7 ms·

Nostr and ATProto (2024)

132 points by sph 1y ago

cowpig 1y ago
Bummer that all three bluesky links in the intro are dead links now, and the author's bluesky account appears to be deactivated: https://bsky.app/profile/shreyanjain.net https://bsky.app/profile/shreyanjain.net
- nunobrito 1y ago
  By contrast, NOSTR comments continue to work just fine. Quite telling between centralized vs decentralized environments. NOSTR is indeed more resilient.
  - cowpig 1y ago
    I'm not sure I would necessarily draw that conclusion. If the author intentionally deactivated their Bluesky account, does the fact that he can successfully do that on Bluesky lead to the conclusion that it's less resilient?
    - gdulli 1y ago
      The comment makes so little sense that it could only be intended as a dumb gotcha from someone who thinks they're fighting in some sort of culture war about the Twitter succession. Ignoring is better than encouraging.
      - nunobrito 1y ago
        Welcome to decentralization. That really means that once you publish something, the internet won't forget it. It is OK if you prefer walled gardens, other people prefer the outdoors.
    - jrm4 1y ago
      I think you've nailed a problem with all of these, they would make "deleting your stuff" HARDER. What's stopping the rogue node from saving all your stuff forever? I think "trying to make a thing that can work through rogue or stupid nodes" is just prohibitively harder than "work on making nodes more reliable" (which I absolutely grant is extremely hard.)
      - plq 1y ago
        > What's stopping the rogue node from saving all your stuff forever? Nothing. You must always have this in mind when posting online: It's impossible to ensure that data is deleted and gone forever.
        jrm4 1y ago
        Right, I mean, I was asking rhetorically. Taking this idea further -- this is the sort of thing that really makes me consider whether or not ATProto might be literally the worst idea in all of social media. Which is to say "can track you just as intrusively as any private service, but now your history is cryptographically signable and even EASIER to share and move everywhere"
      - nunobrito 1y ago
        The difference is a single point of failure (centralization) vs multiple copies of the same posts all over the internet (decentralization). Didn't even took a year to see where the texts are still readable today.
  - danabramov 1y ago
    The author wanted to take down their account (to take a break) so this is actually working as designed. The takedown was issued from the author’s repository (which they control), and the downstream app server acknowledged the request.
jrm4 1y ago
Been thinking about this lately and ultimately, I'm thinking that -- taking into account what we know about "federation" -- both the Nostr and ATProto models are generally pointless because they attack a problem with more complicated tech that must be solved with OR without that tech anyway. Someone said it really well; if your solution relies on "maybe people will learn about or do new complex thing X" it's just not likely to take off. But for the sake of argument, let's try going down that road for this. Along the way you'll be communicating with people, building trust, etc etc. But now YOU'VE ALREADY DONE THE THING YOU'RE trying to optimize for, and for which we already have an extremely resilient model, aka Mastodon-which-is-very-analogous-to-email. At that point, just make a mastodon server or servers with with those people. It just feels like the smart bet is doing that analogously to email, a model that definitely works, then trying to do the same thing PLUS invent a whole new idea of "take everything with you" at the user level.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  I've been doing some exploratory implementation using ATProto and the Bluesky server. It strikes me as a bit over engineered, but I'd take that over Ruby on Rails and Node.js, especially if it needs to turn into a product.
- danabramov 1y ago
  AT model is very different from Mastodon or email. It’s much closer spiritually to RSS and plain old web. Mastodon is “many copies of the same app emailing each other”. There’s no global shared view of the network so you can’t have features like globally accurate like counts, shared identity, global search, algorithmic feeds across instances, etc. On the other hand, in AT, the idea is just that apps aggregate information from different repos. So each application’s server has information aggregated from the entire network. Everybody sees the same consistent information; apps exist to separate experiences rather than communities. For example, Tangled (https://tangled.org https://tangled.org) and Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub) are AT apps, but they’re nothing similar to “mastodon servers”. These are complete apps that implement different experiences but on the same global network. Crucially, normal people don’t need to “buy into” the protocol stuff with AT. Most Bluesky users don’t know what AT is and don’t care about it; they’re just using the app. There’s interesting crossovers you can do (each AT app sees each other AT app’s public data) which do bleed into the user experience (eg my Tangled avatar is actually populated from Bluesky) but overall apps compete on their merit with centralized apps. Hope that makes sense. See https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/ for a longer article I wrote about AT with visual explanations.
est 1y ago
nostr started as very simple but soon there are like millions of NIPs.
- hugs 1y ago
