12 ms·

A Look at Bluesky

156 points by julietteeb 3y ago

dorianmariefr 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. I think Bluesky is pretty interesting (got my invite from Twitter :) )
- fullqwerty 3y ago
  I someone has an invite, I'd love to explore it!
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Do you guys remember when Gmail was in private beta, back when it launched, and you needed an invite? I got my invite from a website where people shared their invite links. After creating an account, and using it for a while I also got the ability to share invites with like 10 people or something. I don’t even know if doing that kind of thing would work today though, given how many spammers and such trawl the internet. Probably some small number of people would grab every invite for themselves, instead of taking only one invite each.
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      People are absolutely scraping the invite codes. It's not even hard considering that they're all /^bsky-social-[a-z0-9]{5}-[a-z0-9]{5}$/. That's why if you're begging for a Bluesky invite, you should ensure that people can actually contact you privately (which you can't do on HN).
      - criddell 3y ago
        > you can’t do on HN You can include your email in your profile. I’ve done that and I get occasional emails from it.
  - dorianmariefr 3y ago
    what's your email?
    - MarcusE1W 3y ago
      If you have a code left, I would be interested valise.07.tub at icloud.com
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- r5w7tpN 3y ago
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mbStavola 3y ago
I'm not 100% sold on ATProto, but the fact that my identity and content can live separately from an instance is an insanely huge advantage over ActivityPub. I do not want to run my own Mastodon server (though I do) but I also don't want to use someone else's server and put my account at the mercy of the operator. It's maddening to think about how I could build a following or amass a ton of quality posts, only for the server to shut down or pull a Twitter. I simply can't stand the thought of it. If ActivityPub wants to keep riding the wave it has now they should start investigating ways to support this. I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platforms / not owning their data).
  - timeon 3y ago
    'More and more people' can still be just minority. But niche is there.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precursor. Network effects are real, but appear insignificant until they’re in our faces. The fact that it’s currently a minority is expected, that’s just how network effects work. It was just a minority on Reddit when Digg was the place to be as well. Obviously I don’t have any magical predictive abilities. But the “vocal minority” argument has bitten a lot of people before. Including those that have stake in the game and are paranoid about competitors.
suction 3y ago
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sneak 3y ago
Right now everyone on Bluesky is on centralized instances run by the devs, and are subject to widespread censorship by same. I know of no way at this time to run one's own instance or federate.
- Zetice 3y ago
  Why does this constantly come up as some kind of gotcha? The protocol is under active development, and Bluesky serves as a reference implementation.
  - sneak 3y ago
    It comes up because right now Bluesky functions exactly like a worse Twitter (also centralized). It has to be better somehow, and the whole selling point is decentralization to sidestep the possibility of recreating the current Twitter fiasco. That goal is not yet achieved, which means it's below parity.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      Bluesky doesn't function at all, it's not public yet, over and over again the people working on it repeat this fact.
      - sneak 3y ago
        Bluesky is absolutely public, I and thousands of others have accounts and are using it presently.
        Zetice 3y ago
        I've had an account for months. It is not "public", it's in private beta.
        sneak 3y ago
        Here is bluesky staff saying it is public: https://bsky.app/profile/emily.bsky.team/post/3jziqq7fgjm2p https://bsky.app/profile/emily.bsky.team/post/3jziqq7fgjm2p
mg 3y ago
With the current Twitter debacle, I think self-hosting my "notes about interesting things" (aka tweets) in a way it is accessible via the web, activitypub, bluesky and RSS might be the best way. Is anybody already doing this? It shouldn't too be hard. Just throw all the notes into a directory and add some code which replies to the different types of requests. I guess the best way to get ones tweets out of Twitter is the "Download an archive of your data" thingy in the settings?
- ImaCake 3y ago
  These tools exist at least between activity pub and RSS. I suspect similar will exist for bluesky if it takes off. https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub
- ttepasse 3y ago
  There is an ActivityPub Plugin for Wordpress; I believe the author has recently been hired by Auttomatic. https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ The Indieweb Crew of course did this first. The principle POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere – was coined by them and is the guiding principle behind the Indieweb movement and it is exactly what you’re trying to do. You should click around a little bit in their wiki: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE Most of the time the Indieweblings are doing their own “protocol“ by receiving and reacting to webmentions with rich data structures in Microformats syntax in their HTML. Some parts of Indieweb a rather opinionated about technologies. But a lot of them also interact with different federation services, for example see: https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub
