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I'm fascinated by the idea of at://. But besides even whether it would ever make business sense, I worry about basic things like: - If you own your data, can'

I'm fascinated by the idea of at://. But besides even whether it would ever make business sense, I worry about basic things like: - If you own your data, can't you change it at any time? I can make perfectly reasonable posts that lots of people agree with, then change it to vile stuff. Even if existing sites at the time store hashes and prevent updates, a new site loading the post will never know it was once different. - How are things like upvotes tracked? If every upvote is an object stored by the person upvoting, how do you even find the people upvoting? And doesn't it become trivial to create tons of fake profiles upvoting everything you do? - And how is moderation/spam even handled? Now if sites are supposed to be showing replies to posts made from everyone across any platform, not just their own, how is moderation handled when you don't know anything about these accounts making replies? I just don't understand how all of the necessary work around transparency, accountability, moderation, and spam can be done in a world where users store their own data, and therefore can fake their own data.

reactordev 1y ago
Why not publish the changes too? The data of the resulting json can include whatever you wish. That data is your data. So if an app developer wants to include the history of changes, that would be the place to do it. Or link to previous at:// addresses for it. Walk it back like a linked list. As for the identity moderation part, if you read up about DID, it tells you how to know who they are and you can block them or do whatever you need to do. The point isn’t that this is some blockchain, it’s just a federated method to share data when you own the data. Poison well attacks aside. In the end, it’s a way to say this person, generated this data, at this location, in case you’re interested. If you care about the things you mentioned, you might not be interested at all.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > Why not publish the changes too? Because you are being adversarial and trying to trick people. > if you read up about DID, it tells you how to know who they are But it doesn't tell you're they're not a spammer. I don't see anything about reputation. > in case you’re interested But that's the point. You're interested in legitimate upvotes to try to find useful content. You're not interested in spam upvotes. In a decentralized world, how does anyone tell the difference?
  - verdverm 1y ago
    > I don't see anything about reputation That's a hard problem obviously. In ATProto, we are using labelers for verification, anyone can run and validate anyone, apps can decide which verifiers they trust. Bluesky runs their own, let's the NYTs verify their contributors, and has allowed one well known, independent user who's been verifying people. These all show a badge in the app
verdverm 1y ago
> then change it to vile stuff There is a hash that is stored with the record, and a real permalink is called a "strongRef". Dan did not mention this in his permalink section, hopefully he reads this and adds some more words to his post. You normally store a strongRef and can then detect when a record content no longer matches what you expect. Bluesky does not support edits specifically for the reason you mention, adversarial edits, i.e. the social part is hard, the technical not so much. I wrote up some experiments with record editing and permalink I did: permalinks: https://verdverm.com/blog/permalinks-and-editing-on-whitewind https://verdverm.com/blog/permalinks-and-editing-on-whitewin... editing: https://verdverm.com/blog/adding-record-editing-with-history-to-atprotocol https://verdverm.com/blog/adding-record-editing-with-history... > How are things like upvotes tracked? You crawl the network to look for pointers and do something like: https://jazco.dev/2024/04/20/roaring-bitmaps/ https://jazco.dev/2024/04/20/roaring-bitmaps/ > And how is moderation/spam even handled? It's way cooler than any other system out there: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati... People are talking of turning both labelers and feedgens into DAGs (i.e. how do we combine each and use set operations to make interesting combinations) > can fake their own data Fake can be seen subjectively here, if it's my data and I can put anything I want in there, what is fake about it? If it's about changes, the CID hash is how we know if a record has been altered
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Thank you, that's very helpful. I'm still left wondering how you prevent the problem of somebody creating hundreds of accounts to upvote all their own posts. I see how the labelers work for content, but I don't see anything about user reputation. So I'm still struggling to understand what the protections are against bots? I'm struggling to understand how upvote/recommendation numbers can be trusted at all, when you want to see what's liked across the whole network and not just by your friends, but without it all being spam likes. >> can fake their own data > Fake can be seen subjectively here, if it's my data and I can put anything I want in there, what is fake about it? So it seems like the hashes (cid) are a big help, thank you. Is there anything preventing you from backdating things? Making it look like you said something or posted a photo of something last month that you didn't actually until just now? Because that seems like the other big category of content faking.

reactordev 1y ago

Why not publish the changes too? The data of the resulting json can include whatever you wish. That data is your data. So if an app developer wants to include the history of changes, that would be the place to do it. Or link to previous at:// addresses for it. Walk it back like a linked list. As for the identity moderation part, if you read up about DID, it tells you how to know who they are and you can block them or do whatever you need to do. The point isn’t that this is some blockchain, it’s just a federated method to share data when you own the data. Poison well attacks aside. In the end, it’s a way to say this person, generated this data, at this location, in case you’re interested. If you care about the things you mentioned, you might not be interested at all.

crazygringo 1y ago
> Why not publish the changes too? Because you are being adversarial and trying to trick people. > if you read up about DID, it tells you how to know who they are But it doesn't tell you're they're not a spammer. I don't see anything about reputation. > in case you’re interested But that's the point. You're interested in legitimate upvotes to try to find useful content. You're not interested in spam upvotes. In a decentralized world, how does anyone tell the difference?
- verdverm 1y ago
  > I don't see anything about reputation That's a hard problem obviously. In ATProto, we are using labelers for verification, anyone can run and validate anyone, apps can decide which verifiers they trust. Bluesky runs their own, let's the NYTs verify their contributors, and has allowed one well known, independent user who's been verifying people. These all show a badge in the app

verdverm 1y ago

> then change it to vile stuff There is a hash that is stored with the record, and a real permalink is called a "strongRef". Dan did not mention this in his permalink section, hopefully he reads this and adds some more words to his post. You normally store a strongRef and can then detect when a record content no longer matches what you expect. Bluesky does not support edits specifically for the reason you mention, adversarial edits, i.e. the social part is hard, the technical not so much. I wrote up some experiments with record editing and permalink I did: permalinks: https://verdverm.com/blog/permalinks-and-editing-on-whitewind https://verdverm.com/blog/permalinks-and-editing-on-whitewin... editing: https://verdverm.com/blog/adding-record-editing-with-history-to-atprotocol https://verdverm.com/blog/adding-record-editing-with-history... > How are things like upvotes tracked? You crawl the network to look for pointers and do something like: https://jazco.dev/2024/04/20/roaring-bitmaps/ https://jazco.dev/2024/04/20/roaring-bitmaps/ > And how is moderation/spam even handled? It's way cooler than any other system out there: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati... People are talking of turning both labelers and feedgens into DAGs (i.e. how do we combine each and use set operations to make interesting combinations) > can fake their own data Fake can be seen subjectively here, if it's my data and I can put anything I want in there, what is fake about it? If it's about changes, the CID hash is how we know if a record has been altered

crazygringo 1y ago
Thank you, that's very helpful. I'm still left wondering how you prevent the problem of somebody creating hundreds of accounts to upvote all their own posts. I see how the labelers work for content, but I don't see anything about user reputation. So I'm still struggling to understand what the protections are against bots? I'm struggling to understand how upvote/recommendation numbers can be trusted at all, when you want to see what's liked across the whole network and not just by your friends, but without it all being spam likes. >> can fake their own data > Fake can be seen subjectively here, if it's my data and I can put anything I want in there, what is fake about it? So it seems like the hashes (cid) are a big help, thank you. Is there anything preventing you from backdating things? Making it look like you said something or posted a photo of something last month that you didn't actually until just now? Because that seems like the other big category of content faking.