DNS is much more foundational and overlooked here. how does the world agree that "x.com" resolves the way it does?
How is it overlooked? It’s mentioned several times, including the mention that atproto builds on top of DNS among other things.
Open Social
311–320 of 409 posts
Re: Open Social
#312the view of social media as just data that can be rehosted i think misses a large part of its success Twitter and Instagram are fundamentally different scenes bc of their restricted formats. Twitter has/had character limits. Instagram was primary for photo sharing. if you try to cram a long political rant in an instagram photo or description.. it is fighting against the app format and limitations. This sculpts the ap…
Designers of atproto actually agree with you so the data is not unstructured! It’s structured by schemas (called “lexicons”) controlled by app developers.
Data in user repositories is treated as untrusted input by apps, and rejected if it doesn’t pass the corresponding schema. Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a nudge towards future extension (eg open unions are default).
That’s exactly why you can’t make a 500 character post on Bluesky. The Bluesky server will ignore your record as being invalid.
Re: Open Social
#313I really hope this doesn't catch on. Having ever random site on the internet being able to see every bit of my data sounds like a nightmare. Unless I am misunderstanding something.
This is for public data.
Think Twitter posts, StackOverflow answers, Reddit comments, etc. The stuff you don’t want companies to gradually start locking up for their own gains (as they tend to).
The protocol will likely be extended for private and semi-private data in the future, which would work by granting explicit permissions to apps. For now, app developers would keep private data in databases, same as usual.
Re: Open Social
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The subtext of my comment is that the people doing and pushing for atproto are not building for small networks but for big networks. Yes, technical solutions can be found; the problem is, as usual, not technical but rather social. What kind of organization can build and maintain world-scale indexes ? What kind of people can be in those organizations ? There is very little reason to believe that those intermediaries w…
I guess I just don’t believe that any solution where you don’t have full view of the network is aligned with what normal people want. Maybe AP is on a bigger mission to teach people that they’re “wanting wrong things” and actually you should enjoy a system where everyone sees a different like count and half the replies are missing. I think it’s a dead end.
Re: Open Social
#315Wow, 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…
> This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does
I didn't know "private likes" even existed, but if atproto includes public key encryption, I could publish a record containing a "like" that I have encrypted with the "liked" user's public key. Only that user would know what the record contained. Though, the fact that the encrypted message exists and had a cleartext "@name" is itself informative to adversaries. Concealing that level of info would require other measures.
Re: Open Social
#316The 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 clearnet websites for flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, cults, hacker groups, classified document leakers, nazi groups and terrorist organisations. Finding a registrar that lets you say what you want is a solved problem.
Currently most people publish stuff on big platforms so governments, activists and billionaires will go after these platforms to influence or control what's being talked about. I worry that if we never had big platforms, or we moved past them, all of the focus would be on going after registrars and hosts instead. It's not a bulletproof system unfortunately
Re: Open Social
#317the view of social media as just data that can be rehosted i think misses a large part of its success Twitter and Instagram are fundamentally different scenes bc of their restricted formats. Twitter has/had character limits. Instagram was primary for photo sharing. if you try to cram a long political rant in an instagram photo or description.. it is fighting against the app format and limitations. This sculpts the ap…
Designers of atproto actually agree with you so the data is not unstructured! It’s structured by schemas (called “lexicons”) controlled by app developers. Data in user repositories is treated as untrusted input by apps, and rejected if it doesn’t pass the corresponding schema. Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a nudge towards future extension (eg open unions are default). That’s exactly why you c…
ah okay, i hadnt come across this. seems like a potentially viable strategy
> Schemas are evolved in a backwards-compatible way with a nudge towards future extension (eg open unions are default).
unions of schemas? Doesnt that lead to a facebook-ized kitchen sink app that does everything?
you can effectivelt filter to .. say .. only photos with a photo-only app. But that doesnt form a app/schema culture
Re: Open Social
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
The subtext of my comment is that the people doing and pushing for atproto are not building for small networks but for big networks. Yes, technical solutions can be found; the problem is, as usual, not technical but rather social. What kind of organization can build and maintain world-scale indexes ? What kind of people can be in those organizations ? There is very little reason to believe that those intermediaries w…
I guess I just don’t believe that any solution where you don’t have full view of the network is aligned with what normal people want. Maybe AP is on a bigger mission to teach people that they’re “wanting wrong things” and actually you should enjoy a system where everyone sees a different like count and half the replies are missing. I think it’s a dead end.
That's a purely personal point of view but I don't think the AP people claim that "people want the wrong things", but rather that "the things you want have a cost and we're not hiding it".
The fact that likes count and half the replies are missing is not specific to AP but to implementations not willing to actually follow the AP community: in fact the SocialHub (https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/) community is the place where all coordinated development happens, and solutions to those issues have already been designed and implemented in multiple softwares, with the notable exception of Mastodon. Maybe that's the issue: people keep looking at Mastodon to understand AP, but Mastodon is one of the worst examples of AP, even when talking only about the technical domain. It doesn't implement the C2S API, it doesn't have portability, likes counts and missing replies as you said, ...
Re: Open Social
#319"Open source has clearly won." is this a joke?
Re: Open Social
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your goal here is to make the best GITHUB OPEN SOURCE game engine possible. That sounds awful if applied to Bevy, and seems you misunderstand what "Mr. Beast" is trying to say. They're not saying make the best game engine, but make the game engine that would do best by GitHub-popular metrics, which is absolutely the wrong way to go. I hope they continue to simply make the best game engine available, as before, and…
They didn't misunderstand, they're calling out Bevy's priorities. Bevy is still incomplete as an engine. AFAIK there's only one commercially successful game made with it, Tiny Glade, and it doesn't even use Bevy's renderer but a custom one. Yet the Bevy developers distract the project with essays and debates about the politics of their federated social media presence. You don't need that to build a game engine, but y…
> They didn't misunderstand, they're calling out Bevy's priorities.
Yes, but the misunderstanding I'm trying to point out is that Mr Beast is not trying to create something of value, they're trying to create something that works well on a specific platform.
In the Bevy analogy, that would be creating a GitHub project that gets the most stars, regardless of how useful or well the engine itself is working.
I'm instead saying the same thing as you, they should continue focusing on building the greatest engine, regardless of the platform for hosting the project.
If Bevy were to follow Mr Beasts advice, they'd focus on flashy demos, engaging READMEs and so on, to increase the success on the platform itself, instead of focusing on the engine itself, which from following their direction almost since inception, they're doing a pretty good job with already.