12 ms·

The AT Protocol

116 points by agd 4y ago

tssva 4y ago
Seems very similar in goal to the Solid Project, https://solidproject.org https://solidproject.org, which Tim Berners Lee is involved with and is being standardized by the W3C.
- gobengo 4y ago
  I believe it's not particularly standards-track at W3C. Is there a reason you think that it is?
- mariusor 4y ago
  This is very interesting. Unlike BlueSky it seems it uses the ontologies compatible with ActivityPub federation, which might prove a good compromise for interoperability in the future. I'll definitely bookmark this.
tsukikage 4y ago
...anyone else click through expecting a discussion of the Hayes command set, or just me?
- contingencies 4y ago
  Not just you.
  - mrlonglong 4y ago
    +++ATH <click>
- entropyie 4y ago
  Super disappointed that this is not about modems...
- mikestew 4y ago
  Not me, but only because you saved me a click. "Go to the comments first", FTW. :-) (Though I might still waste that saved click just to see what TFA is about...)
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    Clicked on the link looking for a blast from the past, came away bewildered.
- krylon 4y ago
  It's not just you.
- nomel 4y ago
  I remember feeling like a magician when I first learned about AT commands. It was my first real experience getting the computer to do something physical. After that, I learned about all the IO accessible on the parallel port, allowing full binary access to the real world. I was hooked, and it eventually led to a career of making computers do physical things. :)
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Me too. Wikipedia seems to have a decent list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set
- ok123456 4y ago
  I wish it was.
- ape4 4y ago
  Yes. Perhaps like Telegram refers to an important earlier communication medium.
- askvictor 4y ago
  Me too; particularly as I've been using them quite a bit recently; AT lives on in embedded system network comms (e.g 4G, wifi, ethernet and/or bluetooth modules - the ESP32/ESP8266 has AT command support). It's really expanded a lot these days - you can do http(s) and mqtt requests, and even run a web server without having to touch a TCP stack.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Findecanor 4y ago
  IBM PC/AT keyboard protocol here. But it is more often called "PS/2", which is the same with more keys.
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  That's what I expected as well.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Same here. I think most of us old beards had the same reaction.
jacooper 4y ago
This looks interesting. https://atproto.com/docs https://atproto.com/docs
- mike256 4y ago
  I dont think so. It should not be named AT Protocol... :-( +++ ATH
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Darn it, I initially assumed that this was about AT commands.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      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.
      - xen2xen1 4y ago
        It's not? Hayes compatible all the way!
        rbanffy 4y ago
        It was terrible, but it was the best we had.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  You seem to have misspelled "misguided". https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc invents their own RPC, because the 8000 other ones are somehow insufficient for their Web3 ways? Bonus points for https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc#authentication https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc#authentication And that's not even getting into "oh, ok, so my cousin is going to create his own DNS entry, is he?" https://atproto.com/guides/identity#identifiers https://atproto.com/guides/identity#identifiers https://atproto.com/lexicons/atproto-com#comatprotocreatesession https://atproto.com/lexicons/atproto-com#comatprotocreateses... seems to be missing any 2FA parts, spitting in the face of years of "don't get phished" learning
viksit 4y ago
has anyone found code on their github or any other libraries yet? the repo is just docs.
- pfraze 4y ago
  https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto packages directory
knaekhoved 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set
patientplatypus 4y ago
kragen 4y ago
Where does it document ATS11=38? +++ ATH
skyfaller 4y ago
Can anyone explain why Bluesky is making a new protocol instead of using ActivityPub like Mastodon? What advantages would it have over ActivityPub? https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ Worth noting that ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard. Is it just Not Invented Here syndrome? This could lead to https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- foodstances 4y ago
  So they can be the center of it and control it, of course.
  - grishka 4y ago
    How could one "control" a federation protocol though?
    - iblablelbli 4y ago
      that's an interesting question, I think spam is part of how... for a proper answer I would look at how SMTP has evolved over time.
      - grishka 4y ago
        SMTP started without proper authentication so anyone could spoof anyone's address. Most of those extensions try to fix this. But ActivityPub, for example, has authentication built-in from the beginning in the form of HTTP signatures.
        iblablelbli 4y ago
    - skyfaller 4y ago
      Consider how worried people are about Google Chrome's browser market share, and how Google is increasingly able to dictate details of the web unilaterally. The Web is made of standardized protocols, but Google has significant control over it. Consider the state of email, a standardized protocol, where Gmail is dominant, and anything that can't deliver to Gmail is practically irrelevant, no matter whether it follows the protocol. Now consider Bluesky. If Twitter supports the AT protocol early, it would be by far the largest implementation, meaning that Twitter practically controls it. It would be like Gmail for email, except there are no other options to begin with. If Twitter does not support AT protocol early, then AT protocol will be irrelevant, and other networks like the ActivityPub Fediverse will continue to outpace it.
branon 4y ago
Bluesky is Twitter's right? Will be cool if they come away with something actually decentralized. Trial in beta with hackers, then one day, in-place swap Twitter to run on it. Pipe dream?
- gojomo 4y ago