Zetice 3y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this actual submission; > A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. That was a bug, and is not generally speaking, the case. You must have the ability to alter the DNS records for the domain you wish to claim. > However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. With no means to make them private. Which could lead to harassment! It could also lead to the enlightenment of man, if we're just making random claims without explaining ourselves... > But runs into the problem of algorithms being hijacked to show inappropriate/offensive/bigoted content. Posts on the AT Proto can be labeled by whatever labeling service you prefer, including Bluesky itself. You can then use your preferred labeling to filter out labels you don't want, or subscribe to a feed that does that for you. > But also it’s a group of overly complicated specifications that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! I don't think, "AT Proto is too complex, use ActivityPub instead" is a reasonable claim at all. The problem is a complex one, and AT Proto in particular is not even out yet. Honestly, I can barely understand this "article". It's just a bunch of oversimplified (and sometimes outright wrong) statements about what AT Proto is, coupled with painfully misunderstood declarations that border on the illegible.
- captn3m0 3y ago
  I’m curious how ATProto codifies these algorithms? Is it just left to the clients to implement on the firehouse?
  - Zetice 3y ago
    https://atproto.com/guides/overview#algorithmic-choice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#algorithmic-choice
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Curious if it was (partially) written using ChatGPT. It definitely has that tone.
  - 3y ago
iptq 3y ago
> A benefit of atproto users is that they are transferable without needing an active server This is not exactly true, it just means the server that holds ur data (traditionally instance or home server) doesn't need to be involved in the transfer process. However, this has centralized identity resolution, which is not a good long term solution. > For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle! This is easily hotfixable by requiring more stringent proof of ownership of the domain (like DNS records), rather than a problem with the protocol itself. But it's a valid concern > But runs into the problem of algorithms being hijacked to show inappropriate/offensive/bigoted content. I thought the whole point was that if you didn't like the algorithm you could swap it out for something simpler. This point puzzles me greatly > that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! Not really. If you peel back the interface they're very different, since the transferability of accounts across servers is something baked deeply into how ActivityPub works and cannot be easily changed without rewriting the protocol. That being said, I personally hope there is some network that can solve the problem of untying resources from domains, since it is one of the big problems with any federated protocol
- vidarh 3y ago
  How transfer of accounts happens isn't part of the ActivityPub protocol at all - it was added last year to Mastodon just using ActivityPub as a transport. A big improvement is possible "just" by making instances revalidate the URI against webfinger regularly (you'd still need to plan ahead for that, but it'd enable "stable" usernames) and secondly by allowing for a key pair to let users sign messages to make claims about ownership and which account is current. That would make it possible to enable fully unilateral moves. Neither would require any changes to ActivityPub.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  How did hubzilla do it? They support activity pub, but their central theme is "nomadic" identities which can be brought anywhere and are independent of a server.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
bullen 3y ago
Isn't RSS better than all other federation protocols? You have four properties of feeds: category, tree-comment, real-time and persistent. Reddit was the winner on all those except real-time. Decentralization is now the most important feature, and taking responsibility of your own data is the best version of that. The only missing part is decentralized RSS servers and clients. Think backup for your posts and RSS reader services that also backup your favorite feeds. All you need for that is a distributed db underlying it all like this: http://root.rupy.se http://root.rupy.se and a reader web tool. The only feature we lack is a category (think hashtag) for RSS. So a combination of all services below: http://fuse.rupy.se http://fuse.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se http://tentacle.rupy.se http://tentacle.rupy.se http://talk.binarytask.com http://talk.binarytask.com Add mail and video hosting/streaming and you got the complete deal.
- eviks 3y ago
  How do you like and reply within RSS?
  - captn3m0 3y ago
    There’s some folks using web mentions to implement those. https://ruk.ca/content/using-freshrss-blog-posts-webmention https://ruk.ca/content/using-freshrss-blog-posts-webmention https://mikevdv.dev/blog/2022-07-05-web-mentions https://mikevdv.dev/blog/2022-07-05-web-mentions
  - bullen 3y ago
    The whole like score rank thing is kinda overblown. Reply works fine and comments too even if only local.
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    There was once the Salmon protocol for enabling replies and comments swimming upstream. Salmon was part of the OStatus protocol which evolved into ActivityPub today.
