3 ms·

> 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

> 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.
  - fabrice_d 4mo ago
    > You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. And maybe that's a good thing.
    - msla 4mo ago
      Technical problems give way to philosophical differences but the over-arching problem is that the people behind ATProto really want to make a social media ecosystem that attracts lots of average people who will refuse to understand that the solution you're giving them can't do things Twitter could do back before Musk bought it. People get angry enough at Bluesky not having an edit button, and it's at least possible to talk about how editing can be abused.
      - fabrice_d 4mo ago
        You can switch to the AppView from https://mu.social/ https://mu.social/ and you'll get editing working.
        jimbobthrowawy 4mo ago
        mu.social is a "client". An "AppView" is the API server that most clients connect to that aggregates data from the network and serves it in a more useful way. mu.social still uses bluesky's AppView (api.bsky.app). The name is confusing. I thought clients were appviews myself for a while.

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.
- fabrice_d 4mo ago
  > You can’t even accurately calculate things like post likes. And maybe that's a good thing.
  - msla 4mo ago
    Technical problems give way to philosophical differences but the over-arching problem is that the people behind ATProto really want to make a social media ecosystem that attracts lots of average people who will refuse to understand that the solution you're giving them can't do things Twitter could do back before Musk bought it. People get angry enough at Bluesky not having an edit button, and it's at least possible to talk about how editing can be abused.
    - fabrice_d 4mo ago
      You can switch to the AppView from https://mu.social/ https://mu.social/ and you'll get editing working.
      - jimbobthrowawy 4mo ago
        mu.social is a "client". An "AppView" is the API server that most clients connect to that aggregates data from the network and serves it in a more useful way. mu.social still uses bluesky's AppView (api.bsky.app). The name is confusing. I thought clients were appviews myself for a while.