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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

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

#391

Post by zaphar »

Spivak wrote: post #384
zaphar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example of the chattiness is a flow where more than one person is following the same individual on another server. That person will have to push new messages to every single one of the people following them. This means that if 10 users are following me from the same server I will not have 1 push for that instance, I'll gave 10 pushes for the same single unchanged message. This is built into the protocol. That's a…

Isn't that "more than once instance" rather than "more than one user"? I think the weirdness is with Bluesky all that cost is still there but it's now handled by a small group of massive megacorps which is a real tangible benefit to self-hosters but you could have that on top of AP by running your service off what would essentially be a massive global cache of AP content which is what the indexer is.

Yes, I edited my comment too be more clear and. I shouldn't have referred to it as fetch because it's actually push.

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

#392

Post by blopp99 »

donatj wrote: post #366

I was really hoping for a scathing review of the old AT modem protocol. My understanding is it’s still what’s used by cell phones to communicate with their cellular modems. Back in the early nineties I spent a lot of time learning and using these commands to send files over the phone to friends without an internet connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_AT_command_set

same and i also think AT Modem is a crock of shit

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

#393

Post by commoner »

remram wrote: post #356
commoner wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to try Brutaldon, a free and open source Mastodon web client that works without JavaScript. Brutaldon can optionally be self-hosted and it also supports Pleroma. - Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org - Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon

How do you use this to see the above thread?

After logging in to Brutaldon, click the Search button at the top, paste the URL of the thread into the field, and submit the form. The Mastodon post appears. Click the "thread" link to expand the entire thread.

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

#394

Post by zaphar »

lucideer wrote: post #390
zaphar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example of the chattiness is a flow where more than one person is following the same individual on another server. That person will have to push new messages to every single one of the people following them. This means that if 10 users are following me from the same server I will not have 1 push for that instance, I'll gave 10 pushes for the same single unchanged message. This is built into the protocol. That's a…

> This is built into the protocol. I haven't implemented AP from scratch so I may be missing technical details precluding this, but it sounds like it may at least partially be covered by https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#shared-inbox-delivery ... in which case it may be an implementation issue? Mind you, there is liberal use of "MAY" there which I find is always a problem with specs: that would likely lead to mandat…

In theory it would help. In practice since a server can't rely on this it probably devolves to just ignoring that feature.

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

#395

Post by bombcar »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #245
bombcar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have every post made on BlueSky up to a certain point last weekend and it's only 3 GB. I have every email I've ever received or sent (and not deleted) and it's only 4GB. Should something require I download all that every time I login? No. But having a local copy is amazing, and a truly federated system should have and even be able to depend on those. The Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke; the only enforcement is t…

How have you pared down your email to just 4GB?

Not sure, I guess I don't send or receive many attachments and delete marketing/spam.

My work email is 10gb.

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

#396

Post by jeroenhd »

doctor_eval wrote: post #217
jeroenhd wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, when a server does go down and thousands of people start uploading their 50k skeets that all need to be cryptographically verified, other major servers will have quite the scaling challenge. Cryptographic verification is intentionally compute heavy after all. 50k entries isn't a whole lot but as people hosting Mastodon servers have found out, things start slowing down when 1000 people transfer th…

That might be true - but how else can it work? The data has to get onto the server somehow, and the days of unsigned or unencrypted data ended with Snowden. The OP was going on about storing all the data on-device and uploading it, but regardless of where it’s stored, if a bunch of people have to move, the thundering herd problem, so to speak, will still exist. Also, signature verification is not slow. I don’t know w…

BlueSky uses @noble/secp256k1 which performs this stuff in Javascript, with about 880* verifications per second on the Apple M2 (a chip with a relatively high IPC, likely higher than your average server).

Verifying those messages will take about a minute of CPU time per user (assuming no impact from cache misses due to threads swapping in and out and processing new data). I think that's quite significant.

* = https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-curves

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

#397

Post by gdubs »

janandonly wrote: post #345
pfraze wrote: 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/

Because people are actually using this as a community now and there's a desire to not just open the floodgates before all the moderation pieces etc are in place. I joined when it was roughly 15-20k users and each wave of invites brought distinct subgroups. Then, the original short invite code tokens began getting brute forced and there was a large wave that completely disrupted the balance of things.

There's the protocol, but then there's also the community – and communities are ecosystems not just technical problems.

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

#398

Post by vidarh »

moojd wrote: post #385
lucideer wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your added point fits in with the initial red flag for me - before I saw pfraze's (excellent) post here - that the vast majority of what I've read advocating for ATProto says very clearly: "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol.". Account portability is in no way incompatible with ActivityPub. It's not built into the spec., but it's also not forbidden / prevented by the spe…

Even framing it as 'account portability' is missing the point. I want to own my identity and take it with me anywhere. I shouldn't need to transfer anything, its mine. This model is fundamentally incompatible with how ActivityPub works (no, running your own server is not the same thing as decoupling identity from the concept of a server itself.) Could that change in the future? Maybe, but not without prior art. Even…

It's not incompatible with how ActivityPub works at all.

The ActivityPub spec says that object id's should be https URI's, not that they must. The underlying ActivityStreams spec just requires them to be unique.

All that's needed to provide full portability without a "transfer" is for an implementation to use URI's to e.g. DID's, or any other distributed URI scheme. Optionally, if you want full backwards compatibility, point the id to a proxy and add a separate URI until there's broader buyin.

I think there's be benefit in updating the ActivityPub spec to be less demanding of URIs, and instead of saying that they "should" be https require them to be a secure transport, and maybe provide a fallback mechanism if the specific URI mechanism is not known (e.g. allow implementations to provide a fallback proxy URL), but the main challenge there is not the spec but getting buying from at least Mastodon. The approach of providing a https URI but give a transport-neutral id separate to the origin https URI would on the other hand degrade gracefully in the absence of buyin.

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

#399

Post by commoner »

bmacho wrote: post #278
cmdlineluser wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add `/embed` to the end of the URL.

Wow, I did not know about that! Still, it doesn't show the rest of the toots, so content posted on Mastodon is still not readable without javascript. Which is ridiculous, we have medium, twitter, facebook, reddit etc, and they decided to publish somewhere not readable without javascript.

I do agree that the default Mastodon web client should display a static page when the user has JavaScript disabled in their browser.

The issue is being tracked here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

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

#400

Post by vidarh »

barnabee wrote: post #362
vidarh wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why bother with Mastodon interop? Why bother building on top of a standard that doesn’t do what you want if you don’t think being part of the “Fediverse” is particularly interesting or a goal of the platform you’re building? Because they pretend to want to be open, and it's sending a very clear signal that is not their goal if they're not even trying to work with the existing ecosystem. If they just want to be a si…

The “Fediverse” is not an existing ecosystem in any way that replaces Twitter or builds an interesting social network, from my perspective at least. No matter how open I wanted to be, if I was setting out to build a social network, I’d please precisely zero value on being connected to that “existing network”. It is irrelevant to me, despite what a vocal minority might want me to believe.

It might not matter to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and choosing to ignore it is a clear signal.
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