reflexco 3y ago
One thing I don't understand is how can Bluesky pretend to be more open than Twitter when it's been months and it's still an invite-only closed garden?
- redsolver 3y ago
  Well, for one you can download all data on the network (posts, likes, follows, ...) using a free public API, even in real-time. If you want to try Bluesky without an invite code, you can run your own PDS (personal data server) today and federate with the official sandbox network, there are already 100 servers doing that: https://atscan.net/pds https://atscan.net/pds
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Judging by how they can apparently wipe all the data and remove people from the network on a whim, it doesn't seem very decentralised.
    - devttyeu 3y ago
      You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance Like moving from GitHub to GitLab. Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.
      - spiderice 3y ago
        > You can download and keep your data and keep a backup > and you can keep a copy of your data Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.
        3y ago
eviks 3y ago
> But also it’s a group of overly complicated specifications that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! So do those extensions exist (even in the form of plans), especially the ones that free you up from a server or is it just wishful thinking?
- MuteXR 3y ago
  They do. Look at Hubzilla.
bschne 3y ago
> A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle! That isn't necessarily an issue with using a domain as a username, it was only possible because you could verify ownership by putting something in a subdirectory they defined which was available as an S3 bucket name (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820815). If you allow verification only from the root directory or via DNS records this shouldn't be a problem AFAICT.
threeseed 3y ago
Meanwhile, Meta Threads is on track to launch shortly [1]. Which is based on an open-standard, interoperates with Mastodon and is from a company that has the battle scars to prove that they can operate a global service in a mature and a reasonable way. Given Jack Dorsey's support of the crazier positions of Elon Musk and RFK e.g. WiFi causes leaky brain it really does look like the best of a bad bunch. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781271/instagram-threads-twitter-leak-android-google-play https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781271/instagram-threads...
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  Gross, another Facebook product. I wouldn’t be touching anything Facebook builds with a 10-foot-pole and a hazmat suit. Does anyone actually want awful-Facebook Twitter? It’ll be the worst bits of Facebook and Twitter in record time. > Which is based on an open-standard, interoperates with Mastodon By which we mean: capitalises on work done to form an open standard, to parasitically drain users, and then deliberately break compatibility a year down the track. FB messenger literally did this when it started too - supported a bunch of different protocols to capture everyone, and then let them break. That said, I’m impressed teams at Facebook have managed to stop working on stealing features wholesale from TikTok and Zuck’s anaemic VR disaster long enough to knock out an app to parasitise a different community.
- xii23 3y ago
  >Given Jack Dorsey's support of the crazier positions of Elon Musk and RFK e.g. WiFi causes leaky brain it really does look like the best of a bad bunch. yeah, I'm not sure why he's going all-in on a fringe candidate who's clearly never going to win
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... yes, yes... let's cheer at Facebook doing things right...
voytec 3y ago
Launching federatable(?) protocol and platform as non-federated, centralized one doesn't spawn confidence in me. The limited registration policy appears to be fueling the desire and excitement by creating a sense of exclusivity that amplifies the demand and anticipation. Reminds me of South Park's "Cartmanland" episode[1]. There's also the fact that Bluesky is run by Jack, who founded and managed pre-Musk Twitter "1.0" and funded Musk's Twitter "2.0". I don't have high expectations nor hopes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJWL49D30A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJWL49D30A
- KoftaBob 3y ago
  > There's also the fact that Bluesky is run by Jack That's not accurate, Jack gave the Bluesky/AT Protocol organization initial grant money, but he doesn't "run" it. The CEO is Jay Graber.
  - voytec 3y ago
    And Linda Yaccarino is Twitter's CEO. In relationships like this, the CEO (or country's president) often has handlers and little decision-making autonomy. Not saying this is the case but I'm not confident it isn't. Jack is a power-hungry opportunist who throws money at anything that can give him wealth and status in the future.
    - emptysongglass 3y ago
      You appear to want to make this into something it isn't. Bluesky isn't beholden to Jack's wishes and has repeatedly and publicly affirmed the same. I don't care about Jack and neither should you. Bluesky is Bluesky run by the Bluesky team. The team and what they're building should be your only concern.
      - Sunspark 3y ago
        If Jack is the majority shareholder (I don't know if he is, just using this as an example), they have to do what he says. Twitter has a CEO now, but the majority shareholder is Musk. She cannot do anything without his permission. Were I CEO I would remove that childish poop emoji auto-responder but I don't think she has that kind of authority. Facebook has a board of directors, but Zuck is the majority shareholder, so they have to do whatever he wants, so they spent time and money on the metaverse when a normal corporation might have said let's not.
