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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

#71

Post by rainonmoon »

eropple wrote: post #58
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…

Having done a decent bit of hacking around ActivityPub, when I read the (thin, which 'pfraze and others have copped to) documentation I immediately went "oh, this is going to be way more scalable than ActivityPub once it's done." It's not all roses. I'm not sold on lexicons and xrpc, but that's probably because I am up to my eyeballs in JSON Schema and OpenAPI on a daily basis and my experience and my existing toolki…

> "oh, this is going to be way more scalable than ActivityPub once it's done."

Can you elaborate on this?

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

#73

Post by pfraze »

seattleeng wrote: post #68
pfraze wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DID method has to satisfy a lot of requirements. I did a ton of research on DHT and blockchain approaches and none of them give the right performance, reliability, and cost outcomes while also supporting key rotation. DNS isn't far off but it's a little obtuse to cram it into, so we're starting with did:web and did:plc. We'll add others if they have the right characteristics. The only options that seem reasonable…

Since you're familiar with this, what was wrong with how Farcaster approached name registration? Signing up or rotating your key is (relatively) cheap on Ethereum mainnet, and client apps could front the cost of signing users up. The user registry doesn't need to be maintained by a closed group in the long run (could start out that way, with Bluesky maintaining the contracts but eventually removing upgradeability whe…

I’m concerned about the transaction cost variability that we’ve seen with ethereum.

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

#74

Post by jazzyjackson »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
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…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally)

theyre tweets, how much could they cost? @ 280 bytes each, that's like 15MB. double it for cryptographic signatures and reply-to metadata. is that really too much to ask for the capacity to transfer to another host at anytime?

(also, leaving aside the fact that 55k tweets puts you in the 0.1% of most prodigious users)

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

#75

Post by howinteresting »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
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…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. Just because a protocol exists doesn't mean that if someone doesn't build on top of it, you can describe it as a crock of shit.

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

#76

Post by howinteresting »

epicsponge wrote: post #70
eropple wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The open source community's spent how many years designing a non-proprietary protocol and putting out reference implementations (and extending it to Facebook-like and Youtube-like and Wordpress-like offerings)... And it's awkward to write code for and the people who inhabit it range from right-wing reactionaries to, as was so effectively put, the homeowners' association . Turns out that people don't care about "ope…

> and I think the AT Protocol docs identify real and probably intractable shortcomings in ActivityPub Except that they are objectively wrong about nearly everything they talk about with regard to ActivityPub. Quoting from the FAQ: > Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. There is a widely-accepted account portability protocol built on top of ActivityPub that multiple server…

At an incredibly practical level, bootstrapping a new ecosystem in closed beta that isn't linked to the fediverse has been really great at attracting posters from Twitter who find the original fediverse too stale and curmudgeonly.

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

#77

Post by lapcat »

epicsponge wrote: post #64
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…

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue.

This has actually happened. It's a real problem. For example, "Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

As far as I'm concerned, the Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke.

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

#78

Post by sleepybrett »

howinteresting wrote: post #76
epicsponge wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I think the AT Protocol docs identify real and probably intractable shortcomings in ActivityPub Except that they are objectively wrong about nearly everything they talk about with regard to ActivityPub. Quoting from the FAQ: > Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. There is a widely-accepted account portability protocol built on top of ActivityPub that multiple server…

At an incredibly practical level, bootstrapping a new ecosystem in closed beta that isn't linked to the fediverse has been really great at attracting posters from Twitter who find the original fediverse too stale and curmudgeonly.

Just like twitter before it, and every other social network, they change in tone over time. Sure right now I guess you could argue that the fediverse is stuffy, though not in my little corner apparently. But that won't stay true. Every person that joins changes the network. Sure some servers will ban other servers for any number of reasons and it will probably fragment. Who cares it will all come out in the wash.

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

#79

Post by solarpunk »

lapcat wrote: post #77
epicsponge wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, original author here. Some comments: > We sign the records so that authenticity can be determined without polling the home server, and we use a repository structure rather than signing individual records so that we can establish whether a record has been deleted (signature revocation). Why do you need an entirely separate protocol to do this? Email had this exact same problem, yet was able to build protocols on t…

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue. This has actually happened. It's a real problem. For example, "Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html As far as I'm concerned, the Mastodon Server Covenant…

there's also a trend of most servers not even being compliant with the 'covenant'

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

#80

Post by duskwuff »

wmf wrote: post #53
0xTJ wrote: post #45

Even after reading some of that thread, I have no idea what this AT protocol is. Did someone reuse the name for the thing used in modems?

AT Protocol is used by the Bluesky app. And yeah, no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more.

> no one outside HN cares about the Hayes AT commands any more.

You might be surprised. A lot of cellular modems and Bluetooth modules are controlled using a variant of the AT command set.

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