  While Bluesky PBLLC received initial funding from Twitter Inc, Twitter (whether under its current management or impending Musk ownership) has no ownership interest or veto-power over the Bluesky plans. Though Agrawal seemed interested enough that Bluesky would potentially have had an 'inside track' to getting Twitter to interoperate, Twitter's proprietary platform interests may have always made that tricky. Under new management, anything could happen.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Is this the Jack Dorsey thing?
- wmf 4y ago
  Yes.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    Bullish that Dorsey is involved. Dorsey as a high status rich guy could attract lots of users and developers. He’ll also kill activitypub as AT protocol will soon be much better funded with more developers.
    - onqtam 4y ago
      he was involved. But now he's doing his own thing which anchors to bitcoin & uses the ION network: https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5 https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsfchoVG1yU3ffTDsPRcU99H1E/edit#slide=id.g11c16fe40c4_0_156 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsf... https://twitter.com/namcios/status/1535302090360250368 https://twitter.com/namcios/status/1535302090360250368
jonhohle 4y ago
I’ve not gotten fully through the spec, but why does the server hold the client’s signing key? That puts a lot of responsibility on a PDS that could be handled by the client, doesn’t it? If the client has their complete repo anyway, why can’t the PDS verify changes with a public key? If it’s to aggregate likes, comments, etc., why not use a mailbox encrypted with the public key for unmerged data and allow the DID to decide whether or not to accept the content, aggregate it, and publish the updated repo? Other clients could choose whether or not to considered the merged mailbox when displaying to users (for example, likes could update automatically, but only accepted comments)
- pfraze 4y ago
  Basically -- to keep it simple. Holding the signing key in the PDS simplifies linearization and reduces device-pairing actions. We spent most of the summer planning to store the signing key in the user device(s) but during a late design session we examined why exactly we wanted that, and realized the main reason was for account portability^1. Thing is, we dont need the primary signing key to be local for account portability; we just need a recovery key that allows the user to assign control away from the PDS later. So we switched to a server-held signing key, but we kept in the architectural pieces that make client-held signing keys possible, in case we want to explore that again in the future. ^1 We're interested in end-to-end encryption but that's not what the signing key would accomplish and will need to be developed later. Hopefully we haven't painted ourselves into a corner for that part of things.
  - topranks 4y ago
    Is this a typo then? This is to be used in adversarial situations in which a user's signingKey leaks or is being held by some custodian who turns out to be a bad actor. In a situation such as this, the signingKey may be used to rotate both the signingKey and recoveryKey. From: https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#account-recovery https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#account-recovery Seems to suggest the signing key is all that’s needed to change the keys for a user? I was expecting it to say the recovery key could be used for that (which only I have).
dchnshA 4y ago
Nah thanks, I'll stick with ActivityPub. The fact they even felt the need to create another protocol instead of using, improving and contributing to ActivityPub makes me think they want to bake a busines modell for themselves into the technology and they can't do that if they don't have full control over the spec. ActivityPub is organically grown from a community to serve that community. Bluesky is created to combine making the profits of a commercial centralized social network + profiting from the investment from crypto bros. ActivityPub is not perfect and nobody is pretending like it is (there is a big blog post from the co-author about what retrospectively they should have done differently, sadly I couldn't find the link), but a specification is not static ! If you have a suggestion to improve it you can propose changes and a lot of things are left to the implementation, so you can just do things differently than other ActivityPub application currently do. In fact there are people building the future of the ActivityPub ecosystem right now: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/ There is no need to create yet another specification. The only feature this claims to have, that all ActivityPub implementations currently don't have is identity portability and that can actually be implemented without changes to the ActivityPub spec, just no ActivityPub Application has implemented it yet.
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  'The specification may be terrible, and everything good about it may be implementation-specific, and every touted feature you're looking for may be missing from the only implementations anyone uses, but you can always just break compatibility from all the de facto standards, and so that's no reason to come up with your own base standard' seems flatly wrong, and that actually is a pretty great reason to come up with your own base standard. IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years, and they were so amazingly correct that basically all IRC communities jumped ship to Discord within the span of a few years. Not to mention nobody uses Mastodon either. Who should Jack be trying to placate, exactly? The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?
  - jdhdjdjdhekeie 4y ago
    except nobody moved from irc to discord because of the protocol. and all discord does can be implemented on top of it. nobody cares. irc died and discord boomed because there was a user generation change. an explosion of new users eclipsed the few irc old timers. discord is garbage any way you look at it. dont try to sell it as fixing irc. lol.
karmakaze 4y ago
Oh they mean 'At'-protocol. I was thinking Hayes 'AT' commands.
- whoopdedo 4y ago
  Which still lives on today in cellular networks. At least up to LTE, I haven't looked lately to see if they're sticking around for 5G. https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/modem-AT-commands.html https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/modem-AT-comman...
  - dapids 4y ago
    It's still there.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    If you are talking to one of those self-contained, postage stamp-sized GSM modules using a microcontroller, chances are there'll be a serial link to it, and it's listening to Hayes commands.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  /me looks at this content-free page and then reads your comment +++ATH0
