291–300 of 409 posts
Sometimes I wonder - maybe websites were enough? Most people on most platforms are readers/consumers, not producers anyways. Maybe having a personal website was a good filter for publishing after all? Maybe personal websites + sites like hackernews that allows us to discuss our and other people's work is the best the Internet could be.
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>The arrows do seem to imply that commenting on my posts goes into my repo, but I'm sure that's just an imprecision trying to express an idea. The whole thing seems very cool and decentralized. The way I used arrows might’ve been a bit confusing because I use two types of them. The solid ones pointing from @alice.com downwards indicate ownership. They’re the same thing as grouping by color. All blue stuff is Alice’s.…
This makes sense but doesn’t this imply that displaying comments under a post is a very expensive operation? Also not totally clear to me (apologies if I missed it in the post) is where repositories live, I have a bsky account with my own domain, but I am not running anything to host a repo. Am I correct in assuming that bsky is hosting my repo, but I would have the option to self host or move it elsewhere and contin…
It would be expensive if you don’t do your own aggregation. The recommendation for social atproto apps is to aggregate the records you care about into a local database and essentially build your app-specific index/cache of the network.
Ctrl+F to this part: “Coincidentally, that’s the exact mechanism you would use for aggregation. You listen to events from all of your app users’ repositories, write them to a local database, and query that database as much as you like with zero extra latency.”.
(One interesting consequence is that indexing the network can also be done by someone on your behalf, see https://slices.network/ for an upcoming experiment in that area.)
> Also not totally clear to me (apologies if I missed it in the post) is where repositories live, I have a bsky account with my own domain, but I am not running anything to host a repo.
Yeah, Ctrl+F here: ”Note that https://alice.com and at://alice.com do not need to resolve to the same server. This is intentional so that having a nice handle like @alice.com doesn’t force Alice to host her own data, to mess with her website, or even to have a site at all. If she owns alice.com, she can point at://alice.com at any server.”
You can inspect where at:// points for your handle in an online browser like http://pdsls.dev. If you put your handle there you’ll see the physical server it resolves to at the top.
Presumably you signed up from Bluesky so yes, Bluesky is hosting your repo by default. You can move it somewhere else with no disruption. See https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u for how to do this from CLI and https://pdsmoover.com/info.html for something less technical.
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I think the other issue here is that there's a serious question of why bother "upgrading" your social media from closed to open when we've all figured out that it's bad for you, worsens your mood, and generally wastes your time? If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
Social media is just a paradigm for multimedia communication and networking over the internet. It isn't inherently good or bad, any more than telephones, television, radio or the internet itself. I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry and addicted all the time.
Wow, I always imagined Activitypub to be the better protocol and AT a cheap knock-off, but reading this article made me realize at is, actually, way better - primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity. This is really a great feature to have! This article was a real mind-opener for me.
Every one of these "How AT proto works" explainers focuses on data ownership—which is where ATProto shines—and glosses over data processing, where ATProto is decidedly weaker than ActivityPub. ATProto is built on a global, public view of the world, where all events are visible to a trusted global "AppServer" that can make all of the decisions for you—how to create your feed, who can see who's posts, etc—all of those…
The author is talking about owning a domain and how having that domain gives you ownership over your data... But I can't but think that, at least in the US, domain names are rented from private Internet service providers. There is no ownership involved. One way or another, we are still paying a company. The assumption of the article is that ISPs are stable and net neutral enough that one would not worry about the ISP…
There are alternatives to DNS, like GNS (GNU Name System): https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html
It's getting harder to change DNS settings on Windows, even systemd makes it a PITA to update DNS entries.
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The AT vs AP issue is full of nuance. Our community has gone back and forth on this: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/18302
> We should pick a platform that is federated, where you have ownership and autonomy over your identity and your audience. Social media should not be own-able by a single group or person. Social media is serious business. It ties directly to human rights and business outcomes. It shouldn't be in anyone else's control but yours. I agree, but why not also apply the same logic to the other two communication platforms yo…
Aside, this infuriates me - "here's our open source project/website, join our Discord!" (even Lemmy instances). sigh
I'm a simple man, I see a Dan post and I click. I'm a bit concerned that the open web only won because of first mover advantage. What gives me hope is OSS winning. I'd love to see something like atproto win though. It's clear that a major issue with social media is network effects preventing better apps from becoming popular.
AIUI, HTML won because it was free. There were competing paid for online hypermedia standards at the time, but many cost money. Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.
This is a beautifully written introduction to the architecture of AT, but after much consideration I will still remain on ActivityPub for the time being. I love the idea to define data formats first, and then build on top of that. It's the only way we should do everything, because if you have the data, everything can be re-built on top. Unfortunately the way AT works is all contained in here: > Social aggregation fea…
Well, atproto can scale down too if you’re content with a subset of data. In other words, it’s not that atproto requires you to have a full network, it’s that it lets you build apps over whole network. ActivityPub doesn’t offer an approach to do that. So we’re not comparing apples to oranges. I do think that you’re underestimating the value of open network for large-scale aggregation. Yes, for big open world you need…
We have this cache thing via wss connections. Do they invalidate this messages from user B? Is user's A worldview now completely dead?
Owning a thing in the internet is a complicated topic i guess.
Preserving past information via copying what a user said so that it does not get lost maybe also in the interest of some users (equivalent to the webarchive). I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?
Whatever content is produced in this "open social" network, some of it may have long lasting "value" to an individual. Is there anything to make sure that what they interacted with can not completely broken by the other site of the party?