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

So this guy is now S3. All of S3

chaos.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 522 posts

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#371

Post by account42 »

bscphil wrote: post #208
madeofpalk wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of these are 'authentication' You're thinking of how Mastodon does verified links. You could do something similar, provide a verified link on your profile to a file in an S3 bucket, but there's very utility (or risk) in that. Mastodon also allows you to be discoverable via a custom domain, using .well-known as parent mentioned https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/webfinger/ https://www.hanselman.com/blog/use-yo…

I'm thinking, mainly, of how these features are exposed in the UI and how users experience it. What matters is that users take (rightly or wrongly) a verified profile link to mean "I control this webpage". So e.g. if you could verify a Twitter handle on Mastodon, it would mean "if you trust the identity of this Twitter handle, you should also trust the validity of this Mastodon user". That's extremely important to ge…

> But if you allow user generated content on the home page of your site, there's not a distinction (from a Mastodon user point of view) between the two.

If you allow UGC with *arbitrary HTML* or explicitly support generating rel=me. Both are you explicitly giving someone control of the site (or at least letting them claim they have it).

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#372

Post by capableweb »

capableweb wrote: post #340
yreg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source on the millions? This person says they got 12k visitors over a day: https://nicklafferty.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-re-on-th... The websites hugged to death by this forum are usually tiny hobby projects.

Dang from 6 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140 > There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.

Forgot to mention, but "I was on the HN frontpage for X hours and got X views" doesn't always translate to the same happening for everything. Some topics are more interesting to the people just browsing HN, than others. I'd expect an article titled "I spent $6 Million On Google Ads Last Year" to be significantly less interesting than "MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry" for example, where the latter would surely gather a magnitude of more visits than the earlier, even if they would spend the same amount of hours on the frontpage.

Some content is simply more interesting for a broader audience.

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#373

Post by jeremyjh »

mal-2 wrote: post #362
jeremyjh wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can make a case for the developer productivity benefits of rails to a startup or business, but it’s hard to see it as worth the cost to the Mastodon community as a whole. But maybe it’s won the Fediverse market because of the depth of features which is a benefit of that productivity.

My read is it's mostly social, there's a lot of people accustomed to Mastodon and not much interest in exploring other options. There are implementations in Elixir (Pleroma, Akkoma) and work being done in Rust (Calckey, currently node but moving towards a Rust implementation). Mastodon dev team are not particularly open to criticism so my general sense is that admins should choose another project.

Yes, I’ve explored all this but I think Mastodon has won mainly because of its admin functionality, a huge fraction of dev effort is focused on tools to manage content moderation, spam policies and so on. Pleroma has a bad reputation because it was behind on that stuff at one time - maybe still - and a lot of instances had to be blocked because they couldn’t be managed effectively enough. I think it’s easy to underestimate how wide that moat is.

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#374

Post by capableweb »

mariusor wrote: post #325
linuxdude314 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul has lots of experience designing protocols. He designed SSB. ActivityPub does a lot of things wrong from first principals. The whole point was to start from scratch.

> ActivityPub does a lot of things wrong from first principals I'd be curious to learn about those.

There is a lot more information here: https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1511811083954102273?lang=...

From my own understanding, the biggest useful differences for me personally is: account portability, domains as usernames and content-addressable from the ground up.

- Account portability - Useful if/when you want to move between servers

- Domains as usernames - Ties into the same value as account portability. I've owned my own domain for decades, it never changes and probably won't, until years after I die

- Content-addressable - Caching and syncing becomes so much easier, which is a huge issue Mastodon currently suffers from.

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#375

Post by mal-2 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #373
mal-2 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read is it's mostly social, there's a lot of people accustomed to Mastodon and not much interest in exploring other options. There are implementations in Elixir (Pleroma, Akkoma) and work being done in Rust (Calckey, currently node but moving towards a Rust implementation). Mastodon dev team are not particularly open to criticism so my general sense is that admins should choose another project.

Yes, I’ve explored all this but I think Mastodon has won mainly because of its admin functionality, a huge fraction of dev effort is focused on tools to manage content moderation, spam policies and so on. Pleroma has a bad reputation because it was behind on that stuff at one time - maybe still - and a lot of instances had to be blocked because they couldn’t be managed effectively enough. I think it’s easy to underes…

That's fair, I've heard complaints that mastodon's moderation tools also leave something to be desired but it might still be the best. I haven't been an admin so I can't comment firsthand.

