Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Social

overreacted.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 409 posts

Re: Open Social

#301

Post by [deleted] »

suyash wrote: post #280
darkamaul wrote: post #258

I’m really impressed by the quality of this post, as others have mentioned. It’s very well written, and the clarity of the drawings adds a lot to the overall explanation. It perfectly illustrates the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. I had never heard of this protocol before (even though I’ve been using Bluesky since the Twitter/X takeover), but after reading this, I feel even more confident that the m…

I'm curious how did he create those illustrations - by hand or AI generated?

[deleted]

Re: Open Social

#302

Post by danabramov »

SilverSlash wrote: post #261

This is a fine example of technical exposition. Very easy to read and understand! Like many others, before this post I hadn't the vaguest idea what atproto was; I always assumed it was some decentralized thing a la crypto. But this actually makes a lot of sense to me and it feels like an objectively good thing. Except for one thing which has been pointed out by others. Anyone can access *all* of my data over this pro…

Yes, something like this is planned in longer term.

The team decided to tackle public data first because scaling aggregation while preserving meaningful ownership is hard. So far I think they’ve succeeded at that.

Private or semi-private comes with a set of different challenges. Indeed scoped tokens are coming (via OAuth scopes) but that’s used for writes. The same mechanism could be extended for private reads in the future, like you describe. There’s questions about what shape private data would have though.

See https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhmtognls2q and https://pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lzhui2zbxk2b for recent thoughts on this topic from Paul who works on atproto.

Re: Open Social

#303

Post by danabramov »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #262

It doesn't matter who controls social media; federated or not, social media is inherently harmful to humans. In a few years we will find out it's like cigarettes. Addictive and harmful, and needs regulation, if not outright bans. But going back to this obsession about data. It's really an obsession with control. But none of you really have control. You hope that you can "engineer" your way into control of your own li…

I tried to make the case that the design of web itself creates different dynamics than the design of today’s social networks in a demonstrable way (walking away from hosting is still easy so it became commodified). I get your pessimism but I wonder how you’d engage with that argument. I think it shows the shape of the thing actually matters.

Re: Open Social

#304

Post by ryangibb »

nairboon wrote: post #288
wsve wrote: post #278

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

The difficulty with the GNS is getting the public keys that enable the decentralisation. Key signing parties seem to have their limits.

There’s a bunch of alternative DNS roots out there, that are similarly hierarchical, but really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root#Implement...

Re: Open Social

#305

Post by danabramov »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #272
hollowonepl wrote: post #269

I think it would be better articulated if comparisons to ActivityPub were made. Those are I believe two competing visions of Open Social defined as communication protocol, not a platform. Otherwise it just sounds like evangelizing employer and that compromises the whole “open” concept of the article, fairly.

The author surely knows about competing protocols but prefers at. It would be just as easy to argue the author is biased if a comparison was made. Maybe more informative though.

I thought about covering others at first but it ended up distracting from the point I wanted to make. I tried to make a strong case for this particular vision in this article. I could write something separate as a comparison, or maybe let other voices speak for their thing.

In short, I don’t think ActivityPub solves any of the stated problems (ability to walk away without cooperation; forking products; giving new life to old data). In that sense it doesn’t mirror “open source but for data” and doesn’t match the premise of my post.

Re: Open Social

#306

Post by danabramov »

utopiah wrote: post #289

Any implementation if I don't care? Like if I want my Web application to support either ATProto, AP, and eventually whatever else is around the corner even if it means only have the lowest common denominator?

If you just care about the identity part, atproto uses a flavor of oauth.

Re: Open Social

#307

Post by danabramov »

zhoukekestar wrote: post #230

This is all based on the premise that you maintain ownership of the DNS. Once you lose control of your domain due to legal issues in the relevant country, those references/citations become invalid. However, this is still a great improvement over the current situation.

I’ve skirted around this in the post to keep conceptual clarity but you can always move away from the domain (as a handle) without breaking links. This is because there’s a more persistent identifier that represents your identity (or at least there’s an option of having one, and that’s the default mechanism). Links between records actually use that identifier instead of the domain handle.

For a more technical overview, see “identity” here: https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/

Re: Open Social

#308

Post by danabramov »

suyash wrote: post #280
darkamaul wrote: post #258

I’m really impressed by the quality of this post, as others have mentioned. It’s very well written, and the clarity of the drawings adds a lot to the overall explanation. It perfectly illustrates the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. I had never heard of this protocol before (even though I’ve been using Bluesky since the Twitter/X takeover), but after reading this, I feel even more confident that the m…

I'm curious how did he create those illustrations - by hand or AI generated?

I’ve used https://excalidraw.com and exported to SVG. It’s very nice for quick technical illustrations.

Re: Open Social

#309

Post by danabramov »

INTPenis wrote: post #256
nulfrost wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? Which part of the stack requires a lot of resources? Each part (PDS, Relay, AppServer (AppView)) can be run on a PI. Blacksky (not a large organization by any means and completely community funded) is almost running the entire bluesky stack themselves. IMO there's not much of a reason to run every part of the stack yourself unless you want to be completely independent from bluesky. At the very least if you want t…

It sounds like the AT protocol is improving in the right direction, but the numbers still say it's highly centralized and therefore closed social media owned by one monolithic entity. AP has its issues, namely not being at all consistent, but that trade-off allows anyone to run all the components of the network without breaking their bank.

AP is just “many small centralized services that email each other”. Its scaling characteristics reflect that - of course running a “little Twitter for 100 people” is cheap. But it’s a completely different thing. You could “scale down” atproto in the same way, but the point of atproto is that you can aim higher than niche islands.

ActivityPub doesn’t attempt to solve any of the same issues that atproto does — there’s no ability to have a full consistent view of the network. So it’s comparing apples and oranges.

Re: Open Social

#310

Post by t_mann »

_cart wrote: post #137
ceayo wrote: post #30

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.

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

Interesting discussion, and good points highlighted about Bluesky's did model that means you essentially don't own your identity either (in typical scenarios and when it will likely matter most). That takes a big chunk out of the "host your own data" narrative.

One point I disagree on that's also mentioned in the replies: I don't think a global state should be seen as necessary or even desirable. Sure, it helps people who optimize for clicks/likes/attention as a business model But that shouldn't be the only concern. Having some degree of uncertainty around the global state can help reinforce a healthy skepticism towards what you're seeing in general. The 'correct' global number of upvotes on a post, or the majority of what has been said about a subject might still be manipulated to the point of being essentially fake. Optimizing for virality is not desirable if you think of the platform as a public good. Think about what it has done for the centralized platforms, and the consequences it's had in the real world.

Post reply on HN