7 ms·
Building on ATProto
- inigyou 3mo agoWhat's even the point of publishing anything online any more if you don't hope to become an influencer? The nature of the game has changed, and now does everything possible to discourage it.
- steve_adams_86 3mo agoYou could say the same about publishing offline. We can always do it simply because we enjoy it and one or two others might find some enjoyment or utility in it as well. It doesn't have to matter, it doesn't have to influence anyone. It's fine as a relatively solitary practice like any other.
- verdverm 3mo agoI've moved off social media to zine making and this couldn't resound more with me these days!
- polymer8563 3mo agoThis is the least human take I've seen on this site so far, and I don't even think you're a bot.
- MarceColl 3mo agoI've been building a board game community on ATProto. The idea revolves in trying to build the feeling of local clubs but online, instead of "PLAY NOW" being on the landing page (although you can play now if you want) it's organized around clubs. I also wanted to move away from one game oriented community. I play Go and Chess and I would love clubs to be for mixed games. You can create leagues, or tournaments, etc. As an extension of that I've been building a small language to build games (with a nice time traveling debugger and automatic replays) inspired by Elm. Go and Chess are both built on top of this and you could fork them and modify the rules. Want to code a new Chess variant? Go ahead! Want to code a whole new game you want to try? Go ahead! What I'm very excited with ATProto is that because all games are broadcast on it and each shares a core system of turn-based replays (and review system with branching) software can be built on top to do AI analysis, or a replay view. The idea that my application can be extended without me adding an API is very exciting and very much in the direction I want to take the system (community is the core tenet).
- verdverm 3mo agoHow do you prevent a player from manipulating game state outside of the app view? There is a subgroup in the Atmo working on games, have you found them yet?
- MarceColl 3mo agoI have a referee server handling that. I haven't! I don't even know what Atmo is, tbh.
- verdverm 3mo ago"Atmosphere" (atmo) is the self-given name for the broader developer community around atprotocol https://discourse.atmosphere.community/ https://discourse.atmosphere.community/ has game specific discussions to help you find the people to connect with.
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoThere's a variety of different attestation strategies folks have cooked up! For example this crate has some tools, https://tangled.org/ngerakines.me/atproto-crates/tree/main/crates/atproto-attestation https://tangled.org/ngerakines.me/atproto-crates/tree/main/c... So far they are mostly trusted authority rather than peer systems. But, since each player owns their own PDS state, one could perhaps just hash the previous state they are working off of. That can at least detect if a game is consistent/agreed to by both sides, allow one player to detect the other's tampering.
- inigyou 3mo agoPublish the moves, not the game state?
- verdverm 3mo agoThis would imply the game state is stored in a centralized app view, at which point the general atproto ethos that you can move your data if an app becomes bad is up to the app. I believe the viable solution in a rich permission system is one where the user cannot directly modify a record (as defined by a permission schema for a specific app/type) and can only call methods.
- verdverm 3mo agoThis author speaks to me! > it should just be called “private data” > the resulting design looks very hard to build on > Private and public data are basically identical. ... The permission is world-read Way back before Bluesky decided on their own what permissioned data would look like, when the Atmosphere Private Data WG still thought they had a say in the design, I gave a talk on a ReBAC/Zanzibar style system that aligns with what I think the author is looking for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYKA85oZc8U&t=3730s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYKA85oZc8U&t=3730s I suppose we could still build on and run a fork like mine if enough people wanted a more robust IAM system. There are some fundamental issues that I am not sure are resolvable without building them into the protocol core from the start. I have personally given up because of the leadership and am waiting/pondering the next protocol. Another design constraint I'd like to see is incentivizing apps to be federated and installable at the PDS as well as incentivizing small social over public square modalities. https://github.com/verdverm/atproto https://github.com/verdverm/atproto
- verdverm 3mo agobtw, for historical context, the reason it is called "permissioned" instead of "private" is because there were sufficient people in the atmo that were very opinionated the E2EE is the only true private. It became an exercise in bikeshedding every time "private data" came up. You can find the discussions here: https://discourse.atmosphere.community/tag/private-data/2 https://discourse.atmosphere.community/tag/private-data/2
- citelao 3mo agoMy statement is not super constructive, but yes, I also really liked this article. Local-first, privacy, even the example of managing personal restaurant reviews. I don't have enough meaningful thoughts here to contribute, but you & OP: I hope we can build a federated protocol for sharing stuff again.