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#376

Post by steveklabnik »

mariusor wrote: post #323
steveklabnik wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how I think about it: * ActivityPub -> AT Protocol ( https://atproto.com/ ) * Mastadon -> Bluesky ( https://blueskyweb.xyz/ ) Right now, federation is not turned on for the Bluesky instance. There are differences in both, however. I'm not going to speak about my impressions of the Mastadon vs Bluesky teams because frankly, Mastadon never really caught on with me, so they're probably biased. ('they' being my im…

Steve, it's "Mastodon" like the animal and like the band. It hurts to read 4 paragraphs of good relevant text and cringe every time you misspell the name. :(

Ah yeah. I struggle spelling certain words. This is one of them. Thank you and sorry. (I spell the animal and the band this way too. Working on it.)

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#378

Post by mariusor »

capableweb wrote: post #374
mariusor wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ActivityPub does a lot of things wrong from first principals I'd be curious to learn about those.

There is a lot more information here: https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1511811083954102273?lang=... From my own understanding, the biggest useful differences for me personally is: account portability, domains as usernames and content-addressable from the ground up. - Account portability - Useful if/when you want to move between servers - Domains as usernames - Ties into the same value as account portability. I've o…

Since you seem to default to sending me to RTFM :D, I'll give you a similarly short reply:

ActivityPub can identify users based on their domain too. Probably better than BlueSky does, because it uses better standardized mechanisms - the URI needs to dereference to a valid ActivityPub actor and the community has converged to using webfinger for discovery. The fact that web-finger is generally used for user discovery makes it easier to use the identical mechanism that BlueSky uses - where the identity (which in ActivityPub is a URL) is not tied directly to a domain. (Eg, if you do a webfinger query for marius.federated.id you will get a response where it tells you that one of the URLs for the ActivityPub identity associated with that is https://metalhead.club/@mariusor, you can check it out right now with curl https://marius.federated.id/.well-known/webfinger?resource=h...).

Account portability can exist in ActivityPub because the verbs for signaling to the network that an object/actor has moved to a different URL are in the vanilla vocabulary. The fact that nobody has implemented this so far does not make it impossible. (It's not like anyone so far needed to move from BlueSky to ... I don't know... BlueSky. So it being capable of moving identities is still equally theoretical in my view).

Regarding your last point (or the one made about it in the twitter thread), I don't really understand about how identifying content by its cryptographic signature is conducive to better caching and "syncing" (how in the world a hash would make it easier to sync content than a URL I don't know). HTTP clients, servers and proxies have very good caching and syncing mechanisms for anything that uses URLs to identify resources. Whatever BlueSky wants to do, must invent their own intermediary layers before anyone will be able to say "it's easier" with any certainty.

In my opinion nothing you mentioned can be called a "doing things wrong from first principals(sic)" - and I'm still hoping that linuxdude314 can make a better argument.

ActivityPub is fine for what it was designed to be: an exchange mechanism for "low impact" social activity. It's not meant to interact with cryptocurrencies, it's not meant to shelter dissidents from corrupt governments, it's not meant to help you interact with your drug dealer, nor whistle-blow on your employer. There are already options for those things. It is meant to allow your grandma to like your cat pictures in a more distributed manner than facebook offers. The people that imagine BlueSky will be doing something more than that, are - in my opinion - vastly overevaluating it.

(PS. Apparently this was not "similarly short", apologies.)

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#379

Post by mariusor »

steveklabnik wrote: post #376
mariusor wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve, it's "Mastodon" like the animal and like the band. It hurts to read 4 paragraphs of good relevant text and cringe every time you misspell the name. :(

Ah yeah. I struggle spelling certain words. This is one of them. Thank you and sorry. (I spell the animal and the band this way too. Working on it.)

Hey thank you for the reply, I'm also sorry. I usually have better grace than correcting random strangers on their spelling, but I've shown weakness on this day. :)

Re: So this guy is now S3. All of S3

#380

Post by steveklabnik »

mariusor wrote: post #379
steveklabnik wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah. I struggle spelling certain words. This is one of them. Thank you and sorry. (I spell the animal and the band this way too. Working on it.)

Hey thank you for the reply, I'm also sorry. I usually have better grace than correcting random strangers on their spelling, but I've shown weakness on this day. :)

It’s all good.

I think the funniest one I struggle with all the time is “parallel.” I always think it should be “paralell.” I put the two parallel lines in the wrong spot in the word!

Post reply on HN