- bks 4y ago
  ATDT
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    ATZ0E0M0L0&A0&D0&G0&K0&N1&U1 ATDT@;684-767-2676 (or any 767-XXXX, 555-XXXX is also fun)
FreeTrade 4y ago
This is a solution to Twitter's problems, not a solution that helps users. The crucial question is 'Will Twitter actually adopt it?' - if so, we'll all need to pay attention. If not, it can be safely ignored.
jonhohle 4y ago
I don’t think I have time for a full review, but making $ext a map seems short sighted. In the example, a poll is included, great. What if you want two polls? It’s another level of indirection, but making $ext a list (unless the encoding protocol handles multiple values with the same key). This also allows for a specified ordering of extensions, provided that makes sense.
- pfraze 4y ago
  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.
  - gargron 4y ago
    You're about to reinvent JSON-LD.
    - cxr 4y ago
      This isn't unfamiliar territory. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117583> <https://web.archive.org/web/20190606173136/https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/unwalled-garden https://web.archive.org/web/20190606173136/https://pfrazee.h...>
    - rektide 4y ago
      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!
adenozine 4y ago
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 day, and I’ve always been grateful ever since, but now the new web is coming together and I’m optimistic that this protocol could lead the way. Time will tell how seriously they move forward with this.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Most fediverse users were banned from Twitter or quit Twitter for ideological reasons.
  - altantiprocrast 4y ago
    Or quit Twitter because the algorithm pushes celebrities and organizations too much, rather than actual humans?
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    That first clause is an exceptional claim. I don’t know anyone in the fediverse who’s there because they can’t be on Twitter. I do know plenty of people who left because it was becoming a raging cesspit of algorithm-driving extremism.
- miloignis 4y ago
  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
TrevorFSmith 4y ago
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 let you know when it's done" is a red flag.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  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.
  - arcatech 4y ago
    It’s a waitlist for the first app, not the protocol itself.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Wouldn't it be better to simply have a notification for the newsletter to keep people informed about the community work and where and how they can contribute. The page is full of content suggesting that users are simply to wait back while this supposedly open protocol is developed with no community involvement.
  - arcalinea 4y ago
    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 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
smaudet 4y ago
Hmm I don't get it. What's the point? Social network software falls into 1) real software you use already with a dedicated circle of people who care 2) people who don't care and just use one of the relatively 'poor' common networks (e.g. twitter, FB). Who is this marketed at? Reading the comments it seems others are struggling to see the point - the existing communities are mostly served even if the software is not great. There's not enough value-add. Came here expecting to read about an interesting protocol not a social network protocol without an app...
RF_Savage 4y ago
An unfortunate name collision. I thought this was some historical article about AT-commands used to command old phoneline modems. But also appropriated to control modern GSM and LTE chipsets, SCADA radio modems and who knows what else. I hope my search results won't get polluted with this too badly.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Indeed, the Hayes commandset. This is what I expected too, which is why I didn't open this article until I heard about this in the news elsewhere. It's pretty exclusively in the domain of embedded development now though.
mattdesl 4y ago
Great to see some more concrete ideas beginning to come out of this team! My main concern with the protocol design is in the identity, and how it lends itself to centralized name services (@alice.google.com). The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts. A permissionless blockchain does seem like it would be a suitable solution, but your identity page mentions avoiding blockchain due to slow commitment times: > At present, none of the DID methods meet our standards fully. Many existing DID networks are permissionless blockchains which achieve the above goals but with relatively poor latency (ION takes roughly 20 minutes for commitment finality) What latency is really needed for a global name registry of a social network? I've only registered a few Twitter handles in a 10 year period, and each time I would be OK waiting for 15-20 minutes (or longer) to ensure commitment finality if it means I could escape the centralized host at any point in the next several years. Similar story with rotating keys and updating any pointers to my host/server.
- dchnshA 4y ago
  > The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts. You are correct about Email, but Mastodon ? Instance diversity is alive and well. People don't choose Mastodon servers by the number of users that are already on it, but by what domain name they would like to have in their identity name. People join the community they identify with ignoring "network effects".
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Instance diversity in Mastodon is that ~2M users or 70% of the network chooses one of 5 main servers. If your account is @foo@service.com and service.com goes in an undesirable direction (it shuts down, or is bought out by a billionaire, or turns on ads or paid subscription) you may be forced to switch to another platform like @foo@alt-service.com. This requires that the service.com continually upholds and honours your redirect, which is to say that your account name was never portable across different and incompatible services to begin with. Network effects dictates that most of the time you will just stick to the same domain you signed up with, because you don't want to lose all your DMs and posts, and you don't want to start over again with a new name.
justbeast 4y ago
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 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