Hamuko 3y ago
I still don't understand the point of ActivityPub. Everyone one wants every social media, blog, news site to implement it. Why? RSS already exists to aggregate all of those into a single place. And having interacted with infosec.exchange, I came to the conclusion that long-form content doesn't mix well with microblogging and that Mastodon is a shit interface for it. I have a completely different software for my RSS feeds with a completely different way of browsing through content that works well for it.
- vidarh 3y ago
  RSS is one way, ActivityPub two. If your blog makes articles available to ActivityPub, then people can e.g. comment directly on the blog post without having to post a link to it, and others can follow those posts. If you don't like Mastodon, there's Pleroma, Misskey, Calkey and others, as well as apps, or you can find RSS feeds from them if you just want to read, or you can use one of the alternate web frontends.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    Mastodon RSS feeds are also crap. None of the posts have any kind of a header, so it's not possible to see what the post is about without opening the post. Real blogs will actually have titles that describe their contents.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Mastodon isn't a blog platform, so that is unsurprising.
- ttepasse 3y ago
  ActivityPub has its deep origins in the feeds world. Originally people were extending feeds with the Atom ActivityStreams Extensions, in XML, for richer data structures which contain the social activities of persons. The protocol PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) was used for some realtime updating of feed subscribers (Push-then-pull, instead of Pull). Mapping persons or rather their accounts to resources like feeds was the impetus for WebFinger. And for notifying comments or reactions to upstream feed producers there was the Salmon protocol. Together those formats and protocols morphed into the OStatus protocol. With the rise of JSON and with lessons learned from OStatus and pump.io those specs morphed into ActivityPub today. The underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary is still the same, I think, but the mechanism for following and responding now uses dedicated out- and inboxes. I think microblogging and other social network stuff and long-form blog posts are different content, best consumed differently. There is some overlap, of course, but articles do not need shoehorned in. Sometimes people simply undervalue the simple link from a microblog post to the longform article.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
I’ve got a Bluesky invite yet can’t use it because “account creation is temporarily limited”. Seems they’ve totally missed the opportunity of Twitter getting worse over the weekend.
- devttyeu 3y ago
  The service seems to be under massive load from the influx of users over the weekend, and they've passed 200k users, posting activity is a few times higher vs "the normal" So they probably could get even more users, but I'm guessing it's already sufficiently crazy for the team right now
  - CountGeek 3y ago
    They (Bluesky) blew it. They had one job and that was to be ready for this moment and what did they do? Continue with the invite system (which is from Gmail era) and then disable account creations...
    - devttyeu 3y ago
      Eh, it's not the first time Twitter is horribly broken and/or makes an unpopular decision, and it probably won't be the last one.
      - Hamuko 3y ago
        Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now. I already saw a bunch of people opt for Mastodon or Misclick because Bluesky just wasn't an option.
        galleywest200 3y ago
        > Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now With which backend? Scaling from 200k users to possibly hundreds of millions that quickly?
    - 3y ago
purjolok 3y ago
> However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. Au contraire, if network users control their clients, they can "block"¹ and "follow" content at-the client level without stating it publicly. ¹. Not a full block, as the blockee can still read and interact with the blocker's posts.
fareesh 3y ago
Are there any android clients that have push notifications yet?
paulgb 3y ago
I’d push back a bit on the claim that atproto features, particularly decoupling identity from the topology of federation, could have been done as extensions to ActivityPub. It’s a fundamental part of the way information flows in ActivityPub vs atproto. I tried Mastodon for a bit and like the community there, but I found they were very deliberately trying to build a place that wasn’t like twitter: building federated search is frowned-upon; no quote-tweets; extremely low threshold for content warnings. They’re building something different and that’s great, but it’s no surprise that people fleeing twitter want to go to the more twitter-like app.
throwaway290 3y ago
ActivityPub suffers from many of the same issues around public likes and such, no? There should be a decentralized social communication protocol that is more fit to reflect how people communicate: more ephemeral and less of a permanent record. I remember LitePub/Pleroma did some work in that direction, and it's mostly compatible with ActivityPub too I think
xelia 3y ago
I’d say the protocol’s complexity tries to solve a lot of real problems that infest social media today, only time will tell if those solutions are the right ones.
mezobeli 3y ago
Give #nostr a try

