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The AT Protocol

atproto.com

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Re: The AT Protocol

#91

Post by miloignis »

adenozine wrote: post #55

This seems really cool. I have looked at ActivityPub quite a bit and written a little basic client/server but the identity portability thing is pretty much a nonstarter for it to be taken seriously in normal circles. I’ve found the content quality of the fediverse to be abysmally low thus far, I think AT could work especially because of the big name behind it. Twitter did the Ruby community a huge solid back in the d…

I've found that quality on the fediverse is quite high, but takes curation and exploration to find people you want to follow. Once you have a good seed of people, it grows pretty organically as you follow people with interesting posts boosted by people you do follow.

It's the only social network that I've actually stuck with and enjoy, having tried and fallen of both twitter and facebook. A big part of that was unfollowing people who posted political stuff and following people who posted stuff about cool hobbies and whatnot

Re: The AT Protocol

#92

Post by justbeast »

This is an interesting start. I have many questions though:

1. Why no public forum or (heavens forfend) a standards body community group, for the spec?

2. For the data model, why not use the excellent ActivityStreams2? The actual data model that contains the posts etc (https://atproto.com/lexicons/bsky-app) is a serious step backwards from the event-log architecture of AS2.

3. Why reinvent gRPC/JSON-RPC? Seriously, of /all/ the things to reinvent, why RPC?

4. I wonder what the team will do for authentication and authorization? Will they go the ACL route? (In which case, are they going to include Solid-style client identity, in the ACLs?) Will they go the capabilities route? (UCANs / zCaps). This is the genuine hard part.

Re: The AT Protocol

#93

Post by rektide »

gargron wrote: post #76
pfraze wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're open to that possibility. We know the broad idea we want to apply with schema extensions, but we're still figuring out the right DX on the execution.

You're about to reinvent JSON-LD.

I'd love to know how Gargron (mastadon author) feels about json-ld.

Im just the peanut gallery but json-ld is pretty nice. Give people the right "context" & they can basically ignore that they're working woth json-ld, in a wide range of cases. But get real extensibility & interop with the other semantic web things.

Of course, writing maintaining & using the translators to flop between forms is more work!

Re: The AT Protocol

#94

Post by gojomo »

TrevorFSmith wrote: post #56

If a team can't work within an existing standards body or a community (like the ActivityPub contributors) then they simply can't create an actually decentralized and open protocol/network. They can, however, create something that they can define and control for their own gain. Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other discussion channel but simply a "give us your email address and we'll l…

Many of the world's strongest standards – including those of the internet – were standardized from work that first proved itself outside "standards bodies", rather than emerged from them. Standards bodies are better at codifying practices proven to work than bootstrapping new approaches, and quickly become highly-political impediments to innovation as the stakes grow & entrenched interests arrive.

Also, despite the ideals & good work of early ActivityPub work, in practice its server-centricity has already sent it many evolutionary steps down towards the same semi-feudal architecture as email & HTTP, where your identity, content-policies, & even privacy are at the mercy of your "home server" (feudal lord).

Even the real option to freely choose a new liege (at some serious switching costs) doesn't promptly or fully address this weakness, and the theoretical potential for practices to be radically different faces a giant "architecture tax" from the installed base, & costs/expectations of backward-compatibility.

Users of ActivityPub have already self-selected for those who are OK with such "home server" dependencies. Why, they find them "cozy" & even have (well-reasoned!) apologetics describing ways in which this user-homeserver co-dependency is good – for their needs.

So why should people with a very different vision, informed by both the limits of the giant proprietary platforms and of ActivityPub, fight a slow uphill slog in that community, as opposed to pursing a "green field" (or you might even say "blue sky") effort with fewer constraints? Appropriate formats & conventions from prior work like ActivityPub can still be reused, whenever helpful.

Re: The AT Protocol

#95

Post by gojomo »

dchnshA wrote: post #87
mattdesl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does every new idea need to work within the constraints of ActivityPub and W3C? Their spec is fundamentally different than ActivityPub.

From what I have seen so far it is different for the sake of being different, not because they found a better way.

Two of the three pillars highlighted on the atproto.com homepage – portable accounts, and algorithmic choice – would require significant retrofitting counter to ActivityPub server customs to achieve.

(And the third, "federated social", is arguably an area that at-proto is erring by staying too close to the ActivityPub approach. We know what happens to 'federated' systems under network-economics: they trend toward semi-feudalism.)