116 points by agd 4y ago

Seems very similar in goal to the Solid Project, https://solidproject.org https://solidproject.org, which Tim Berners Lee is involved with and is being standardized by the W3C.

gobengo 4y ago
I believe it's not particularly standards-track at W3C. Is there a reason you think that it is?
mariusor 4y ago
This is very interesting. Unlike BlueSky it seems it uses the ontologies compatible with ActivityPub federation, which might prove a good compromise for interoperability in the future. I'll definitely bookmark this.

tsukikage 4y ago

...anyone else click through expecting a discussion of the Hayes command set, or just me?

contingencies 4y ago
Not just you.
- mrlonglong 4y ago
  +++ATH <click>
entropyie 4y ago
Super disappointed that this is not about modems...
mikestew 4y ago
Not me, but only because you saved me a click. "Go to the comments first", FTW. :-) (Though I might still waste that saved click just to see what TFA is about...)
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Clicked on the link looking for a blast from the past, came away bewildered.
krylon 4y ago
It's not just you.
nomel 4y ago
I remember feeling like a magician when I first learned about AT commands. It was my first real experience getting the computer to do something physical. After that, I learned about all the IO accessible on the parallel port, allowing full binary access to the real world. I was hooked, and it eventually led to a career of making computers do physical things. :)
mysterydip 4y ago
Me too. Wikipedia seems to have a decent list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set
ok123456 4y ago
I wish it was.
ape4 4y ago
Yes. Perhaps like Telegram refers to an important earlier communication medium.
askvictor 4y ago
Me too; particularly as I've been using them quite a bit recently; AT lives on in embedded system network comms (e.g 4G, wifi, ethernet and/or bluetooth modules - the ESP32/ESP8266 has AT command support). It's really expanded a lot these days - you can do http(s) and mqtt requests, and even run a web server without having to touch a TCP stack.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Findecanor 4y ago
IBM PC/AT keyboard protocol here. But it is more often called "PS/2", which is the same with more keys.
systems_glitch 4y ago
That's what I expected as well.
squarefoot 4y ago
Same here. I think most of us old beards had the same reaction.