A Look at Bluesky

156 points by julietteeb 3y ago

dorianmariefr 3y ago

Thanks for sharing. I think Bluesky is pretty interesting (got my invite from Twitter :) )

fullqwerty 3y ago
I someone has an invite, I'd love to explore it!
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Do you guys remember when Gmail was in private beta, back when it launched, and you needed an invite? I got my invite from a website where people shared their invite links. After creating an account, and using it for a while I also got the ability to share invites with like 10 people or something. I don’t even know if doing that kind of thing would work today though, given how many spammers and such trawl the internet. Probably some small number of people would grab every invite for themselves, instead of taking only one invite each.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    People are absolutely scraping the invite codes. It's not even hard considering that they're all /^bsky-social-[a-z0-9]{5}-[a-z0-9]{5}$/. That's why if you're begging for a Bluesky invite, you should ensure that people can actually contact you privately (which you can't do on HN).
    - criddell 3y ago
      > you can’t do on HN You can include your email in your profile. I’ve done that and I get occasional emails from it.
- dorianmariefr 3y ago
  what's your email?
  - MarcusE1W 3y ago
    If you have a code left, I would be interested valise.07.tub at icloud.com
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
r5w7tpN 3y ago
[dead]

mbStavola 3y ago

I'm not 100% sold on ATProto, but the fact that my identity and content can live separately from an instance is an insanely huge advantage over ActivityPub. I do not want to run my own Mastodon server (though I do) but I also don't want to use someone else's server and put my account at the mercy of the operator. It's maddening to think about how I could build a following or amass a ton of quality posts, only for the server to shut down or pull a Twitter. I simply can't stand the thought of it. If ActivityPub wants to keep riding the wave it has now they should start investigating ways to support this. I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data.

tsimionescu 3y ago
> I think more and more people are getting fed up with centralized platforms / not owning their data. Given the meteoric rise of TikTok, I don't think there is any sign of this being true outside a small techy bubble. At least, not as a percentage (that is, the growth in the number of people who are fed up with centralized platforms is dwarfed by the growth in the number of people who are fine with centralized platforms / not owning their data).
- timeon 3y ago
  'More and more people' can still be just minority. But niche is there.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Well we may learn the hard way. Lots and lots of good old regular people have quit Facebook and stay off Twitter and many other engagement-optimized platforms. These companies have a poor reputation, for good reason. It’s just not 2010 anymore, and the cracks are starting to show. If a new platform such as bluesky, activitypub or Nostr becomes dominant, people will certainly point to this era in particular as a precursor. Network effects are real, but appear insignificant until they’re in our faces. The fact that it’s currently a minority is expected, that’s just how network effects work. It was just a minority on Reddit when Digg was the place to be as well. Obviously I don’t have any magical predictive abilities. But the “vocal minority” argument has bitten a lot of people before. Including those that have stake in the game and are paranoid about competitors.

suction 3y ago

[dead]

sneak 3y ago

Right now everyone on Bluesky is on centralized instances run by the devs, and are subject to widespread censorship by same. I know of no way at this time to run one's own instance or federate.

Zetice 3y ago
Why does this constantly come up as some kind of gotcha? The protocol is under active development, and Bluesky serves as a reference implementation.
- sneak 3y ago
  It comes up because right now Bluesky functions exactly like a worse Twitter (also centralized). It has to be better somehow, and the whole selling point is decentralization to sidestep the possibility of recreating the current Twitter fiasco. That goal is not yet achieved, which means it's below parity.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    Bluesky doesn't function at all, it's not public yet, over and over again the people working on it repeat this fact.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Bluesky is absolutely public, I and thousands of others have accounts and are using it presently.
      - Zetice 3y ago
        I've had an account for months. It is not "public", it's in private beta.
        sneak 3y ago
        Here is bluesky staff saying it is public: https://bsky.app/profile/emily.bsky.team/post/3jziqq7fgjm2p https://bsky.app/profile/emily.bsky.team/post/3jziqq7fgjm2p

mg 3y ago

With the current Twitter debacle, I think self-hosting my "notes about interesting things" (aka tweets) in a way it is accessible via the web, activitypub, bluesky and RSS might be the best way. Is anybody already doing this? It shouldn't too be hard. Just throw all the notes into a directory and add some code which replies to the different types of requests. I guess the best way to get ones tweets out of Twitter is the "Download an archive of your data" thingy in the settings?