Re: The AT Protocol

#96

Post by sneak »

gargron wrote: post #77
sneak wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a de-facto standard, so it’s safe to say that, given that all major AP implementations do so, your identity is tied to your homeserver. The tyranny of the installed base is real. What you choose to ship basically defines what everyone else can do with AP in practice. I think it’s a shame that Mastodon got a million fuzzy blinky UI features before the (still missing) BYOdomain support, given that everyone in th…

"Fuzzy blinky UI features" is what people actually care about though. You can have all the theoretical bells and whistles in the protocol but if you don't have a flagship application that people can use for their everyday needs, nobody is going to care. The fact of the matter is that "porting your account" is just a much less frequent need than literally anything else that people will come across in their day to day…

Skate to where the puck is going to be:

If there are 50 million DAU on the fediverse, most users will not be on “small hobbyist servers”.

They also won’t be running a rails app.

Re: The AT Protocol

#97

Post by Karrot_Kream »

gargron wrote: post #75
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub's PublicInbox is used to route all messages. This works for "small-world networking" where you're in a tight-knit community exchanging messages with known or friend-of-friend actors, but doesn't work well for "big-world networking" with folks you don't know and don't necessarily want to share all or even most of your messages with (a pretty big pain point right now in the Fediverse.) ATProtocol claims to…

This is not right. First of all, what do you mean by "PublicInbox"? Are you referring to the optional sharedInbox attribute, which allows delivering a payload to a whole server at once instead of iterating over the personal inbox of every actor on the server? Or are you referring to the inbox in general? The inbox is just a mechanism to deliver a payload from point A to point B. It is in fact used to receive messages…

Sorry, yeah I meant "sharedInbox" vs "PublicInbox". My understanding is that the AP client (assuming you aren't using C2S ActivityPub) sends messages to your AP server which then either sends messages to the sharedInbox of the destination AP instance or directly to the inbox at that other AP instance. I realize the visibility of each message is up to the discretion of each AP implementation but as practiced now, messages are often seen by multiple parties before getting to the final destination.

As far as indexers are concerned, I realize it's entirely possible to use indexers with AP. It's wholly unclear to me how AT Protocol is using indexers or scoping any of their objects so I'm not sure it's worth belaboring the point.

Re: The AT Protocol

#98

Post by arcalinea »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #61
TrevorFSmith wrote: post #56

If a team can't work within an existing standards body or a community (like the ActivityPub contributors) then they simply can't create an actually decentralized and open protocol/network. They can, however, create something that they can define and control for their own gain. Rolling out this protocol on a site without a community forum or other discussion channel but simply a "give us your email address and we'll l…

Yeah.. when I saw that and something about joining a waitlist for something that should be developed in public I noped my way out. I hope other people learn have similar BS indicators and don't fall for this stuff. There is nothing open about joining a wait-list.

The waitlist is just for the app. We've been developing the protocol in a public repo on Github for months, but most people don't have the patience to follow open source code development, so we'll notify them when we can put a usable app in their hands.

MIT licensed protocol code, public since May: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

Re: The AT Protocol

#99

Post by adenozine »

miloignis wrote: post #91
adenozine wrote: post #55

This seems really cool. I have looked at ActivityPub quite a bit and written a little basic client/server but the identity portability thing is pretty much a nonstarter for it to be taken seriously in normal circles. I’ve found the content quality of the fediverse to be abysmally low thus far, I think AT could work especially because of the big name behind it. Twitter did the Ruby community a huge solid back in the d…

I've found that quality on the fediverse is quite high, but takes curation and exploration to find people you want to follow. Once you have a good seed of people, it grows pretty organically as you follow people with interesting posts boosted by people you do follow. It's the only social network that I've actually stuck with and enjoy, having tried and fallen of both twitter and facebook. A big part of that was unfol…

I understand that some people gain some sort of satisfaction out of this, but it mostly defeats the purpose for the average user.

Imagine you walk into a bar, and it’s clearly filled with neonazis. Someone says to you, “Hey! This is a great bar. You’ll have to curate your friends in here, but once you do you’ll find some great folks.”

It’s just silly to think the average person is even remotely interested in that. I’m a big fan of decentralized and p2p technology, but social networks are very much improved by strong, strict regulation at a central level.

Granted, I’m a dedicated twitter user, and I’m also interested in political topics and discussions, which you mentioned that you weren’t.

Twitter’s flavor isn’t for everybody. I think there should be more flavors in general, but what the fediverse offers is a different dish, different restaurant, different everything. I’m skeptical it will find much success outside of the sorts of people that use it now.

Re: The AT Protocol

#100

Post by rbanffy »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #40
rbanffy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I guess we are very old. OTOH, companies like these should hire us Elder Things to check whether they are naming something after something people like.

It's not? Hayes compatible all the way!

It was terrible, but it was the best we had.
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