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Introduction to AT Protocol

mackuba.eu

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Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#31

Post by jazzyjackson »

verdverm wrote: post #8
koolala wrote: post #3

Would be great to have a new modern alternative to the E-mail standard that is usable for both public and private messaging.

We might be able to do this with permissioned spaces. There are instances or use-cases where you want an outside entity to make changes to a user's repo - email / inbox [or @mail since it is @atproto :] - unsubscribe from email - notifications / rsvp The cool thing is that we could use the stackable moderation infra for dealing with bad actors https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

stackable moderation for ignoring senders is a cool idea. I'll keep an eye out for permissioned spaces, is there encryption and signatures involved at all? (everything on bluesky is signed with PKI, iirc?)

And just unsolicited feedback but "Blebbit" is a deeply terrible name. It turns my stomach for some reason. I don't even know what a bleb could be or what it could represent besides, like, an ulcer.

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#33

Post by jazzyjackson »

psionides wrote: post #28
jazzyjackson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't there a Discord built on ATProto ? [Serious Question, wondering if there are trade-offs that make this especially annoying]

So, one big problem is that there's basically no way to have shared-private data in the protocol - it's either private to you, or fully public. Hence no "locked accounts", "followers-only posts" and so on on Bluesky, and this also prevents more sensitive ideas like e.g. "Strava on ATProto" (where you probably don't want to share your run map with the whole world!). They are working on this, but it's still gonna take…

Ah thanks for the answer. What's the PKI story on bluesky, doesn't every identity have a corresponding public key? So if I had a list of people I wanted to a post to be visible to, couldn't I "just" encrypt it with a key that is decryptable by each of those individuals via their pubkey?

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#34

Post by JdeBP »

acheron wrote: post #16

In this house, we believe “AT protocol” refers to Hayes modem commands. ATDT2024561414

I see the error of forgetting the long distance prefix and dialling some poor innocent to squeal tones in xyr ear during Zone Mail Hour is alive and well. (-:

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#35

Post by actionfromafar »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #33
psionides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one big problem is that there's basically no way to have shared-private data in the protocol - it's either private to you, or fully public. Hence no "locked accounts", "followers-only posts" and so on on Bluesky, and this also prevents more sensitive ideas like e.g. "Strava on ATProto" (where you probably don't want to share your run map with the whole world!). They are working on this, but it's still gonna take…

Ah thanks for the answer. What's the PKI story on bluesky, doesn't every identity have a corresponding public key? So if I had a list of people I wanted to a post to be visible to, couldn't I "just" encrypt it with a key that is decryptable by each of those individuals via their pubkey?

My immediate thought to

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#36

Post by sedatk »

Here is an excerpt from the offical docs for the curious:

"Why not use ActivityPub?

ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon.

Account portability is a major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.

Another major reason is scalability. ActivityPub depends heavily on delivering messages between a wide network of small-to-medium sized nodes, which can cause individual nodes to be flooded with traffic and generally struggles to provide global views of activity. The AT Protocol uses aggregating applications to merge activity from the users' hosts, reducing the overall traffic and dramatically reducing the load on individual hosts.

Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP's double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and algorithmic feeds."

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#39

Post by verdverm »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #27
psionides wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything "social" basically - the first ideas that come to people's minds are of course things like: GitHub but on ATProto, Instagram on ATProto, Tiktok on ATProto, Reddit on ATProto…

Why isn't there a Discord built on ATProto ? [Serious Question, wondering if there are trade-offs that make this especially annoying]

Working on it, https://blebbit.app (mainly landing pages, but login and basic chat work)

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#40

Post by psionides »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #33
psionides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one big problem is that there's basically no way to have shared-private data in the protocol - it's either private to you, or fully public. Hence no "locked accounts", "followers-only posts" and so on on Bluesky, and this also prevents more sensitive ideas like e.g. "Strava on ATProto" (where you probably don't want to share your run map with the whole world!). They are working on this, but it's still gonna take…

Ah thanks for the answer. What's the PKI story on bluesky, doesn't every identity have a corresponding public key? So if I had a list of people I wanted to a post to be visible to, couldn't I "just" encrypt it with a key that is decryptable by each of those individuals via their pubkey?

I'm not really familiar with that layer of things, but I think it's possible, though that "just" is doing a lot of work here of course, and I think it might not necessarily be a good idea to have encrypted messages available publicly for everyone all the time, so they can collect them and wait until someone slips up / a vulnerability is found / they have enough hardware to crunch it...
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