  that is the best and worst aspect or nostr. it is a very interesting, semi-chaotic box of new toys to play with. reminds me of the early web. (the second best/worst aspect of nostr is key rotation.)
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    I haven't checked in on it in a couple years, is there mechanism for transferring an identity to a new key pair? I have thought Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI [0]) is the best solution to this but don't know if there's an implementation of it anywhere [0] https://keri.one/keri-resources/ https://keri.one/keri-resources/
hugs 1y ago
from an an average developer perspective, nostr is interesting because it's "just" a digitally signed json data structure sent over a websocket. reading the spec [1] for creating a simple nostr client (aka "nip-1"), my average developer brains thinks: i could do that. i don't get that same feeling when reading atproto or activitypub docs. ultimately, there's a reason why all these protocols get complicated at scale, but in the simple case, nostr is very easy to make a client for and start playing with. nostr feels like a good example case for gall's law: "a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
- danabramov 1y ago
  What questions do you have about AT? I agree its docs are mostly “bad” and hard to understand. I find the actual tech approachable so happy to answer more concrete questions. Tools like http://pdsls.dev http://pdsls.dev in particular can be helpful to see how things fit together.
  - hugs 1y ago
    i think it really is as simple as boiling it down into a doc that looks like nip-1 and saying, "this is the absolute minimum amount you need to understand and implement to start sending messages on an AT-based network." -- not from a user perspective, but from an average developer perspective. i know eventually i'd need to implement a ton more than the absolute bare minimum, but my gut-feeling "average developer brain" says nostr's absolute minimum feels smaller that AT's absolute minimum. i guess i'm looking for an AT doc for devs that shows the absolute minimum for creating a client that is equally approachable as NIP-1.
    - danabramov 1y ago
      Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll see if I can write something in that spirit later.
      - 1y ago
codazoda 1y ago
> The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications. I must not be the target audience for this older article. Several paragraphs in, I had no idea what this was about. That’s how ATProto describes itself.
- danabramov 1y ago
  I wrote an intro to AT that should be broadly accessible and states the problems before the solutions. You might find it helpful: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/
vivzkestrel 1y ago
whats with the sudden upsurge in interest in ATProto related stuff on HN? Not that I am complaining. I am glad to see something else take AI's spot but just curious. Last month or so has been very busy with something or the other ATProto related
- hugs 1y ago
  just a theory, but as atproto matures, there are now other example projects using the protocol for other things besides "distributed twitter clone". for example, tangled was talked about yesterday. [1] and that probably came up because more people are wondering about the future of github as it becomes more integrated into microsoft. as things become more centralized, interest in decentralization goes up. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899
  - danabramov 1y ago
    I think partially it's because momentum is picking up in the AT ecosystem. Since all data lives in a single conceptual space, you start seeing community services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ (backlinks without running your own index), https://slices.network/ https://slices.network/ (indexes data you want and gives you a GraphQL/REST endpoint), independent relays (https://atproto.africa/ https://atproto.africa/), and so on. To give you an example, https://slices-teal-relay.bigmoves.deno.net/ https://slices-teal-relay.bigmoves.deno.net/ is a demo of Slices showing the latest teal.fm records (like Last.fm scrobbles). The thing is, teal.fm is not even launched as an app. It's just its developers already listen to music through it, the records get created in their repos, and so any other developer can aggregate their records and display them. It's a web of realtime hyperlinked JSON created by different apps. That's exciting.
    - xeonmc 1y ago
      I wonder if one could perhaps create an RSS reader app by piggybacking on ATProto purely for broadcasting change events, with the feed themselves still located at their traditional address? Basically reviving Google Reader on ATProto infra.
dpc_01234 1y ago
There's also: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZnXomX2juRjxj9K1LuF https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZn...
kragen 1y ago
Are a lot of people using Nostr now? I frequently get recommendations from people to look at stuff on Bluesky, Twitter, or Mastodon, but I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 is the first time I've seen anything posted on Nostr.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  Every time I've seen a nostr trending feed it's been 100% cryptocurrency chat, so I assume it's only popular within those circles
  - DoctorOW 1y ago
    Every post on alternative social networks I've tried is mainly advertisements for the platform you've already joined. Nostr as a whole isn't crypto, but this large instance seems intrinsically linked to Bitcoin, every account gets a wallet built-in[1]. [1]: https://primal.net/premium https://primal.net/premium