ImaCake 3y ago
These tools exist at least between activity pub and RSS. I suspect similar will exist for bluesky if it takes off. https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub
ttepasse 3y ago
There is an ActivityPub Plugin for Wordpress; I believe the author has recently been hired by Auttomatic. https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ The Indieweb Crew of course did this first. The principle POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere – was coined by them and is the guiding principle behind the Indieweb movement and it is exactly what you’re trying to do. You should click around a little bit in their wiki: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE Most of the time the Indieweblings are doing their own “protocol“ by receiving and reacting to webmentions with rich data structures in Microformats syntax in their HTML. Some parts of Indieweb a rather opinionated about technologies. But a lot of them also interact with different federation services, for example see: https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub

Zetice 3y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this actual submission; > A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. That was a bug, and is not generally speaking, the case. You must have the ability to alter the DNS records for the domain you wish to claim. > However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. With no means to make them private. Which could lead to harassment! It could also lead to the enlightenment of man, if we're just making random claims without explaining ourselves... > But runs into the problem of algorithms being hijacked to show inappropriate/offensive/bigoted content. Posts on the AT Proto can be labeled by whatever labeling service you prefer, including Bluesky itself. You can then use your preferred labeling to filter out labels you don't want, or subscribe to a feed that does that for you. > But also it’s a group of overly complicated specifications that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! I don't think, "AT Proto is too complex, use ActivityPub instead" is a reasonable claim at all. The problem is a complex one, and AT Proto in particular is not even out yet. Honestly, I can barely understand this "article". It's just a bunch of oversimplified (and sometimes outright wrong) statements about what AT Proto is, coupled with painfully misunderstood declarations that border on the illegible.

captn3m0 3y ago
I’m curious how ATProto codifies these algorithms? Is it just left to the clients to implement on the firehouse?
- Zetice 3y ago
  https://atproto.com/guides/overview#algorithmic-choice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#algorithmic-choice
nathancahill 3y ago
Curious if it was (partially) written using ChatGPT. It definitely has that tone.
- 3y ago

iptq 3y ago

> A benefit of atproto users is that they are transferable without needing an active server This is not exactly true, it just means the server that holds ur data (traditionally instance or home server) doesn't need to be involved in the transfer process. However, this has centralized identity resolution, which is not a good long term solution. > For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle! This is easily hotfixable by requiring more stringent proof of ownership of the domain (like DNS records), rather than a problem with the protocol itself. But it's a valid concern > But runs into the problem of algorithms being hijacked to show inappropriate/offensive/bigoted content. I thought the whole point was that if you didn't like the algorithm you could swap it out for something simpler. This point puzzles me greatly > that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! Not really. If you peel back the interface they're very different, since the transferability of accounts across servers is something baked deeply into how ActivityPub works and cannot be easily changed without rewriting the protocol. That being said, I personally hope there is some network that can solve the problem of untying resources from domains, since it is one of the big problems with any federated protocol

vidarh 3y ago
How transfer of accounts happens isn't part of the ActivityPub protocol at all - it was added last year to Mastodon just using ActivityPub as a transport. A big improvement is possible "just" by making instances revalidate the URI against webfinger regularly (you'd still need to plan ahead for that, but it'd enable "stable" usernames) and secondly by allowing for a key pair to let users sign messages to make claims about ownership and which account is current. That would make it possible to enable fully unilateral moves. Neither would require any changes to ActivityPub.
cycomanic 3y ago
How did hubzilla do it? They support activity pub, but their central theme is "nomadic" identities which can be brought anywhere and are independent of a server.
- madeofpalk 3y ago

bullen 3y ago

Isn't RSS better than all other federation protocols? You have four properties of feeds: category, tree-comment, real-time and persistent. Reddit was the winner on all those except real-time. Decentralization is now the most important feature, and taking responsibility of your own data is the best version of that. The only missing part is decentralized RSS servers and clients. Think backup for your posts and RSS reader services that also backup your favorite feeds. All you need for that is a distributed db underlying it all like this: http://root.rupy.se http://root.rupy.se and a reader web tool. The only feature we lack is a category (think hashtag) for RSS. So a combination of all services below: http://fuse.rupy.se http://fuse.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se http://sprout.rupy.se http://tentacle.rupy.se http://tentacle.rupy.se http://talk.binarytask.com http://talk.binarytask.com Add mail and video hosting/streaming and you got the complete deal.

eviks 3y ago
How do you like and reply within RSS?
- captn3m0 3y ago
  There’s some folks using web mentions to implement those. https://ruk.ca/content/using-freshrss-blog-posts-webmention https://ruk.ca/content/using-freshrss-blog-posts-webmention https://mikevdv.dev/blog/2022-07-05-web-mentions https://mikevdv.dev/blog/2022-07-05-web-mentions
- bullen 3y ago
  The whole like score rank thing is kinda overblown. Reply works fine and comments too even if only local.
- ttepasse 3y ago
  There was once the Salmon protocol for enabling replies and comments swimming upstream. Salmon was part of the OStatus protocol which evolved into ActivityPub today.

reflexco 3y ago

One thing I don't understand is how can Bluesky pretend to be more open than Twitter when it's been months and it's still an invite-only closed garden?

