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The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

urbanists.social

81–90 of 493 posts

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

#81

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…

> 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)

There’s also all the media to go along with them.

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

#82
post #46

> "Additionally, if a Bluesky server goes down, their way of keeping access to your data is by storing all of it on your device!" This seems troubling, if it's accurate. [I've edited the above quote to remove some all-caps and exclamation points.]

It's a lot better than Mastodon, where you simply lose everything.

The author totally glosses over that and scoffs at it being a real problem both in the thread linked and here in the comments, yet real people have experienced the extraordinary pain of watching their accounts evaporate overnight because of some capricious server admin. It's a total nonstarter for ever using Mastodon.

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

#84
post #56

It seems to me that a lot of the problems discussed in this thread (it's using a new protocol that doesn't work with existing tools, it uses crypto, handles auth in the protocol, server can goes down) are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something complete…

> are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something completely different. AtProto is designed to be a federated protocol. The issue I have is that it is not interoperable with the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub. You can b…

Creating a restriction where every new social media protocol has to be built on top of ActivityPub sounds awful. There is room for innovation outside of this narrow scope of ideas.

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

#85
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…

Y’all are doing amazing work and bsky is a joy to use and I’m really excited for the technical journey.

I’m guessing with more success will come more haters unfortunately. :-/

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

#87
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

There’s also all the media to go along with them.

Ok, so add some more megabytes to that. Most people don't have that much microblogging data.

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

#88
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

There’s also all the media to go along with them.

Pretty sure a nontrivial percentage of peoples smartphones have that many thumbnails for the photo gallery app alone.

Anybody who has had a smartphone for a decade likely has at minimum 10k photos in their cloud locker with local thumbnail.

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

#90
post #56

It seems to me that a lot of the problems discussed in this thread (it's using a new protocol that doesn't work with existing tools, it uses crypto, handles auth in the protocol, server can goes down) are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something complete…

> are just frustrations that don't have to do with the core innovation that Bluesky promises to deliver, and are instead confusing the AT protocol to be another ActivityPub-related protocol, rather than something completely different. AtProto is designed to be a federated protocol. The issue I have is that it is not interoperable with the major standard used on the federated internet right now: ActivityPub. You can b…

“We have a thing that is arcane and hasn’t taken off with the public so don’t make a new one” isn’t exactly a stellar argument.

The only winning move is to onboard users and given hundreds of millions of people may be looking to leave Twitter, Mastodon utterly shit the bed and missed the moment.

That’s the end of the story: if the system can’t catch users raining down from the sky during a generational upheaval in social media it ain’t never gonna make it.

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