132 points by sph 1y ago

Bummer that all three bluesky links in the intro are dead links now, and the author's bluesky account appears to be deactivated: https://bsky.app/profile/shreyanjain.net https://bsky.app/profile/shreyanjain.net

nunobrito 1y ago
By contrast, NOSTR comments continue to work just fine. Quite telling between centralized vs decentralized environments. NOSTR is indeed more resilient.
- cowpig 1y ago
  I'm not sure I would necessarily draw that conclusion. If the author intentionally deactivated their Bluesky account, does the fact that he can successfully do that on Bluesky lead to the conclusion that it's less resilient?
  - gdulli 1y ago
    The comment makes so little sense that it could only be intended as a dumb gotcha from someone who thinks they're fighting in some sort of culture war about the Twitter succession. Ignoring is better than encouraging.
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      Welcome to decentralization. That really means that once you publish something, the internet won't forget it. It is OK if you prefer walled gardens, other people prefer the outdoors.
  - jrm4 1y ago
    I think you've nailed a problem with all of these, they would make "deleting your stuff" HARDER. What's stopping the rogue node from saving all your stuff forever? I think "trying to make a thing that can work through rogue or stupid nodes" is just prohibitively harder than "work on making nodes more reliable" (which I absolutely grant is extremely hard.)
    - plq 1y ago
      > What's stopping the rogue node from saving all your stuff forever? Nothing. You must always have this in mind when posting online: It's impossible to ensure that data is deleted and gone forever.
      - jrm4 1y ago
        Right, I mean, I was asking rhetorically. Taking this idea further -- this is the sort of thing that really makes me consider whether or not ATProto might be literally the worst idea in all of social media. Which is to say "can track you just as intrusively as any private service, but now your history is cryptographically signable and even EASIER to share and move everywhere"
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      The difference is a single point of failure (centralization) vs multiple copies of the same posts all over the internet (decentralization). Didn't even took a year to see where the texts are still readable today.
- danabramov 1y ago
  The author wanted to take down their account (to take a break) so this is actually working as designed. The takedown was issued from the author’s repository (which they control), and the downstream app server acknowledged the request.

jrm4 1y ago

Been thinking about this lately and ultimately, I'm thinking that -- taking into account what we know about "federation" -- both the Nostr and ATProto models are generally pointless because they attack a problem with more complicated tech that must be solved with OR without that tech anyway. Someone said it really well; if your solution relies on "maybe people will learn about or do new complex thing X" it's just not likely to take off. But for the sake of argument, let's try going down that road for this. Along the way you'll be communicating with people, building trust, etc etc. But now YOU'VE ALREADY DONE THE THING YOU'RE trying to optimize for, and for which we already have an extremely resilient model, aka Mastodon-which-is-very-analogous-to-email. At that point, just make a mastodon server or servers with with those people. It just feels like the smart bet is doing that analogously to email, a model that definitely works, then trying to do the same thing PLUS invent a whole new idea of "take everything with you" at the user level.

Zigurd 1y ago
I've been doing some exploratory implementation using ATProto and the Bluesky server. It strikes me as a bit over engineered, but I'd take that over Ruby on Rails and Node.js, especially if it needs to turn into a product.
danabramov 1y ago
AT model is very different from Mastodon or email. It’s much closer spiritually to RSS and plain old web. Mastodon is “many copies of the same app emailing each other”. There’s no global shared view of the network so you can’t have features like globally accurate like counts, shared identity, global search, algorithmic feeds across instances, etc. On the other hand, in AT, the idea is just that apps aggregate information from different repos. So each application’s server has information aggregated from the entire network. Everybody sees the same consistent information; apps exist to separate experiences rather than communities. For example, Tangled (https://tangled.org https://tangled.org) and Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub) are AT apps, but they’re nothing similar to “mastodon servers”. These are complete apps that implement different experiences but on the same global network. Crucially, normal people don’t need to “buy into” the protocol stuff with AT. Most Bluesky users don’t know what AT is and don’t care about it; they’re just using the app. There’s interesting crossovers you can do (each AT app sees each other AT app’s public data) which do bleed into the user experience (eg my Tangled avatar is actually populated from Bluesky) but overall apps compete on their merit with centralized apps. Hope that makes sense. See https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/ for a longer article I wrote about AT with visual explanations.

