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- Hacker News
- 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 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?
- 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 - 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 - 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 - >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 - 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
- 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