- Karrot_Kream 3mo agoI've followed the ATProto space (and seen you around the space) a bunch over time, and honestly for the private data portion of it, I'm quite bearish on the idea of an ATProto shaped thing winning here. I do think "small social" is winning in almost every definition of the word. There's Discords for everything, each non-technical person I know is in 10s of group chats, folks on Instagram or Twitter seek their "communities" on these apps. HN and Reddit are somewhat platforms of yesterday, valuable only for the sheer volume of conversation, not really of any particular use, often used to doomscroll on the toilet or in the supermarket line. But ultimately I don't see why you need a protocol for small social. ActivityPub could do it fine (even though it's largely used as a glorified JSON HTTP API), Matrix or IRCv3 can do it fine, email works and is being used, heck you could even roll a bespoke HTTP or Websocket RPC (de-facto ActivityPub) to fix the problem anyway. ATProto is useful because it's a protocol for socializing In the Large. I think user experience matters for this much more than a protocol. I know Bluesky users want it, but I'm not convinced that an ATProto derived solution is the answer.
- ekosz 3mo agoReading articles like this one, I do think people are trying to put a square peg (their applications) through a round hole (ATProto). The ATProto was designed around all data being public. You write public data to a user's PDS and then any application can read that public data and do something with it. If all data was private (encrypted?) by default then that would defeat half of all of ATProto's goals. Imagine someone starts startup A on-top of the ATProto. They raise some money, get some users, some people love it, but ultimately they die. If the data was private to that service, that data dies with the startup. But if the data is all public future startup B can read that old data and do something with it. As a user that's brings me a ton of utility and comfort trying out new services. If you're trying to built a local-first, mostly private service I just don't think the ATProto is the right tool for the job.
- verdverm 3mo ago> The ATProto was designed around all data being public. I might turn this around to say that ATProto was the square peg trying to fit into the round hole (the vast majority of people want privacy)
- fidotron 3mo agoThe main need is strong authentication, certainly for enabling P2P microblogging type apps. The privacy stuff is covered by Signal etc. anyway, and you could layer that on top if you wanted to, but in a P2P setup privacy is always going to be a bit disappointing as so much metadata is inevitably exposed unless you do crazy stuff like flood fill the network with every message without regard to routing.
- verdverm 3mo agoThe definition of privacy is a spectrum, with what you describe at the most information secops end. Most people are not so worried about metadata leakage (they don't even know what it is, similar to atproto for most bluesky users). What most want is to not be reposted and ratio'd by terminally online people like Blue MAGA did on Bluesky. They also just want to post to their followers or friends, not the world.
- Striving7340 3mo agoATProto and its advocates increasingly sound like all the crypto-based decentralized platforms that failed. The difference is that crypto people actually had reasons to run nodes, they got paid to, while ATProto expects enthusiasts to do so for the love of the game or act like bluesky and have 99% of the "decentralized" platform on a centralized node. It never catches on with application developers because it requires you to already worship the protocol and build around it.
- andunie 3mo agoI don't think anyone ever got paid to "run nodes".
- LoganDark 3mo agoI think what they're talking about is like how bitcoin miners get paid in bitcoin for mining
- pfraze 3mo agoWe don't even get paid to be in this cult, that's how organic it is
- verdverm 3mo agothe cultiness is why I left crypto and atproto, it plagues many great ideas by creating in and out groups around opinions on the right way to do things
- pfraze 3mo ago[flagged]
- verdverm 3mo agoI'm not sure why you always feel the need to attempt to troll me personally on HN like this. Last time you did, HN flagged your reply. We do not have to agree, but we can be civil. For HN reader context, Paul (Bsky CTO) and I have discussed the protocol and permission system IRL and have different visions. My sense it that microblogging platforms like X/Bluesky condition people to discourse in ways online they would not in the physical world, though I have encountered online behaviors manifesting in the real world in recent years. ymmv, I have left them all completely and have a much better mental state since.
- arikrahman 3mo agoI switched from codeberg to tangled, and the transition couldn't have been smoother. Being on the ATmosphere really helps with peace of mind.