redsolver 3y ago
Well, for one you can download all data on the network (posts, likes, follows, ...) using a free public API, even in real-time. If you want to try Bluesky without an invite code, you can run your own PDS (personal data server) today and federate with the official sandbox network, there are already 100 servers doing that: https://atscan.net/pds https://atscan.net/pds
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Judging by how they can apparently wipe all the data and remove people from the network on a whim, it doesn't seem very decentralised.
  - devttyeu 3y ago
    You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance Like moving from GitHub to GitLab. Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.
    - spiderice 3y ago
      > You can download and keep your data and keep a backup > and you can keep a copy of your data Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.
      - 3y ago

eviks 3y ago

> But also it’s a group of overly complicated specifications that could’ve just been extensions to the ActivityPub protocol rather than a whole new protocol! So do those extensions exist (even in the form of plans), especially the ones that free you up from a server or is it just wishful thinking?

MuteXR 3y ago
They do. Look at Hubzilla.

bschne 3y ago

> A problem with the system of having a domain as a username is that people can claim it who don’t have access to that username. For example, someone was able to get the AWS S3 domain as their handle! That isn't necessarily an issue with using a domain as a username, it was only possible because you could verify ownership by putting something in a subdirectory they defined which was available as an S3 bucket name (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820815). If you allow verification only from the root directory or via DNS records this shouldn't be a problem AFAICT.

threeseed 3y ago

Meanwhile, Meta Threads is on track to launch shortly [1]. Which is based on an open-standard, interoperates with Mastodon and is from a company that has the battle scars to prove that they can operate a global service in a mature and a reasonable way. Given Jack Dorsey's support of the crazier positions of Elon Musk and RFK e.g. WiFi causes leaky brain it really does look like the best of a bad bunch. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781271/instagram-threads-twitter-leak-android-google-play https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781271/instagram-threads...

FridgeSeal 3y ago
Gross, another Facebook product. I wouldn’t be touching anything Facebook builds with a 10-foot-pole and a hazmat suit. Does anyone actually want awful-Facebook Twitter? It’ll be the worst bits of Facebook and Twitter in record time. > Which is based on an open-standard, interoperates with Mastodon By which we mean: capitalises on work done to form an open standard, to parasitically drain users, and then deliberately break compatibility a year down the track. FB messenger literally did this when it started too - supported a bunch of different protocols to capture everyone, and then let them break. That said, I’m impressed teams at Facebook have managed to stop working on stealing features wholesale from TikTok and Zuck’s anaemic VR disaster long enough to knock out an app to parasitise a different community.
xii23 3y ago
>Given Jack Dorsey's support of the crazier positions of Elon Musk and RFK e.g. WiFi causes leaky brain it really does look like the best of a bad bunch. yeah, I'm not sure why he's going all-in on a fringe candidate who's clearly never going to win
ktosobcy 3y ago
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... yes, yes... let's cheer at Facebook doing things right...

voytec 3y ago

Launching federatable(?) protocol and platform as non-federated, centralized one doesn't spawn confidence in me. The limited registration policy appears to be fueling the desire and excitement by creating a sense of exclusivity that amplifies the demand and anticipation. Reminds me of South Park's "Cartmanland" episode[1]. There's also the fact that Bluesky is run by Jack, who founded and managed pre-Musk Twitter "1.0" and funded Musk's Twitter "2.0". I don't have high expectations nor hopes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJWL49D30A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJWL49D30A

KoftaBob 3y ago
> There's also the fact that Bluesky is run by Jack That's not accurate, Jack gave the Bluesky/AT Protocol organization initial grant money, but he doesn't "run" it. The CEO is Jay Graber.
- voytec 3y ago
  And Linda Yaccarino is Twitter's CEO. In relationships like this, the CEO (or country's president) often has handlers and little decision-making autonomy. Not saying this is the case but I'm not confident it isn't. Jack is a power-hungry opportunist who throws money at anything that can give him wealth and status in the future.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    You appear to want to make this into something it isn't. Bluesky isn't beholden to Jack's wishes and has repeatedly and publicly affirmed the same. I don't care about Jack and neither should you. Bluesky is Bluesky run by the Bluesky team. The team and what they're building should be your only concern.
    - Sunspark 3y ago
      If Jack is the majority shareholder (I don't know if he is, just using this as an example), they have to do what he says. Twitter has a CEO now, but the majority shareholder is Musk. She cannot do anything without his permission. Were I CEO I would remove that childish poop emoji auto-responder but I don't think she has that kind of authority. Facebook has a board of directors, but Zuck is the majority shareholder, so they have to do whatever he wants, so they spent time and money on the metaverse when a normal corporation might have said let's not.

