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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

#431

Post by gojomo »

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…

There's a growing base of users who have reached the epiphany (by multiple paths) that both identities & content-addressing MUST be cryptographically-rooted, or else users' privacy & communications will remain at the mercy of feudal centralizers with endless strong incentives to work against their interests.

For such users, any offering without these is a non-starter, dead-on-arrival.

People with resistance to this epiphany sound like those who used to insist, "HTTP is fine" (even when it put people at risk) or "MD5 is fine" (long after it was cryptographically broken). Most will get it eventually, either through painful tangible experiences or the gradual accumulation of social proof.

A bolt-on/fix-up of an older protocol might work, if done with extreme competence & broad consensus. And, some in the ActivityPub world had the cryptoepiphany very early! Ideas for related upgrades have been kicked around for a long time. But progress has been negligible, & knee-jerk resistance strong, & the deployed-habits/technical-debts make it harder there than in a green-field project.

Hence: a new generation of systems that bake the epiphany in at their core – which is, ultimately, a more robust approach than a bolt-on/fix-up.

Because so many of those recently experiencing this cryptoepiphany reached it via experience with cryptotokens, many of these systems enthusiastically integrate other aspects of the cryptotoken world – which of course turns off many people, for a variety of good and bad reasons.

But the link with cryptotokens is plausibly inessential, at least at the get-go. The essentials of grounding identity & addressing in cryptography predate Bitcoin by decades, and had communities-of-practice totally independent of the cryptoeconomics world.

A relative advantage Bluesky may have is their embrace of cryptographic addressing behind-the-scenes, without pushing its details to those who might confuse it with promotional crypto-froth. Users will, if all goes well, just see the extra security, scalability, and user sovereignty against abuses that it offers. We'll see.

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

#432

Post by mal-2 »

lapcat wrote: post #52
wmf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Mastodon is even worse. Backup/restore has been generally ignored in social media.

Mastodon is definitely bad. I had to do an emergency migration to a new instance and lost all of my posts.

Calckey is working on account migration and backup that does transfer posts to the new server.

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

#433

Post by mal-2 »

pelorat wrote: post #205

I don't know, sounds pretty interesting that every user has their own repository and can upload it to a new instance, however how will content moderation even work on a platform like this?

I'm no expert, but piecing together what I've read, content moderation will not really be a thing. Instead there will be content labeling services which can be provided by third parties. You would subscribe to a labeling feed then use those labels to filter content you didn't want to be visible.

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

#434

Post by mal-2 »

rvz wrote: post #153
danielrhodes wrote: post #134

Seems like Mastodon/ActivityPub and AT Protocol are solving for opposing problems. Maybe the compromise is a centralized service?

> Maybe the compromise is a centralized service? Yes. Centralization is inevitable and normal users only care if they can use it easily or not and don’t have to choose a instance or set up their own mail server, instance, or whatever. As always with typical techies, the emotions put into this post were already running high given Bluesky itself has gotten someone extremely angry over the tiniest things.

So far that's been the case, but the spectacular failure of Twitter as a centralized service has definitely taught some people a lesson. It remains to be seen if wariness of centralization will be a major factor for people in the future.

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

#435

Post by mrguyorama »

pfraze wrote: post #304
drakonka wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's not really compatible with the "quiet, stealthy beta" thing OP claims they were aiming for. If it was meant to be a quiet beta journalists should probably have been invited at a later point.

It’s a waitlist plus invite codes given to users. We have had only a vague influence over who joined.

Isn't this just way more evidence you don't even know your users?

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

#436

Post by tedunangst »

zaphar wrote: post #394
lucideer wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Instead of baselessly speculating, you could find out that nearly every server uses shared inbox.

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

#437

Post by DannyBee »

comte7092 wrote: post #389
DannyBee wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Something that I think your analysis is missing is that with a decentralized product, ops is also user experience. The whole point is that it needs to be reasonably easy for people to run and scale their own servers. If people are constantly being burned out, quit, or run out of money, then it has an impact on regular users.

Assuming you have meaningful data that shows that, instead of handwavy conjecture, sure.

I don't think most projects do ;)

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

#438

Post by DannyBee »

moritz wrote: post #427
DannyBee wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The overall the amount of developer toil and waste created en masse by people who think they are making something "better", usually with no before/after data […], almost always vastly dwarfs all improvement that occurs as a result. So, why is the Fedi not built on RSS/Websub/etc. then?

Don't know enough about this particular topic to offer a view, but in general, because people care more about releasing their better thing and pretending they are helping than the hard work of actually helping

This is true everywhere?

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

#439

Post by DannyBee »

pessimizer wrote: post #415
DannyBee wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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."

Says everyone everywhere who thinks they made something better!

"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."

Look, i'm not suggesting whoever does it first gets to dictate it, but literally everyone thinks their thing will be better enough to attract lots of users or be worth it, and most never actually do/are. They do, however, cause lots and lots and lots of toil!

Your position is exactly what leads people over this cliff - better architecture does not matter. it doesn't. Technical goodness is not an end unto itself. Its a means, often to reduce cost or increase efficiency, and unfortunately rarely, deliver new features or better experience. Reducing cost or increasing efficiency are great. But architecture is not the product. The product is the product.

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

#440

Post by gjm11 »

int_19h wrote: post #164
tsuujin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s important to say this: I think asking questions is great, and I’m glad that we’re not just taking statements at face value because making social suck less is a worthy goal. However, you are coming across as highly adversarial here. Mostly because you immediately follow your questions with assertions, indicating that your questions may be rhetorical rather than genuine. I’m not accusing you of anything pe…

They're explicitly not debating in good faith: "Also I don't care if I'm spreading FUD or if I'm wrong on some of this stuff. I spent an insane amount of time reading the docs and looking at implementation code, moreso than most other people. If I'm getting anything wrong, it's the fault of the Bluesky authors for not having an understandable protocol and for not bothering to document it correctly." ( https://urbanis…

I don't think it's "not in good faith" to say "I made a real substantial effort to understand this, and am trying to describe it accurately; if at this point my descriptions don't match the reality, it's not my fault but that of the people who made it impossible to understand".

(Of course it's perfectly possible, for all I know, that SW is not debating in good faith. But what you quote doesn't look to me like an admission of bad faith.)

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