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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

#411

Post by zaphar »

sleepybrett wrote: post #408
zaphar wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There can be an interrogation endpoint/message of supported versions/extensions to the base protocol, that's a very normal thing. If it supports bundled delivery, send a single bundle if not send them all individually.

Yep, And I'm sure there are some instances that do exactly that. But in a distributed protocol you only get the benefit if both sides of a given interaction support the optimization. For something in the spec that is optional you can't rely on it and you aren't forced to implement it so it's not irrational to just ignore it. Which typically means you only get occasional marginal benefit.

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

#412

Post by jeroenhd »

tazjin wrote: post #194
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…

> Cryptographic verification is intentionally compute heavy after all You're thinking of password hashing functions like argon2, there's no reason for normal signing and verification operations to be intentionally expensive as that's not where the security guarantees come from.

Indeed, verifying a signature does not rely on mathematical complexity like hashing does. However, they do usually involve finite fields and large numbers that require a whole bunch of complex mathematical operations. Then there's also the fact that optimizations are often not available as they would allow for timing attacks.

Compared to something like simple a CRC32 checksum to verify that the data was transmitted correctly, these operations will always be complex and more time intensive than you'd prefer them to be.

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

#414

Post by jeroenhd »

vidarh wrote: post #404
jeroenhd wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, and although I understand why (ActivityPub IDs are generally URLs and changing them would probably cause duplicates, but there are URLs that don't change). It's quite annoying that it can't be done right now, but I'll admit that I also don't care enough to come up with a patch for it.

There are two ways around this: 1. They are URI's, and while ActivityPub say they should be https URL's, they don't need to be, and could e.g. point at IPFS or similar. 2. JSON-LD signatures are used by Mastodon, and included in the export, and nothing stops another instance from validating those and serving them up with the original URIs in the id from new URLs, as a means of making it clear the server didn't origin…

You're right, there's actually no reason why a second server couldn't serve up toots with the old IDs.

The main problem would probably be keeping track of what server to fetch these messages from after a move (or even a second move) to a different server and keeping the metadata attached in sync.

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

#415

Post by pessimizer »

DannyBee wrote: post #354
zaphar wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a single user ActivityPub instance with a minimal following and small number of people across multiple instances that I follow. From a user perspective ActivityPub is fine I have no complaints. However from an Ops perspective ActivityPub is incredibly chatty. If this had to scale to a larger instance the costs would spiral fast. Operationally and cost efficiency wise ATProto is a better looking protocol already…

Being technically better is usually not a good enough reason to be incompatible. I'm not sure why people don't get this, but it is almost always true. Starting from scratch, just because you can theoretically design a better system, is one of the worst thing to do to users. Theoretically better also rarely wins in the marketplace anyway. If you want a slightly lighter position: Software needs to be built to be migrat…

I think this is mostly silly. Barely anyone uses ActivityPub. If BlueSky only moderately catches on and 100M people start using it, the total number of ActivityPub users would be a rounding error.

> If you want to spend time helping developers/users, then understand where they spend their time, not where you spend your time.

You're spending your time with ActivityPub, so this advice should apply to you, too. The bulk of potential users are spending their time on anything but ActivityPub. And as for developers, one of course needs to attract them, but I hear the people behind BlueSky have a couple of bucks, the ambition to create a huge potential new market, and a track record of creating a couple of things. I don't think they'll have trouble finding developers.

If BlueSky comes up with a better architecture, ActivityPub clients should rebase. BlueSky should pretend they don't exist, except if they have some nice schemas or solved some problem efficiently, try to maintain compatibility with that unless there's even the slightest reason to deviate.

Didn't ActivityPub have enough of a head start? Why didn't ActivityPub just use Diaspora? Why prioritize ActivityPub over OStatus?

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

#416

Post by teddyfrozevelt »

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…

Not to derail this thread, but is there any way of seeing whether I'm actually on the waitlist? I remember signing up late last year, but there was never any confirmation and I never got the survey which I've heard people talking about. I'm super interested to try out Bluesky, but haven't been able to find anyone with an invite.

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

#417

Post by mkr-hn »

vidarh wrote: post #186
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…

Mastodon does not currently support importing posts from your old account. Just followers/following. It's a nuisance, and there's nothing preventing it per se, since the posts are signed, but that part could be better.

Calckey recently gained the ability to migrate posts. Even from Mastodon. Maybe that'll motivate Mastodon and the forks to prioritize it.

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

#418

Post by XorNot »

goodpoint wrote: post #306
XorNot wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it make it easier? A list of hashes which should be blacklisted means servers obeying rulings are never at risk of returning that data (this would also work offensively: poll for forbidden hashes and see who responds).

...and now you have to track which instance is authorize to block which hash, creating a lot of extra complexity. Plus, we need to trust all instances to really delete stuff. It makes life really easy for spammers.

[flagged]

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

#419

Post by zoogeny »

lucideer wrote: post #291
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…

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…

> If you're going to go NIH your replacement needs to not just be better but substantially better, and you should also show understanding of the original open spec.

I just disagree with this in principle. I wonder what the tech equivalent of "laissez faire" would be.

To this day I don't understand how anyone in the tech world thinks they can make a single demand of anyone else. Even as a customer I believe you can really only demand that the people you are paying deliver what is contractually and legally required. But outside of that ... I just don't understand people's mentality on this subject.

What is it about this specific area of the web that attracts these idealogical zealots? I had the same head-scratching moment in the early 2000s when RSS and Atom were duking it out.

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

#420

Post by romeoblade »

teddyfrozevelt wrote: post #416
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…

Not to derail this thread, but is there any way of seeing whether I'm actually on the waitlist? I remember signing up late last year, but there was never any confirmation and I never got the survey which I've heard people talking about. I'm super interested to try out Bluesky, but haven't been able to find anyone with an invite.

I would like to know this as well. I never got a confirmation and I could have swore I signed up months ago when it first opened. I signed up again a few weeks ago and didn't receive a confirmation then either.

I suspect it's due to me using an uncommon tld for my primary email.

Email: blade -at- coates dot life.

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