est 1y ago

nostr started as very simple but soon there are like millions of NIPs.

hugs 1y ago
that is the best and worst aspect or nostr. it is a very interesting, semi-chaotic box of new toys to play with. reminds me of the early web. (the second best/worst aspect of nostr is key rotation.)
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  I haven't checked in on it in a couple years, is there mechanism for transferring an identity to a new key pair? I have thought Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI [0]) is the best solution to this but don't know if there's an implementation of it anywhere [0] https://keri.one/keri-resources/ https://keri.one/keri-resources/

hugs 1y ago

from an an average developer perspective, nostr is interesting because it's "just" a digitally signed json data structure sent over a websocket. reading the spec [1] for creating a simple nostr client (aka "nip-1"), my average developer brains thinks: i could do that. i don't get that same feeling when reading atproto or activitypub docs. ultimately, there's a reason why all these protocols get complicated at scale, but in the simple case, nostr is very easy to make a client for and start playing with. nostr feels like a good example case for gall's law: "a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md

danabramov 1y ago
What questions do you have about AT? I agree its docs are mostly “bad” and hard to understand. I find the actual tech approachable so happy to answer more concrete questions. Tools like http://pdsls.dev http://pdsls.dev in particular can be helpful to see how things fit together.
- hugs 1y ago
  i think it really is as simple as boiling it down into a doc that looks like nip-1 and saying, "this is the absolute minimum amount you need to understand and implement to start sending messages on an AT-based network." -- not from a user perspective, but from an average developer perspective. i know eventually i'd need to implement a ton more than the absolute bare minimum, but my gut-feeling "average developer brain" says nostr's absolute minimum feels smaller that AT's absolute minimum. i guess i'm looking for an AT doc for devs that shows the absolute minimum for creating a client that is equally approachable as NIP-1.
  - danabramov 1y ago
    Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll see if I can write something in that spirit later.
    - 1y ago

codazoda 1y ago

> The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications. I must not be the target audience for this older article. Several paragraphs in, I had no idea what this was about. That’s how ATProto describes itself.

danabramov 1y ago
I wrote an intro to AT that should be broadly accessible and states the problems before the solutions. You might find it helpful: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/

vivzkestrel 1y ago

whats with the sudden upsurge in interest in ATProto related stuff on HN? Not that I am complaining. I am glad to see something else take AI's spot but just curious. Last month or so has been very busy with something or the other ATProto related

hugs 1y ago
just a theory, but as atproto matures, there are now other example projects using the protocol for other things besides "distributed twitter clone". for example, tangled was talked about yesterday. [1] and that probably came up because more people are wondering about the future of github as it becomes more integrated into microsoft. as things become more centralized, interest in decentralization goes up. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899
- danabramov 1y ago
  I think partially it's because momentum is picking up in the AT ecosystem. Since all data lives in a single conceptual space, you start seeing community services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ (backlinks without running your own index), https://slices.network/ https://slices.network/ (indexes data you want and gives you a GraphQL/REST endpoint), independent relays (https://atproto.africa/ https://atproto.africa/), and so on. To give you an example, https://slices-teal-relay.bigmoves.deno.net/ https://slices-teal-relay.bigmoves.deno.net/ is a demo of Slices showing the latest teal.fm records (like Last.fm scrobbles). The thing is, teal.fm is not even launched as an app. It's just its developers already listen to music through it, the records get created in their repos, and so any other developer can aggregate their records and display them. It's a web of realtime hyperlinked JSON created by different apps. That's exciting.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    I wonder if one could perhaps create an RSS reader app by piggybacking on ATProto purely for broadcasting change events, with the feed themselves still located at their traditional address? Basically reviving Google Reader on ATProto infra.

dpc_01234 1y ago

There's also: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZnXomX2juRjxj9K1LuF https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZn...

kragen 1y ago

Are a lot of people using Nostr now? I frequently get recommendations from people to look at stuff on Bluesky, Twitter, or Mastodon, but I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 is the first time I've seen anything posted on Nostr.

kalleboo 1y ago
Every time I've seen a nostr trending feed it's been 100% cryptocurrency chat, so I assume it's only popular within those circles
- DoctorOW 1y ago
  Every post on alternative social networks I've tried is mainly advertisements for the platform you've already joined. Nostr as a whole isn't crypto, but this large instance seems intrinsically linked to Bitcoin, every account gets a wallet built-in[1]. [1]: https://primal.net/premium https://primal.net/premium