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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

341–350 of 493 posts

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

#341
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 OK…

It's weird to me that all the complaints about @proto being NIH focus on ActivityPub when if anything it's closer to an evolution of secure scuttlebutt. The two are so fundamentally different I do not understand the complaints.

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

#342
post #8
post #3

> It turns out using Git, which is almost always used with a centralized 'remote', to do federation, which needs to be weakly consistent, IS A BAD IDEA!!!!! Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? I want to take this critiques here seriously but there's not a ton to grasp onto. It definitely didn't feel great that AtProto built from bare ground, reinvented json-schema & OpenAPI for no…

My limited understanding of the problem about git as the basis for user data storage is that it then would expose the complexity of git rebasing and the rest via federation. Git is great with a centralized remote (like I believe the original post is getting at) but less so in a federated setting.

How would it fare with a system like Darcs/Pijul where rebasing and cherry picking aren't problematic ?

https://initialcommit.com/blog/pijul-version-control-system#...

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

#343
> “The 'account portability' piece is bullshit! The way 'account portability' works is by having two separate keys, one for signing and one as a 'recovery' key. You're supposed to be able to use the 'recovery' key to rewrite history if your account gets hacked or some shit.

WE HAVE THE ABILITY TO DO THAT AS SERVER ADMINS!!! MASTODON HAS THIS ALREADY!!“

I’m sorry, but how can you take someone seriously who makes comments this absurd.

This reads like jealousy.

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

#344
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.

This is completely irrelevant to the article and response

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

#345
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…

Only 65K users? Why does NOSTR have 10 times[1] as many users already? I guess you choose to close the doors and only let 65K users come in as Beta testers?

[1] Users with a profile are at about 2.2 million, see : https://stats.nostr.band/

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

#346
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. Everything else aside, this is completely untrue. I self-hosted my first fediverse account on Mastodon and got fed up with the complexity of it for a single person instance and shut it off one day (2018 or so?). On another account at some point 50% of my followed people vanished because 2 servers where everyone in that bubble were on just went…

Alternatively: the likelihood of any one server going away tomorrow is small, but the likelihood of something in your social graph going away tomorrow is high.

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

#347
post #3

> It turns out using Git, which is almost always used with a centralized 'remote', to do federation, which needs to be weakly consistent, IS A BAD IDEA!!!!! Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? I want to take this critiques here seriously but there's not a ton to grasp onto. It definitely didn't feel great that AtProto built from bare ground, reinvented json-schema & OpenAPI for no…

> Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? that by itself is a bad idea users being able to arbitrary edit tweets in a social network is never a good idea because the moment you say (i.e. tweet) somethingpublic it's not just your thing anymore,

What you’re saying is nonsense. Posts are stored in a merkle tree; you can’t just change stuff.

Don’t spread misinformation please.

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

#348
post #8
post #3

> It turns out using Git, which is almost always used with a centralized 'remote', to do federation, which needs to be weakly consistent, IS A BAD IDEA!!!!! Given that a user owns their feed, I'm not sure why this is a bad idea? I want to take this critiques here seriously but there's not a ton to grasp onto. It definitely didn't feel great that AtProto built from bare ground, reinvented json-schema & OpenAPI for no…

My limited understanding of the problem about git as the basis for user data storage is that it then would expose the complexity of git rebasing and the rest via federation. Git is great with a centralized remote (like I believe the original post is getting at) but less so in a federated setting.

This is not true. Users won’t be exposed to rebasing, only developers. Rebasing is what powers some deletion features and is what would power the ability to edit.

The functionality would be obfuscated behind easy to use UX constructs.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I was like, 50K tweets converted to bytes is like… well it’s one second to upload on my home internet connection. After that, it just felt like rant.

Twitter has pictures so well, probably more than one second.

Hmm, Twitter has certainly drifted a lot from when it was SMS-compatible with an open API...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/9/3135406/twitter-api-open-c...

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

#350
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something completely different. AtProto is designed to be a federated protocol. The issue I have is that it is not interoperable with the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub. You can b…

“We have a thing that is arcane and hasn’t taken off with the public so don’t make a new one” isn’t exactly a stellar argument. The only winning move is to onboard users and given hundreds of millions of people may be looking to leave Twitter, Mastodon utterly shit the bed and missed the moment. That’s the end of the story: if the system can’t catch users raining down from the sky during a generational upheaval in so…

I wondered if Twitter would try extending its protocol so it integrated into the Fediverse, and just become the best Mastodon server ever that everyone ended up congregating on.
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