jacooper 4y ago

This looks interesting. https://atproto.com/docs https://atproto.com/docs

mike256 4y ago
I dont think so. It should not be named AT Protocol... :-( +++ ATH
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Darn it, I initially assumed that this was about AT commands.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    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.
    - xen2xen1 4y ago
      It's not? Hayes compatible all the way!
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        It was terrible, but it was the best we had.
mdaniel 4y ago
You seem to have misspelled "misguided". https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc invents their own RPC, because the 8000 other ones are somehow insufficient for their Web3 ways? Bonus points for https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc#authentication https://atproto.com/specs/xrpc#authentication And that's not even getting into "oh, ok, so my cousin is going to create his own DNS entry, is he?" https://atproto.com/guides/identity#identifiers https://atproto.com/guides/identity#identifiers https://atproto.com/lexicons/atproto-com#comatprotocreatesession https://atproto.com/lexicons/atproto-com#comatprotocreateses... seems to be missing any 2FA parts, spitting in the face of years of "don't get phished" learning

viksit 4y ago

has anyone found code on their github or any other libraries yet? the repo is just docs.

pfraze 4y ago
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto packages directory

knaekhoved 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set

patientplatypus 4y ago

kragen 4y ago

Where does it document ATS11=38? +++ ATH

skyfaller 4y ago

Can anyone explain why Bluesky is making a new protocol instead of using ActivityPub like Mastodon? What advantages would it have over ActivityPub? https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ Worth noting that ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard. Is it just Not Invented Here syndrome? This could lead to https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

foodstances 4y ago
So they can be the center of it and control it, of course.
- grishka 4y ago
  How could one "control" a federation protocol though?
  - iblablelbli 4y ago
    that's an interesting question, I think spam is part of how... for a proper answer I would look at how SMTP has evolved over time.
    - grishka 4y ago
      SMTP started without proper authentication so anyone could spoof anyone's address. Most of those extensions try to fix this. But ActivityPub, for example, has authentication built-in from the beginning in the form of HTTP signatures.
      - iblablelbli 4y ago
  - skyfaller 4y ago
    Consider how worried people are about Google Chrome's browser market share, and how Google is increasingly able to dictate details of the web unilaterally. The Web is made of standardized protocols, but Google has significant control over it. Consider the state of email, a standardized protocol, where Gmail is dominant, and anything that can't deliver to Gmail is practically irrelevant, no matter whether it follows the protocol. Now consider Bluesky. If Twitter supports the AT protocol early, it would be by far the largest implementation, meaning that Twitter practically controls it. It would be like Gmail for email, except there are no other options to begin with. If Twitter does not support AT protocol early, then AT protocol will be irrelevant, and other networks like the ActivityPub Fediverse will continue to outpace it.

branon 4y ago

Bluesky is Twitter's right? Will be cool if they come away with something actually decentralized. Trial in beta with hackers, then one day, in-place swap Twitter to run on it. Pipe dream?

gojomo 4y ago
While Bluesky PBLLC received initial funding from Twitter Inc, Twitter (whether under its current management or impending Musk ownership) has no ownership interest or veto-power over the Bluesky plans. Though Agrawal seemed interested enough that Bluesky would potentially have had an 'inside track' to getting Twitter to interoperate, Twitter's proprietary platform interests may have always made that tricky. Under new management, anything could happen.

qualudeheart 4y ago

Is this the Jack Dorsey thing?

wmf 4y ago
Yes.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Bullish that Dorsey is involved. Dorsey as a high status rich guy could attract lots of users and developers. He’ll also kill activitypub as AT protocol will soon be much better funded with more developers.
  - onqtam 4y ago
    he was involved. But now he's doing his own thing which anchors to bitcoin & uses the ION network: https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5 https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsfchoVG1yU3ffTDsPRcU99H1E/edit#slide=id.g11c16fe40c4_0_156 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsf... https://twitter.com/namcios/status/1535302090360250368 https://twitter.com/namcios/status/1535302090360250368

jonhohle 4y ago

I’ve not gotten fully through the spec, but why does the server hold the client’s signing key? That puts a lot of responsibility on a PDS that could be handled by the client, doesn’t it? If the client has their complete repo anyway, why can’t the PDS verify changes with a public key? If it’s to aggregate likes, comments, etc., why not use a mailbox encrypted with the public key for unmerged data and allow the DID to decide whether or not to accept the content, aggregate it, and publish the updated repo? Other clients could choose whether or not to considered the merged mailbox when displaying to users (for example, likes could update automatically, but only accepted comments)

