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- Hacker News
- To put it another way: Google search works by making their own copy of the Internet. It's much smaller scale, but similarly, atproto makes downloading the entire social network relatively easy. Many ordinary techies have the resources to replicate the whole thing if they wanted to. To query your replica, you use a database, designed however you like.
So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone.
Google's Go Module Mirror is a similar but more specialized service that has a copy of all the Go modules that anyone has published on the Internet.
by skybrian - > So the question is, are you okay with giving random people a mirror of your public posts? After all, they're public. It's like putting them in a repo on Github for anyone to clone.
That makes no sense - and yes, I'm aware that people think like this, even though it's entirely contradictory.
If you intend to make information public, you relinquish control over access to it. Trying to walk that back, or even to retain capability of walking it back, is perverting the system and turning the earlier claim of information being public into a lie.
by TeMPOraL - ATProto has the hardest working developer relations department in the game right now.by tolerance
- I can't decide if ATProto is actually amazing or if its proponents are just dazzled by their own tech. Is it truly decentralized? What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt? Of course, at the end of the day, it's the network effects that matter. Attention is all you need indeed.by aftbit
- Feels like a solution in search of a problem - just like all the others. Also feels like only half a solution - just like anything else developers invent. Do you remember what Joel Spolsky said about P2P architectures and Napster? It doesn't matter whether your system is P2P or not, it matters whether or not the user can type in the name of a song and then listen to it. That's how YouTube is the new Napster. Because you can just type in a song and listen to it, and for the sake of determining popularity, it's completely irrelevant whether this is done by stealing the music or by legally licensing it. However, the ads that pay for that licensing are relevant.
ATProto is attempting the "if we make it P2P it'll be popular!" strategy except not with P2P.
by inigyou - The Twitter-competitive social site is moribund, so I think maybe what you're seeing more and more of is the pivot towards infrastructure --- always planned, but not before such a big part of the messaging.by tptacek
- > What makes it better than Mastodon or Matrix or Scuttlebutt?
Decentralized identity. You don’t have to choose a specific instance and be locked into your decision.
by xigoi - I will say that I have no relation to bluesky so it's not my tech and I do find it amazing. This post from Dan Abramov might help in clarifying how 'decentralized' it is compared to the threadiverse https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/by tynanpurdy
- The team came from the IPFS and Scuttlebutt worlds. "Better" is relative to your design goals. Iroh is better for point-to-point connections & localfirst. Matrix is better for chat rooms. Etc. The general logic of atproto was to serve large scale publishing with an open model that doesn't seriously degrade the UX. The scale orientation means - at least until the non-public spaces land - you're syncing a lot of records to provide an alternative microblogger to bluesky. The account hosting system, however - the pds - remains exceedingly cheap and easy to run. Pros and cons, matching with the design goals.by pfraze
- > The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.
Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!
- Yeah, but the web is getting smaller, as the most valuable and interesting parts got turned into private whatsapp groups or non-indexed discord and other "community first" nonsense, and went dark.by TeMPOraL
- IMO those problems are better solved by SOLID https://solidproject.org/ pushed by Tim Berners Lee himself. As someone who worked(s) a lot on diaspora, I can tell you decentralization is hard. I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)by flaburgan
- > I don't see how atproto solve most of the complicated problems (discovery, scalability, etc.)
Oh! So you don't know very much! Well, happy to help give you some links so you can learn some of the basics!
@pfrazee gave a talk recently on how atproto was built from day 1 for scale. It's not a secret, it's in the name, Authenticate Transfer Protocol! Your key that you control signs all of your content! Such that your can be forwarded by anyone, that it continues to bear your authentication, wherever it goes, whatever replicas it's on!
https://youtu.be/BoJnj2yPf14?is=YcnoJZSqQw1YBhl9
It's so easy and small that one can run a whole network firebose off a small VPS! There's a list of them. https://atproto.at/relays
Discoverability is a function of this! There's all sorts of tools to filter for different kinds of data. There's indexes, so you can find things like back links, https://www.microcosm.blue/. And there's specific schemas (lexicons) for helping find blog posts, https://standard.site.
I'm a fan of the API that Solid exposes, I'm a fan of the json-ld. But for discoverability and scalability, in terms of being a networked protocol, ATproto is great.
- I don't understand the premise, is this saying short form posts (dare I call them Tweets) on Bluesky are somehow a replacement for long form blog posts?
- No. atproto (which is what bluesky is based on) supports all kinds of public media - for instance https://standard.site/ which is designed for longer form static content.
You can choose where your PDS runs and the ecosystem still works. If one relay shuts down (Google Reader) or takes their API private (X, Reddit) it shouldn't matter, the PDS are separate and another relay can take over.
Worst case you can go directly to the PDS, but that wouldn't work at scale
- There have been so, so many attempts to decentralize in my lifetime. I used to be a huge believer and worked on these problems, but have to admit I'm somewhat exhausted. The technology is not the problem. The problem is always quality, effort, and cost.
If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1]
While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access.
Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat.
by madrox - We don't have to have any respect for X's profitability btw. We're allowed to despise it even while it's losing money.by inigyou
- decentralization exists and is working though? why does it need to "win"?
