter before that got popular. But it's not sustainable. If a few hundred million people join, it will get just as bad as other networks. In other words, I don't see how this could last unless they address this. I don't think that this should be technically hard. You need some kind of key management and a few minor extensions to the protocol. The rest can be done client side.

That would be more productive than this rant against the AT protocol.

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

#294

Post by ceejayoz »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
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…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on top of it in order to fix the authenticity problem.

But if we started today, we wouldn't build email that way. There are so many baked-in well-intended fuckups in email that reflect a simpler time where the first spam message was met with "wtf is this, go away!" I remember pranking a teacher with a "From: president@whitehouse.gov" spoofed header in the 90s.

Email is the way it is because it can't be changed, not because it shouldn't be.

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

#295

Post by philipwhiuk »

pavlov wrote: post #198
mmiyer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about images in tweets?

In this hypothetical minimalist Twitter clone in the 2009 spirit, images are elsewhere. We have a widely used hypertext protocol that lets you reference media objects from anywhere, so let’s use that. Client apps can individually solve the image upload usability question in ways that fit their user base. Yes, there will be broken links. But IMO that’s better than having all your data in one centralized location where…

Deep linking Flickr's content without showing Flickr's adverts gets you blacklisted so quick.

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

#296

Post by Avamander »

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?

It's just for humans, it's not usually used for anything else. For machines we have ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) which basically contains almost the same info but signed across the entire chain.

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

#297

Post by Gordonjcp »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #183
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…

Not having read the article, I got pretty far into your second paragraph before realizing you all aren't talking about configuring a modem over a serial link. It's funny because the "Hayes AT command set" protocol is also an obtuse crock. I was really hoping you were going to open my mind with some deep wisdom straight out of 1981.

You sound like you may also be old enough to remember dealing with AT keyboard scan codes directly.

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

#298

Post by Gordonjcp »

quaintdev wrote: post #212
askvictor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wish they hadn't clobbered the name of an existing, well-known protocol. It's still used in drivers for cellular modems (I'm working with it right now), which are getting more and more numerous for IoT applications.

Makes it really hard to search stuff. This has happened with Matrix, Go. Although using golang resolves issue with Go.

nodejs has not solved this problem with "node" which is an admittedly shitty name for a very old amateur radio networking package.

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

#299

Post by philipwhiuk »

jeroenhd wrote: post #180

I've tried to read through the AT Protocol specs but they're very vague and clearly unfinished. Their view on federation isn't exactly what I'm looking for ("a bunch of Twitters that can theoretically interoperate" rather than a decentralized platform) but I suppose only having one or two main servers does solve the "I don't know whether to pick outlook.com or gmail.com" problem that many new Mastodon users seem to f…

> As far as I can tell, BlueSky is just a new, exclusive Twitter with an API at this moment

Honestly I assumed that was the USP - Twitter sans Musk.

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

#300

Post by fatnoah »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #183
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…

Not having read the article, I got pretty far into your second paragraph before realizing you all aren't talking about configuring a modem over a serial link. It's funny because the "Hayes AT command set" protocol is also an obtuse crock. I was really hoping you were going to open my mind with some deep wisdom straight out of 1981.

I had the same reaction. It seemed really weird to get upset about such an old thing.
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