Introduction to AT Protocol • Hacker News Board

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#51

Post by hiena03 » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:09 PM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #36

Here is an excerpt from the offical docs for the curious: "Why not use ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon. Account portability is a major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signe…

Relevant post by Christine Lemmer-Webber (Co-creator of ActivityPub) https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#52

Post by verdverm » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

hiena03 wrote: post #51

sedatk wrote: post #36

Here is an excerpt from the offical docs for the curious: "Why not use ActivityPub? ActivityPub is a federated social networking technology popularized by Mastodon. Account portability is a major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signe…

Relevant post by Christine Lemmer-Webber (Co-creator of ActivityPub) https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

a very opinionated piece that leads by conclusion rather than building up to it.

The main part of ATProto that is centralized is the PLC and that will eventually be made (most likely) into a consortium. PDS hosting is debatable

That being said, it should be possible to run completely independent atproto networks today. We have several dev infra setups for doing it in the ecosystem

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#53

Post by xphos » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:29 PM UTC

Here I was thinking I'd see old AT commands for controlling radios. Learned something new

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#54

Post by rmccue » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:30 PM UTC

gargron wrote: post #21

tetrisgm wrote: post #4

Been pondering for my team to use it for our product’s timeline. I don’t particularly want our user base to be Bluesky, but it’d be good to have support for the protocol, and control over the system. Have there been any products go embraced this? Or is it like ActivityPub where basically the whole thing is Mastodon.

ActivityPub is embraced by: - Threads - Flipboard - WordPress - micro.blog - NodeBB - PeerTube - Pixelfed - GoToSocial - Akkoma - ...and countless smaller projects It is by no means just Mastodon.

> WordPress

This isn’t quite true. WordPress.com announced they were planning on ActivityPub support, but that is a separate entity run by a commercial company (Automattic).

Their plan was to support it specifically on Tumblr, as well as helping fund an open source plugin for it; there have been no plans to integrate it into the WordPress software directly.

I believe they’ve also deprioritised it as they did significant layoffs recently.

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#55

Post by slyrus » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

xphos wrote: post #53

Here I was thinking I'd see old AT commands for controlling radios. Learned something new

Same. ATS11=43 was magic back in the day.

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#56

Post by dunham » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:42 PM UTC

xphos wrote: post #53

Here I was thinking I'd see old AT commands for controlling radios. Learned something new

I believe that's still used in phones for communication between the computer and the cell phone hardware.

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#57

Post by thesuperbigfrog » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

xphos wrote: post #53

Here I was thinking I'd see old AT commands for controlling radios. Learned something new

ATDT

. . .

ATH

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#58

Post by beepbooptheory » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 12:20 AM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #14

If you are interested in building on ATProtocol, one of the best places to start is the Discord (until we have an atproto native alt @blebbit.app) https://discord.atprotocol.dev/ Of course the spec is good too, very easy read https://atproto.com https://docs.bsky.app

Thats such a bummer, I was on the matrix dev chat for a while and it was good and helpful. I wonder why they changed it from that?

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#59

Post by tomrod » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 12:28 AM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #42

jazzyjackson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah thanks for the answer. What's the PKI story on bluesky, doesn't every identity have a corresponding public key? So if I had a list of people I wanted to a post to be visible to, couldn't I "just" encrypt it with a key that is decryptable by each of those individuals via their pubkey?

PKI distribution for encrypted data is an unsolved problem at the scale of many millions or billions of people. Signal caps at 10k iirc It's also generally not advisable to make your cypher text publicly visible That being said, I'm working with others in the ecosystem on "permissioned space", which are much closer to how people think about Google Docs and similar systems working. There is also another effort around…

Fantastic. Looking forward to seeing where you land.

Re: Introduction to AT Protocol

#60

Post by riffic » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 12:30 AM UTC

koolala wrote: post #3

Would be great to have a new modern alternative to the E-mail standard that is usable for both public and private messaging.

there shouldn't be a rush to replace the things that have stood the test of time. Lindy's law would suggest a protocol that's been around 40+ years is fundamental and won't be going anywhere anytime soon.