Hamuko 3y ago

I still don't understand the point of ActivityPub. Everyone one wants every social media, blog, news site to implement it. Why? RSS already exists to aggregate all of those into a single place. And having interacted with infosec.exchange, I came to the conclusion that long-form content doesn't mix well with microblogging and that Mastodon is a shit interface for it. I have a completely different software for my RSS feeds with a completely different way of browsing through content that works well for it.

vidarh 3y ago
RSS is one way, ActivityPub two. If your blog makes articles available to ActivityPub, then people can e.g. comment directly on the blog post without having to post a link to it, and others can follow those posts. If you don't like Mastodon, there's Pleroma, Misskey, Calkey and others, as well as apps, or you can find RSS feeds from them if you just want to read, or you can use one of the alternate web frontends.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Mastodon RSS feeds are also crap. None of the posts have any kind of a header, so it's not possible to see what the post is about without opening the post. Real blogs will actually have titles that describe their contents.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Mastodon isn't a blog platform, so that is unsurprising.
ttepasse 3y ago
ActivityPub has its deep origins in the feeds world. Originally people were extending feeds with the Atom ActivityStreams Extensions, in XML, for richer data structures which contain the social activities of persons. The protocol PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) was used for some realtime updating of feed subscribers (Push-then-pull, instead of Pull). Mapping persons or rather their accounts to resources like feeds was the impetus for WebFinger. And for notifying comments or reactions to upstream feed producers there was the Salmon protocol. Together those formats and protocols morphed into the OStatus protocol. With the rise of JSON and with lessons learned from OStatus and pump.io those specs morphed into ActivityPub today. The underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary is still the same, I think, but the mechanism for following and responding now uses dedicated out- and inboxes. I think microblogging and other social network stuff and long-form blog posts are different content, best consumed differently. There is some overlap, of course, but articles do not need shoehorned in. Sometimes people simply undervalue the simple link from a microblog post to the longform article.

lloydatkinson 3y ago

I’ve got a Bluesky invite yet can’t use it because “account creation is temporarily limited”. Seems they’ve totally missed the opportunity of Twitter getting worse over the weekend.

devttyeu 3y ago
The service seems to be under massive load from the influx of users over the weekend, and they've passed 200k users, posting activity is a few times higher vs "the normal" So they probably could get even more users, but I'm guessing it's already sufficiently crazy for the team right now
- CountGeek 3y ago
  They (Bluesky) blew it. They had one job and that was to be ready for this moment and what did they do? Continue with the invite system (which is from Gmail era) and then disable account creations...
  - devttyeu 3y ago
    Eh, it's not the first time Twitter is horribly broken and/or makes an unpopular decision, and it probably won't be the last one.
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now. I already saw a bunch of people opt for Mastodon or Misclick because Bluesky just wasn't an option.
      - galleywest200 3y ago
        > Would've been easier to capture all of the Twitter refugees now With which backend? Scaling from 200k users to possibly hundreds of millions that quickly?
  - 3y ago

purjolok 3y ago

> However, that means interactions, such as user likes, blocks, follows, etc are all public. Au contraire, if network users control their clients, they can "block"¹ and "follow" content at-the client level without stating it publicly. ¹. Not a full block, as the blockee can still read and interact with the blocker's posts.

fareesh 3y ago

Are there any android clients that have push notifications yet?

paulgb 3y ago

I’d push back a bit on the claim that atproto features, particularly decoupling identity from the topology of federation, could have been done as extensions to ActivityPub. It’s a fundamental part of the way information flows in ActivityPub vs atproto. I tried Mastodon for a bit and like the community there, but I found they were very deliberately trying to build a place that wasn’t like twitter: building federated search is frowned-upon; no quote-tweets; extremely low threshold for content warnings. They’re building something different and that’s great, but it’s no surprise that people fleeing twitter want to go to the more twitter-like app.

throwaway290 3y ago

ActivityPub suffers from many of the same issues around public likes and such, no? There should be a decentralized social communication protocol that is more fit to reflect how people communicate: more ephemeral and less of a permanent record. I remember LitePub/Pleroma did some work in that direction, and it's mostly compatible with ActivityPub too I think

xelia 3y ago

I’d say the protocol’s complexity tries to solve a lot of real problems that infest social media today, only time will tell if those solutions are the right ones.

mezobeli 3y ago

Give #nostr a try