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Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers AT Protocol works like the Web

• rsolva 2y ago
  The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
  • brianolson 2y ago
    If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
  • pfraze 2y ago
    If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications https://atproto.com/guides/applications If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social https://github.com/bluesky-social.
    • rsolva 2y ago
      Thanks, it's been a while since I last looked into it. Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?
      • pfraze 2y ago
        Yep!
        • yewey 2y ago
          and will a bunch of hostile feminists be able to place derogatory "labels" on my self hosted account or put me on nasty and rudely named lists branding me a right winger or a transmysoginist or whatever like they currently do on bluesky?
          • slater 2y ago
            If you are any of those things, it doesn't hurt to warn others! hth
          • stjacobs 2y ago
            [dead]
          • afiori 2y ago
            My understanding is that users and third-parties can offer various moderation services that users can subscribe to. So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow
    • Matl 2y ago
      If mastodon.social shuts down tomorrow, my own instance continues to operate fully independently. For PDS is that true? If bsky.app shuts down, will my PDS be able to function as an independent instance incl the web frontend etc.?
      • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• IoI_xD 2y ago
  > We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad (which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
  • arromatic 2y ago
    You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
    • dbspin 2y ago
      Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At the same time (2005 - 2012) Twitter was an incredible resource for real time news and reactions to what was happening. Without clickbait, commercial promotion or flame (culture) wars. The web pre-agorithm was gradually being subsumed by feed readers like Google Reader, where you'd browse longform articles and blog posts from people you'd found or been recommended by friends. There was no shortage of content. What was absent was 'brainrot', engagement bait, and all the vapid fluff that the 'algorithms' (tweaked entirely and completely to maximise engagement and advertising consumption - not to your preference) provide.
      • lukan 2y ago
        To quote the sibling content: "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm." Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads" I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.
• kristo 2y ago
  I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it. These people are just winging for followers IMO.
  • Aeolun 2y ago
    I mean, I very much desire the ‘not crypto’ part of that. All the rest is optional. Facebook is better than crypto.
  • badgersnake 2y ago
    A social network that’s not controlled by, or potentially controlled by a billionaire. The traits required to become a billionaire are not the traits required to run a social network. This should be obvious by now. Zaphod Beeblebrox had no actual power for a reason.
  • meibo 2y ago
    I think you just described the fediverse. The naysayers want you use to use the fediverse instead of centralized crypto stuff.
  • j_maffe 2y ago
    Bro you literally just described Mastodon.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• Matl 2y ago
  To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
• Matl 2y ago
  > For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
  • dartos 2y ago
    I central authority with escape hatches is okay, I think. One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority. As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
    • Matl 2y ago
      The problem being that once that single authority becomes 'the standard' getting anyone to switch/use any alternative becomes almost impossible There are many alternatives to (ICANN) DNS, but since none have support built into major browsers, they end up being a pain to use, which hampers adoption. The most successful is probably the Onion network and that's far from mainstream.
      • dartos 2y ago
        I don’t think there’s a way to avoid that kind of zipf curve when it comes to “mainstream” as it’s rarely the technical merits that makes something mainstream. The network effect is very strong. It’s usually the force of large, powerful (or early) organizations. Realistically I’m okay with a single overwhelming popular entity as long as I, as an individual, can choose have my alternative.
  • packetlost 2y ago
    It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
• Orthographic 2y ago
  (I've updated this post as I've learned more). Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky). If I understand Bluesky correctly: When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc). You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry. And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me. Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it. My questions are: 1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure? 2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)? 3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
  • steveklabnik 2y ago
    I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention: 1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently. 2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it. 3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
• jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Thanks Paul & all. I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining, https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base. Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
• evbogue 2y ago
  Yes, of course Bluesky is federated. The hosts hold onto your keypairs. The DID:PLC is a substring of your first hash. For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/ https://scuttlebot.io/ Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
  • selecsosi 2y ago
    Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
    • evbogue 2y ago
      Thanks! I'm well. Yes, Scuttlebot's offline-firstness and the friend of a friend replication strategy were ahead of their time.