5 ms·

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are

by 1dom 4mo ago

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly. I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto specifically at the expense of ActivityPub (and RSS, a bit). I think you lower yourself by doing this: 1. it forces you to omit and contort the interesting technical truths about ATProto and Activitypub, like Relays and their pros/cons for ATProto and account migrations and pros/cons for ActivityPub 2. it creates unnecessary conflict and criticism and seems unnecessarily divisive for 2 platforms solving problems in such a similar space It's also just seems a bit silly: why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Sorry if this is overly harsh or I've misunderstood, but it gives me a strong vibe that it was motivated by disdain and frustration towards ActivityPub and ActivityPub users rather than wanting to legitimately inform the world about ActivityPub. I did enjoy the diagrams and the explainers though! I just felt like the subtle digs and pops at activitypub were an unnecessary distraction.

danabramov 4mo ago
I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization. My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader instances?" which I think illustrates its absurdity. I genuinely do think that the two pictures I provide close to the end clear this up in a way a lot of early atproto/ActivityPub discussions completely gloss over. Re: Relays, I wrote here on why I didn't include them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600963. They're kind of incidental perf optimizations rather than essential to the model. In the post, I wanted to focus on the model.
- JasonSage 4mo ago
  From my perspective, I care about the centralization/decentralization aspect a lot, and if I'm coming into the discussion with a much better understanding of the Mastodon side then _of course_ I'm going to ask about the instances--that's the vocabulary I'm going to use to try to probe for flaws and gaps. It's not necessarily that it's the instances specifically I care about, or that I'm somehow technically misguided. What I hoped to read in the article is how we approach topics like centralization, censorship, moderation, data ownership--and with a technical lens. But I feel like all I got was "here's why instances are the wrong vocabulary" without substantively talking about the part I personally care about and want to marry the technical understanding with. Maybe I just read too shallowly and need to sit with it.
  - danabramov 4mo ago
    I see! That's a huge topic by itself since you're raising a lot of questions. Maybe this could be a different article. My aim with this one was just to clarify the network topology because it is a prerequisite to having the other discussion, and too often that prerequisite is not there. If you ask a list of specific questions, that would help a lot. I might be able to write something or reply inline here.
    - JasonSage 4mo ago
      I appreciate that a lot! The article has a deliberate and explicit scope, and covers it well. I'm hoping that perhaps my personal perspective shades why "instances" comes up, or why the reaction on HN seems to include the wider scope than the article itself covers.
    - Vinnl 4mo ago
      I felt the same: when folks ask this question they might not be using the correct terminology, but what they actually want to know is how many different PDSes (that's what you mean by "atproto hostings", right?) there are in a typical feed.
      - 4mo ago
cavoirom 4mo ago
I found the distinction and comparison about Mastodon and ATProto are necessary. The fediverse model is easier to understand given existing social networks. ATProto is a novel concept that give users data sovereign and also the scalability of the centralized social networks.
- 1dom 4mo ago
  I agree, a comparison and distinction is helpful, maybe even necessary. But I felt the author's bias came across a bit too strong in places and was a little distracting. Still interesting stuff though!
doublepg23 4mo ago
Perhaps ATProto vs. ActivityPub will been seen as the Fediverse's East-West Schism. Instead of decrees over the "filioque" we get blog posts about the definition of "federation" where both parties talk past each other.
- riffraff 4mo ago
  The good thing is bridgy fed/a new social exists, and you can trivially bridge atmosphere and fediverse today. The east-west schism took way longer to allow some reconciliation :)
embedding-shape 4mo ago
> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its URL as a 'name'". The blog post is specifically for that context I think. It's less about trying to hide around the issue, and more reframing how you see the concepts, as people start to associate words with concepts and structures. So when people talk about "decentralized social media", lots of people think about ActivityPub, which typically (always?) has a kind of federated architecture, and the instance is one of those nodes in the network. When these people see ATProto, instinctively (and perhaps rightly so) they literally ask "But why is there only one Bluesky instance that people join?" as those concepts map close to what they know. Overall I think the post is a good and useful addition to the discourse, with perhaps not a completely novel perspective, but posted publicly for future reference when this inevitably gets asks again sometime in the future, specifically for the people who have these previous associations already formed in their head.
- echelon 4mo ago
  All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a common platform. 3rd party tools and extensions can filter content, provide trust graphs, interest graphs, etc. You can just slurp up and score whatever might interest you. Your agent or algorithm might do pre-filtering against your preferred heuristics to downsample to relevancy. You could write any client for this in any shape or form. Completely different look and feel for different people and interests / focuses.
  - danabramov 4mo ago
    The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps. Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and others.