pfraze 4y ago
Basically -- to keep it simple. Holding the signing key in the PDS simplifies linearization and reduces device-pairing actions. We spent most of the summer planning to store the signing key in the user device(s) but during a late design session we examined why exactly we wanted that, and realized the main reason was for account portability^1. Thing is, we dont need the primary signing key to be local for account portability; we just need a recovery key that allows the user to assign control away from the PDS later. So we switched to a server-held signing key, but we kept in the architectural pieces that make client-held signing keys possible, in case we want to explore that again in the future. ^1 We're interested in end-to-end encryption but that's not what the signing key would accomplish and will need to be developed later. Hopefully we haven't painted ourselves into a corner for that part of things.
- topranks 4y ago
  Is this a typo then? This is to be used in adversarial situations in which a user's signingKey leaks or is being held by some custodian who turns out to be a bad actor. In a situation such as this, the signingKey may be used to rotate both the signingKey and recoveryKey. From: https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#account-recovery https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#account-recovery Seems to suggest the signing key is all that’s needed to change the keys for a user? I was expecting it to say the recovery key could be used for that (which only I have).

dchnshA 4y ago

Nah thanks, I'll stick with ActivityPub. The fact they even felt the need to create another protocol instead of using, improving and contributing to ActivityPub makes me think they want to bake a busines modell for themselves into the technology and they can't do that if they don't have full control over the spec. ActivityPub is organically grown from a community to serve that community. Bluesky is created to combine making the profits of a commercial centralized social network + profiting from the investment from crypto bros. ActivityPub is not perfect and nobody is pretending like it is (there is a big blog post from the co-author about what retrospectively they should have done differently, sadly I couldn't find the link), but a specification is not static ! If you have a suggestion to improve it you can propose changes and a lot of things are left to the implementation, so you can just do things differently than other ActivityPub application currently do. In fact there are people building the future of the ActivityPub ecosystem right now: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/ There is no need to create yet another specification. The only feature this claims to have, that all ActivityPub implementations currently don't have is identity portability and that can actually be implemented without changes to the ActivityPub spec, just no ActivityPub Application has implemented it yet.

pie_flavor 4y ago
'The specification may be terrible, and everything good about it may be implementation-specific, and every touted feature you're looking for may be missing from the only implementations anyone uses, but you can always just break compatibility from all the de facto standards, and so that's no reason to come up with your own base standard' seems flatly wrong, and that actually is a pretty great reason to come up with your own base standard. IRC beat the 'the standard is just fine as it is' drum for many years, and they were so amazingly correct that basically all IRC communities jumped ship to Discord within the span of a few years. Not to mention nobody uses Mastodon either. Who should Jack be trying to placate, exactly? The extremely few people who were so fed up with Twitter that they left for Mastodon, are they eager to finally start federating with Twitter?
- jdhdjdjdhekeie 4y ago
  except nobody moved from irc to discord because of the protocol. and all discord does can be implemented on top of it. nobody cares. irc died and discord boomed because there was a user generation change. an explosion of new users eclipsed the few irc old timers. discord is garbage any way you look at it. dont try to sell it as fixing irc. lol.

karmakaze 4y ago

Oh they mean 'At'-protocol. I was thinking Hayes 'AT' commands.

whoopdedo 4y ago
Which still lives on today in cellular networks. At least up to LTE, I haven't looked lately to see if they're sticking around for 5G. https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/modem-AT-commands.html https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Terminology/modem-AT-comman...
- dapids 4y ago
  It's still there.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  If you are talking to one of those self-contained, postage stamp-sized GSM modules using a microcontroller, chances are there'll be a serial link to it, and it's listening to Hayes commands.
EarlKing 4y ago
/me looks at this content-free page and then reads your comment +++ATH0
bks 4y ago
ATDT
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  ATZ0E0M0L0&A0&D0&G0&K0&N1&U1 ATDT@;684-767-2676 (or any 767-XXXX, 555-XXXX is also fun)

FreeTrade 4y ago

This is a solution to Twitter's problems, not a solution that helps users. The crucial question is 'Will Twitter actually adopt it?' - if so, we'll all need to pay attention. If not, it can be safely ignored.

