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We need a federation of forges

blog.tangled.org

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Re: We need a federation of forges

#371

Post by tardedmeme »

danabramov wrote: post #316
vladms wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does Bluesky app have control over what data it aggregates and can decide (without checking with a user) not to aggregate data from a host? I am trying to understand what are the implications for a user, and a bad scenario where one would disagree with an action of the app. And if the answer is "yes" then at least when someone "makes their own app" can they easily use "Bluesky hosts list" + add special extra hosts…

Yes to both. An app can choose to ignore/ban some users (or even entire hosting servers if they’re specifically created for network abuse). This is similar to how any web app may choose to ignore POST requests from spammers. And yes, someone can decide to aggregate data themselves and provide an alternative app over same data with different moderation policies. In fact that’s already the case (Blacksky runs their own…

So the app is equivalent to an AP instance.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#372

Post by tardedmeme »

uncenter wrote: post #94
code-blooded wrote: post #36

Tangled is VC sponsored. It doesn't scream stability to me, but rather "we need to grow at all cost". I don't see the appeal. Even though it's federated, when development stops, who will be there to fix bugs and maintain it?

You wrote this comment on a VC funded news aggregation website, so who's to say?

This website is funded by providing brainwashing services for YC's agenda.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#373

Post by tardedmeme »

jerojero wrote: post #14

"There are 4 standards that try to solve this problem, its too many, we need one that finally unifies it all and solves the problem once and for all" "There are 5 standards that..." Jokes aside, I think we need stronger arguments as to why something like activity pub is not good enough to solve the problem instead of trying to come up a new way of solving the "decentralized comms" problem.

Or email. AP is very similar to SMTP over HTTP.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#374

Post by tardedmeme »

rileymichael wrote: post #215
jonstaab wrote: post #181

I don't know how new Tangled is, but there is a fairly mature github alternative being built on Nostr: https://gitworkshop.dev/ The basic idea is that you can put your repository on multiple GRASP-compatible nostr relays (GRASP is a sub-protocol that glues nostr and git together), so even if one server goes down you can transparently sync using the others. This means in effect 100% uptime if you choose reliable serve…

not that mature — its name violates git’s trademark policy https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

This is a meaningless fact unless Git actually sues them for infringement. Failure to quickly sue can be seen as tacit approval.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#375

Post by tardedmeme »

foresto wrote: post #362
nightpool wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds more like you want better decentralization, like IPFS or BitTorrent, not necessarily federation between different forge instances. I'm not familiar with any existing federated system that would be resilient to government censorship. Certainly Mastodon and Bluesky aren't.

> I'm not familiar with any existing federated system that would be resilient to government censorship. Usenet and Matrix are notable examples.

Usenet is, Matrix isn't. Usenet achieves this with a broadcast design - every node on the network receives every message. As a result of this and being flooded with half a petabyte of new messages per day, there are approximately 3 (three) nodes (all other providers are reselling access to one of these).

The text side of Usenet is healthier, with a few gigabytes per day, and not trying to retain every message forever. Would it work if it was also the world's git forge though?

Re: We need a federation of forges

#376

Post by jauntywundrkind »

miki123211 wrote: post #282

I don't think we need a federation of forges. What we need instead is just richer git repos. Fossil gets 90% there with integrating tickets (issues), forums and wikis as part of the repo itself. When you clone a fossil repo, those are also part of the clone, and can be browsed offline on an airplane. Replies can also be written offline and, permissions willing, synced back up to the remote, either immediately or when…

I think this idea is additive not contrary.

I still would like to be able to send and receive issues and pull-requests, to/from anyone.

Your idea here seems to be about how to encode the data. You talk about web interfaces & who is allowed to do what. But it's not clear to me how my repo/forge gets my PR in front of you. The social networking technology feels like it has to come into play somewhere, and I don't see that as described in your system.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#377

Post by jauntywundrkind »

nightpool wrote: post #208

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu? Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the c…

Github is already in practice federated, within the confines of github. If you fork a project you now have your own federated git forge with that project.

The difference is that these same flows should work without needing to be github to github.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#378

Post by Crestwave »

tardedmeme wrote: post #371
danabramov wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes to both. An app can choose to ignore/ban some users (or even entire hosting servers if they’re specifically created for network abuse). This is similar to how any web app may choose to ignore POST requests from spammers. And yes, someone can decide to aggregate data themselves and provide an alternative app over same data with different moderation policies. In fact that’s already the case (Blacksky runs their own…

So the app is equivalent to an AP instance.

Not really. From my understanding, in AP, your account belongs to an instance and your data is then synced to other servers. If the instance goes down, your account is gone.

In ATP, your data is stored in the "Atmosphere", hosted on decentralized "Personal Data Servers" (PDS). The app then simply parses and filters that data. They can apply moderation actions by choosing not to display or read certain posts, but your data still exists and another app could choose to display it. Similarly, if the app goes down, your data is still perfectly intact in the Atmosphere.

It might then seem like the PDS is equivalent to an AP instance, but as mentioned, they are decentralized. Identity is verified through signatures, so if your PDS goes down, you can migrate to a new one as long as you have your signing keys. Therefore, the account belongs to you and not any specific server.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#379

Post by jauntywundrkind »

mikepurvis wrote: post #58
d_silin wrote: post #3

Federated solutions seem to be the future, after once-beloved provider becomes the crumbling monopoly.

It's not a clear one-way trip though. The "original" blogosphere of the 2000s was heavily federated with MovableType supporting trackbacks and then later systems automating that further with pingbacks. Ultimately it all fell to spam and hosting complexity though, and now almost all blogs are on a handful of centralized hosts again. Spam/moderation is going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome with any distributed for…

At least with atproto, we can see if an account has history and activity, see if their public data looks at all legit. The ability to deal with spam and disinformation seems so much radically better than anything else we've been able to work from.

Re: We need a federation of forges

#380

Post by embedding-shape »

tardedmeme wrote: post #369
embedding-shape wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, Mastodon didn't really set out to solve that particular problem. But it does seem like ATProto did, as it seems a lot easier to move around in ATProto than Mastodon (and ActivityPub in general).

Yep. Changing servers is easy. You just have to update the central PLC registry run by Blue Sky LLC to say which server you're hosted on now. ... wait a minute.

You're complaining that moving away from a PDS means you have to let that PDS know you're moving away? Do you understand what you're actually complaining about, or I the one who misunderstand what you're complaining about?

In case you haven't read them before, the docs for migrating are here: https://atproto.com/guides/account-migration

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