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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

451–460 of 493 posts

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> I don't understand how anyone in the tech world thinks they can make a single demand of anyone else.

Ultimately, yes you're right, no-one can make actual "demands" of anyone else. My language above is demanding, certainly, but ultimately I'm just arguing opinion. I cannot control any outcomes of what Bluesky or any other enterprise choose to pursue.

> What is it about this specific area of the web that attracts these idealogical zealots?

I think it stems from the unprecedented success of such zealots in the 1980s, which have differentiated the technological landscape of software technologies from previous areas of engineering by making them more approachable, accessible, interoperable and ultimately democratised. That's largely been the result of people arguing passionately on the internet to advocate for that level of openness, collab & interop.

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

#453

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Makes it really hard to search stuff. This has happened with Matrix, Go. Although using golang resolves issue with Go.

Indeed. As much as the k-based KDE app names might look or sound silly, they're mostly quite searchable due to being a tad different.

They might be searchable on the wider internet if you’re looking for info on them, but I can never remember them when I need them on the actual system.

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

Yes, OK I agree, that is pretty bad. That’s about 1400 users per day per server using napkin maths. Definitely not the kind of scale I would have expected. But is this the only possible implementation? I suppose for the OP to have a reasonable point (that it’s “a crock of shit”), this would need to be an intractable problem.

I assume a server written in native code would be faster, but I don't know by how much. The normal use case for this algorithm has to do with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin libraries aren't written for multithreaded social media servers so it's hard to say. Theoretically it could be fast, but you'll need to find someone crazy enough to implement thie protofol first.

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

#455

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Ok, If I make a protocol I will call it "rocambole" but I will be thinking of the sand leek rather than the victorian fictional adventurer.

LOL I was mostly thinking of the swiss roll but I know it's only called rocambole in Brazil. It's got all sorts of names all over the world according to Wikipedia

I had no idea what it was. Those of what I found one seemed plausible and the other worth mentioning.

Glad it was something else entirely. The localization for Brazil can be rocambole.

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

#457

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I actually think photos could potentially add up to quite a lot!

Sure, they could. Most people don't post tons of hi res photos. But I'm sure there are ways you could optimize to not have all the content on local device, if it's such a big deal. But this is a really strange point to me to be hung up on.

I think you’d be surprised at the number of photos posted, but also many people post tons of gifs (especially reaction gifs) which are fairly large.

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

#458
post #418

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...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]

I explained the point twice.

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

#459
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's weird to me that all the complaints about @proto being NIH focus on ActivityPub when if anything it's closer to an evolution of secure scuttlebutt. The two are so fundamentally different I do not understand the complaints.

> The two are so fundamentally different I do not understand the complaints.

You will find that many people do not dig into details. You can post on Mastodon, you can post on Bluesky, therefore they must be similar.

It does mean that learning about things becomes a superpower, because you can start to tell if a criticism is founded in actual understanding or something more superficial.

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

#460
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can anyone know 65,000 people?
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