- I’d have a lot more sympathy for Twitter’s position wrt profit had they not explicitly told advertisers to go fuck themselves.by hamburglar
- I think for any kind of widespread adoption we're a couple of decades out regarding feasibility. The problem for managing your own thing is not necessarily the usability of current software (although that too), but education of the masses regarding technology.
It'd be great if schools taught foundations like how the internet works (not in-depth, but basics like what a server is) and how to create your own server. People would get gradually less afraid of technology and that'd enable systems like this.
As it stands, people are just more comfortable using walled gardens because their data is managed for them and they don't bear any responsibility for it.
by domysee - People can use Bluesky without understanding any of this stuff. Their posts are stored in a separate pds automatically.by skybrian
- There are invariably 3 solutions to all “federated” web problems:
- Email
- Semantic HTML
- Web indexing services
In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.
by James_K - Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?by pfraze
- >Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed.
You can add Reddit to that list, IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build.
by cube00 - Reddit went public in 2024. What are you talking about ?by icepush
- At first, I thought that the fraction of people who want this kind of network of peers would be rather small. I thought that almost all people want extensive restrictions on user agents and controlling how the data is revealed to the user. But Bluesky actually does not restrict AI scraping and consumption of data. You're just yet another consumer, subject to rate-limiting etc. whether you are browser or headless agent. I have to say that I am somewhat (pleasantly) surprised that this approach is accepted by Bluesky considering the community is more anti-AI than most. The fact that you're allowed to consume the feed is amazing. Good stuff!by arjie
- I’ll give a pretty honest accounting of that.
We made it a pretty big goal from the start to clearly communicate to users that the network is extremely public, and that we believe open access to public content is an important part of preventing another round of walled gardens. This is generally understood and appreciated, but the community has a wide range of opinions about it. Some people see public as public and that they’re there to have their voice heard. Some people see it as a pretty uneasy arrangement at best, and would rather it wasn’t that way.
The atproto community has been spending a large portion of the year developing “atproto spaces,” which are essentially a way to cheaply mint mini-atprotos with access control. This is the answer to non public data. It will be added to the Bluesky app and the ecosystem, and it will remain accessible to apps based on the grants of the users, but the spaces will not broadcast their content on the firehose. I believe, based on the reception we’ve received from that work, that people appreciate that it’s being done, and that people eager for less exposure will pick it up.
This should, hopefully, resolve any tensions at play. We will continue to advocate for public speech and I think many people will continue to participate in it, but I am quite curious to see if the non public spaces gain more adoption overall. My guess, based on people’s general use of the internet, is that they naturally will. The public arenas serve a particular purpose and not everyone is always trying to be a part of them.
EDIT: did I really just say "let me give an honest accounting of that." I have been spending way too much time with llms.
by pfraze - For blog posts, I'd look to RSS instead. That's where that content is traditionally published. Instead of SELECTing from bluesky's index, you can use OPML subscription lists. There are a bunch of places that curate feed lists, so it's significantly less likely to face API death like twitter did.
There are multiple sites that support follower semantics over RSS. Feedland tracks subscriptions publicly, so you can see the blogs I read (https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev), and who reads my blog (https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...).
I run another variant which collects OPML blogrolls via crawling, so you can find out who else likes your favorite blog and what else they recommend. Here's the page for Simon Willison's blog (https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/discover/feed-a34ee2a88...). Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
by 8organicbits - Oh the opml blogroll map is pretty exciting! I occasionally try to browse around for these manually but they can be hard to explore for so having a big list is a big deal. I usually just do searches for them + use a scour.ing interest to find more. I'm excited to look at it more this weekend when I'm not so tired.
One thing I'd love to see with rss / ompl sharing sites is more ease of exploration. It feels a bit clunky browsing many of these feed sharing sites because you need to evaluate each feed by manually clicking through each one etc or worse you can only import the whole opml at once flooding your feeds. For example I've seen some sites with feeds directly showing posts as they come in for each persons feed list(s) so you can see what that batch of rss feeds looks like in action without clicking around much. There are some sites doing great work getting people to share their lists but I think there is room for qol improvements.
One site I've been liking that has feeds for each list and is trying to reduce friction on sharing is blogflock.com. You can also follow other peoples lists directly on the site too so they show up in your main feed. I believe I've also seen some people self host their blogroll on their personal sites with similar feeds but I'm having trouble finding that software atm.
by rdmuser - > Thinking of RSS and blogrolls as a network feels much more resilient than blueskys Jetstream api endpoint.
Nothing to do with Bluesky services. There are many independent firehoses and relays. Here's a stream of standard.site blog posts coming in over a firehose hosted in Chennai. Every single one. No curator between me and the posts, and no work by me to crawl the whole network for them. https://pdsls.dev/jetstream?instance=wss%3A%2F%2Fchennai.fir...
Edit: ok there is an aggregator, the relay is scraping all of the PDSs out there to build the event stream. Notably this is not possible with RSS, where you need to build a large index with knowledge. PDSs request relays to crawl and that's that.
by tynanpurdy