Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Shameless plug, we built Chronon to solve a very similar problem. Chronon is now open source (apache 2) and used at Netflix, OpenAI, Airbnb, Stripe etc.
It is used to serve features/context to ML/AI models and rule engines, along with app views.
We are more scale and perf oriented as project given the use-cases and less decentralization oriented.
We also ship with a dataframe / prql like declarative api.
by nikhilsimha - The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.by evbogue
- my experience with most more-distributed internet-systems is: it's so distributed it's hard to get.
here you have Authenticated Transfer Protocol. you can get data very easily. via any of a huge range of means & sources! we have some examples ones today (direct from a pds, relay, jetstream, appview, new protocols like Atom (atproto over MoQ), new systems like hubble). and in most cases, you can tell that it's from a certain account!
i agree with you, i just think the bases are mostly covered here. i also think that it's a fascinating topic. and yes it matters. an "Atproto for Distributed Systems Engineers" probably should know why atproto has such great addressable data (not hash based though), signed key crypto. but also, if you dig in, you'll find quickly it has a great story here. (although your https://anproto.com/ indicates some clear disagreement about sufficiency.)
and the higher level what it is and how it works here is a much more useful practical guide, for getting started with.
there's a lot of people who focus on distributed, on what that means. what seems a lot missing though is that atproto is already nicely a nicely authenticated (crypto) transfer protocol. and that it's probably the best actually distributed, in terms of data availability, in terms of people trying to get your data.
- I feel like it's the best ATProto architecture explanation on the web.
I hope it will make people who argue that "there are no instances in ATProto" is wrong, understand that it is actually true and not just a naming debate.
by LelouBil - Is ATProto federated, P2P, or a protocol flexible enough to build all kinds of things?
Is it opinionated about which type of system to build?
Skimming this page, it looks like ATProto is a schema for the ontology, and despite saying "P2P", it looks built around federation and concerned about scaling infrastructure (rather than scaling message broadcast).
I'm interested in a p2p social network with federated supernodes (p2p first class, federation second class, relays for devices that don't want to join the swarm) for people and agents. Could you easily build that with ATProto, or is it the wrong domain?
I'm interested in true, first-class P2P. Not a bolt-on afterthought. That's the problem with all of these federated services like Bluesky and Mastodon.
A true social protocol should work like email. Any machine on the network should be able to talk it to any other machine. Of course centralization nodes will appear, but they should be optional. Used as aids for user friendliness, anonymity, and firewalling yourself off.
by echelon - The article did not make me understand that at all.
> Since we're making a new app, we're going to want two things: an app server (which hosts our API & frontend) and a view server (which collects data from the network for us).
Yes, the user data is decoupled from the apps, but aren't both stored on some kind of instances? Also:
> Why are we listening to the event stream if we're the one making the write? Because we're not the only ones making writes! There are lots of user repos generating events, and lots of apps writing to them!
Who is hosting this event stream? Aren't we making some kind of federated network by deciding on our app server which event streams or which users/apps pushing updates to listen to?
by jmusall - Shameless plug, but if this got you interested, I have a couple of longreads on the topic:
- https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
- https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
From the official site, I'd also recommend https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-ethos
by danabramov