jonhohle 4y ago

I don’t think I have time for a full review, but making $ext a map seems short sighted. In the example, a poll is included, great. What if you want two polls? It’s another level of indirection, but making $ext a list (unless the encoding protocol handles multiple values with the same key). This also allows for a specified ordering of extensions, provided that makes sense.

pfraze 4y ago
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.
- gargron 4y ago
  You're about to reinvent JSON-LD.
  - cxr 4y ago
    This isn't unfamiliar territory. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117583> <https://web.archive.org/web/20190606173136/https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/unwalled-garden https://web.archive.org/web/20190606173136/https://pfrazee.h...>
  - rektide 4y ago
    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!

adenozine 4y ago

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 day, and I’ve always been grateful ever since, but now the new web is coming together and I’m optimistic that this protocol could lead the way. Time will tell how seriously they move forward with this.

qualudeheart 4y ago
Most fediverse users were banned from Twitter or quit Twitter for ideological reasons.
- altantiprocrast 4y ago
  Or quit Twitter because the algorithm pushes celebrities and organizations too much, rather than actual humans?
- kstrauser 4y ago
  That first clause is an exceptional claim. I don’t know anyone in the fediverse who’s there because they can’t be on Twitter. I do know plenty of people who left because it was becoming a raging cesspit of algorithm-driving extremism.
miloignis 4y ago
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

TrevorFSmith 4y ago

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 let you know when it's done" is a red flag.

encryptluks2 4y ago
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.
- arcatech 4y ago
  It’s a waitlist for the first app, not the protocol itself.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Wouldn't it be better to simply have a notification for the newsletter to keep people informed about the community work and where and how they can contribute. The page is full of content suggesting that users are simply to wait back while this supposedly open protocol is developed with no community involvement.
- arcalinea 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

smaudet 4y ago

Hmm I don't get it. What's the point? Social network software falls into 1) real software you use already with a dedicated circle of people who care 2) people who don't care and just use one of the relatively 'poor' common networks (e.g. twitter, FB). Who is this marketed at? Reading the comments it seems others are struggling to see the point - the existing communities are mostly served even if the software is not great. There's not enough value-add. Came here expecting to read about an interesting protocol not a social network protocol without an app...

RF_Savage 4y ago

An unfortunate name collision. I thought this was some historical article about AT-commands used to command old phoneline modems. But also appropriated to control modern GSM and LTE chipsets, SCADA radio modems and who knows what else. I hope my search results won't get polluted with this too badly.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
Indeed, the Hayes commandset. This is what I expected too, which is why I didn't open this article until I heard about this in the news elsewhere. It's pretty exclusively in the domain of embedded development now though.

mattdesl 4y ago

Great to see some more concrete ideas beginning to come out of this team! My main concern with the protocol design is in the identity, and how it lends itself to centralized name services (@alice.google.com). The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts. A permissionless blockchain does seem like it would be a suitable solution, but your identity page mentions avoiding blockchain due to slow commitment times: > At present, none of the DID methods meet our standards fully. Many existing DID networks are permissionless blockchains which achieve the above goals but with relatively poor latency (ION takes roughly 20 minutes for commitment finality) What latency is really needed for a global name registry of a social network? I've only registered a few Twitter handles in a 10 year period, and each time I would be OK waiting for 15-20 minutes (or longer) to ensure commitment finality if it means I could escape the centralized host at any point in the next several years. Similar story with rotating keys and updating any pointers to my host/server.

dchnshA 4y ago
> The end result seems like it will be no different than Mastodon and email protocol, where a few central players own the majority of the namespace and network effects prevent most users from having full custody & portability of their accounts. You are correct about Email, but Mastodon ? Instance diversity is alive and well. People don't choose Mastodon servers by the number of users that are already on it, but by what domain name they would like to have in their identity name. People join the community they identify with ignoring "network effects".
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Instance diversity in Mastodon is that ~2M users or 70% of the network chooses one of 5 main servers. If your account is @foo@service.com and service.com goes in an undesirable direction (it shuts down, or is bought out by a billionaire, or turns on ads or paid subscription) you may be forced to switch to another platform like @foo@alt-service.com. This requires that the service.com continually upholds and honours your redirect, which is to say that your account name was never portable across different and incompatible services to begin with. Network effects dictates that most of the time you will just stick to the same domain you signed up with, because you don't want to lose all your DMs and posts, and you don't want to start over again with a new name.

justbeast 4y ago

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 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.

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