by 1dom 4mo ago

danabramov 4mo ago

I'm being a bit cheeky in the article's tone but I am fairly confident from discussions in the past that "But where are Bluesky instances?" is a common question which usually demonstrates a misunderstanding of the architecture where "having instances of an app" is seen as a measure of decentralization. My article was an attempt to dig at this specific misunderstanding by comparing it to "But where are Google Reader instances?" which I think illustrates its absurdity. I genuinely do think that the two pictures I provide close to the end clear this up in a way a lot of early atproto/ActivityPub discussions completely gloss over. Re: Relays, I wrote here on why I didn't include them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600963. They're kind of incidental perf optimizations rather than essential to the model. In the post, I wanted to focus on the model.

JasonSage 4mo ago
From my perspective, I care about the centralization/decentralization aspect a lot, and if I'm coming into the discussion with a much better understanding of the Mastodon side then _of course_ I'm going to ask about the instances--that's the vocabulary I'm going to use to try to probe for flaws and gaps. It's not necessarily that it's the instances specifically I care about, or that I'm somehow technically misguided. What I hoped to read in the article is how we approach topics like centralization, censorship, moderation, data ownership--and with a technical lens. But I feel like all I got was "here's why instances are the wrong vocabulary" without substantively talking about the part I personally care about and want to marry the technical understanding with. Maybe I just read too shallowly and need to sit with it.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  I see! That's a huge topic by itself since you're raising a lot of questions. Maybe this could be a different article. My aim with this one was just to clarify the network topology because it is a prerequisite to having the other discussion, and too often that prerequisite is not there. If you ask a list of specific questions, that would help a lot. I might be able to write something or reply inline here.
  - JasonSage 4mo ago
    I appreciate that a lot! The article has a deliberate and explicit scope, and covers it well. I'm hoping that perhaps my personal perspective shades why "instances" comes up, or why the reaction on HN seems to include the wider scope than the article itself covers.
  - Vinnl 4mo ago
    I felt the same: when folks ask this question they might not be using the correct terminology, but what they actually want to know is how many different PDSes (that's what you mean by "atproto hostings", right?) there are in a typical feed.
    - 4mo ago

cavoirom 4mo ago

I found the distinction and comparison about Mastodon and ATProto are necessary. The fediverse model is easier to understand given existing social networks. ATProto is a novel concept that give users data sovereign and also the scalability of the centralized social networks.

1dom 4mo ago
I agree, a comparison and distinction is helpful, maybe even necessary. But I felt the author's bias came across a bit too strong in places and was a little distracting. Still interesting stuff though!

doublepg23 4mo ago

Perhaps ATProto vs. ActivityPub will been seen as the Fediverse's East-West Schism. Instead of decrees over the "filioque" we get blog posts about the definition of "federation" where both parties talk past each other.

riffraff 4mo ago
The good thing is bridgy fed/a new social exists, and you can trivially bridge atmosphere and fediverse today. The east-west schism took way longer to allow some reconciliation :)

embedding-shape 4mo ago

> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers? Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its URL as a 'name'". The blog post is specifically for that context I think. It's less about trying to hide around the issue, and more reframing how you see the concepts, as people start to associate words with concepts and structures. So when people talk about "decentralized social media", lots of people think about ActivityPub, which typically (always?) has a kind of federated architecture, and the instance is one of those nodes in the network. When these people see ATProto, instinctively (and perhaps rightly so) they literally ask "But why is there only one Bluesky instance that people join?" as those concepts map close to what they know. Overall I think the post is a good and useful addition to the discourse, with perhaps not a completely novel perspective, but posted publicly for future reference when this inevitably gets asks again sometime in the future, specifically for the people who have these previous associations already formed in their head.

echelon 4mo ago
All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media. Swarms of content. Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution. Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability. Immutability in general. Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten). Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts. You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a common platform. 3rd party tools and extensions can filter content, provide trust graphs, interest graphs, etc. You can just slurp up and score whatever might interest you. Your agent or algorithm might do pre-filtering against your preferred heuristics to downsample to relevancy. You could write any client for this in any shape or form. Completely different look and feel for different people and interests / focuses.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  The problem with client P2P is there’s no aggregation at scale. You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. Not to speak of recommendations, search, and all other basic things people expect from social apps. Atproto is an attempt to engage with the problem space in a way that hits the baseline UX of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s worth noting atproto designers come partially from P2P lineage. Some worked on Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and others.