341–350 of 409 posts
It captures something that I think a lot of us in tech have been feeling but haven't quite articulated: that the social web feels increasingly rented, and the rent keeps going up
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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 th…
Mastodon/AP is difficult to discuss because pointing to flaws of Mastodon leads to people saying "it's just a Mastodon problem", but AP doesn't by itself specify much so it's hard to critique it too. If there's a "flavor" of AP that's competitive with what atproto solves (can "walk away" without cooperation, can "revive" and "remix" data from other apps, can "fork" products with all their data), I'd like to read a co…
It could be interesting to see what other apps may be born out of the protocol though!
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...and this is why Nostr is different! You can build basically anything on it. A blog, a Twitter like application, a streaming service, messaging apps, the sky is the limit! Here's a selection of things built on the protocol: https://nostrapps.com
I really like the approach of nostr, but when I tried to use it, each client I tried would start me off following ecoin pump and dump influencers. It was really off putting. I would’ve preferred starting off in an empty room, an experience more like using signal.
Are you asking for an application that does not have other kinds of feeds?
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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.
For a significant subset of users - younger people and children - a consensus is forming among specialists that social media is indeed inherently bad.
I'm not going to claim that social media can't have negative consequences for young people, lots of things do. But the hyperbole behind the discourse makes it obvious there is also a moral panic at work. In every case, technology is blamed for a failure of society's responsibility to educate and raise children properly.
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…
I've actually tried to separate the two in the article although it might be subtle (because I didn't want to make it confusing).
Owning a domain means you own your handle. Not data. In atproto, a domain is just a handle — you can swap it out without breaking links. (This relies on a centralized auditable repository which is currently being moved out of Bluesky as a separate independent entity. If you don't want to rely on that, yes, you'd have to tie your identity to the domain.)
Owning "data" is not related to owning the domain per se. It has to do with the fact that you can point your identity at a different physical server over time without breaking links. So your hosting doesn't have any real leverage over you. That's what I mean by meaningful ownership.
I've sort of conflated domains and persistent identity in the article to simplify the picture a bit. Your identity is not tied to a domain, but a domain serves as a bidirectionally verified user-friendly alias for it. If you lose control over the domain, you can tie a different one to the same identity later. This doesn't break links between records or functionality.
It captures something that I think a lot of us in tech have been feeling but haven't quite articulated: that the social web feels increasingly rented, and the rent keeps going up
We’d be lucky if the rent was paid in dollars but, instead, it’s paid in psychological manipulation
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> considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, Instances don't work like they do on mastodon. There's not really a "dominating instance" in the same way. Heck, even within Bluesky's infra, there are multiple PDSes. Basically, stuff is layered in a different way (which the article shows the details of) and so talking about the structure of things ends up working differently. > what's stopping them from…
I don't think being able to migrate your account addresses the rugpull concern. The rugpull scenario is that one day, in five years or so, bsky.app drops all AT Protocol support and transforms into a Twitter-like centralized social media website. The problem isn't that the account will stop "existing" but that Bluesky users will stop seeing it. The average non-techie Bluesky user who doesn't know about the AT Protoco…
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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 "@n…
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Yes, if you are really worried about this you’d want to regularly back that up.
I read your reply as the scenario from GP is unlikely to happen in practice or has low impact. To me it seems you need to make frequent backups of "your" data to have a copy of it. Can i run multiple PDSes with my own single identity to not give one provider exclusive power over access to "my" data?
There’s middle grounds here; for example, due to some recent moderation decisions, some users have decided to move away from Bluesky PBC-run PDSes and to self hosting. Those users did not need to proactively backup to move. The proactive backup cases are things like “Bluesky PBC’s servers disappear suddenly” or “they ban your account.”
I don’t think you can run multiple PDSes, but since it’s quick to move the canonical version, I don’t see that as a huge drawback personally. In the same way you’d fallback to the secondary if the primary turns out badly, you’d set up a new PDS and point your identity at it.