- jjuel 3mo agoI love tangled, but there are certain repos I don't want public. So with all ATProto data being public you can never have a private repo which is disappointing.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoThat’s not going to be true for much longer.
- LelouBil 3mo agoSpeaking about Tangled, is there an article somewhere about how they use ATProto ? Like what are in the records and all
- danabramov 3mo agoYou can check yourself using https://pds.ls https://pds.ls, just open any handle there that has Tangled repos
- LelouBil 3mo agoIt's very interesting, thank you very much https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:wshs7t2adsemcrrd4snkeqli/sh.tangled.repo/core https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:wshs7t2adsemcrrd4snkeqli/sh.t...
- vzaliva 3mo agoThe intention is good. I like the reviews idea. Since the author has hit the limitations of ATProto, could ActivityPub be an answer?
- XanSurnamehere 3mo agoI doubt it, since you'd own your data even less as a user than with ATProto. (stuck to a server without the ability to fully move backlinks, data, and identity to another. at least all those things stay the same when you move between PDSes!)
- polymer8563 3mo agoNomadic Identity is an ongoing FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal)
- LelouBil 3mo agoI really think ATProto is decentralized "the right way" for the general public. So I would very much like it to support this kind of thing.
- pfraze 3mo agoLuke's feedback on the permissioned data proposal is pretty interesting. The current proposal has a kind of locational element to permissions, where a record's URI reflects the access control, and I can understand why that would be jarring. I'm talking with the team about whether we think that's something that could change, and what a change like that would cost. We're still in the collecting feedback phase so it's good to hear how it hits people. Regarding his other concern, I would've loved to make atproto a localfirst protocol -- that's the field the atproto team came from -- but we had to pick & choose where to spend our complexity budget. I wouldn't say it's a nonstarter for the ecosystem; you can use something like iroh in conjuction with atproto to share identities -- dial people at their dids or domain names -- and then commit state to the atproto repo once it's ready to leave your local sync mesh. Maybe that sort of thing makes its way into future versions of the protocol. But, engineering often involves trades, and for the v1 that was one of the trades we had to make.
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoa meta-note that i think deserves attention: we never ever seen such a level of engagement around a social media protocol as this. count the number of mastodon protocol discussions that have happened, or dispora, or activitypub. they exist as background. matrix maybe comes close if you look at raw count anywhere, but i'd say has no-where near the visibility, doesn't surface/emerge into the public. atproto is succeeding at being a discussed protocol. at being a socialized social media protocol. and that's just amount of discussion. but what about engagement by the people working on it? nothing like this, not by high level people, discussing in open, talking about protocols. you don't see permissioned data blog serieses coming out about the direction. you don't see the same blogsphere posts. you don't see the CTO coming to chat about it. a huge amount of this is just that Bluesky people really work hard to do the right thing, are humble and trying hard to build good protocols, good network design, trying to build the most distributable most easy to get the content network out there that works the best. i think also though, the ability of the systems / protocols here to be expressed lends itself to being discussable, has good primitives, that make it fruitful and interesting for things like Permissioned Data, or things like the sync 1.1 protocol, to be generally understandable, good primitives, that are discussable. luke's points about local first are really good. this is hard challenge for "Authenticated Transfer Protocol", at protocol, which prioritized a sense of identity and data coupling, that is harder to do in local context, that is harder to distribute without the online verification. great concern, great area to focus on. i look forward to more people experimenting with interesting PDS architectures & seeing what if anything might possibly relax to accommodate.
- jocelyner 3mo ago[dead]
- vinnymac 3mo agoI created a web-of-trust forum built on ATProto. https://caterpilla.rs https://caterpilla.rs Probably one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on, and I largely attribute that to the protocol. I’m particularly interested in the permissioned data spec, but don’t want it to hold me back, so some functionality is on ice, and I went live without it.
- sbt 3mo agoDisclaimer: I have not looked carefully at the permissioned data proposal, but I know atproto reasonably well. Stepping back for a momement, it's clear that permissioned data is driven by real world use-cases (Bluesky needs DMs, Tangled needs private repos, etc). However, I think the synergies with the existing atproto needs to be pretty significant to warrant developing yet another encrypted space spec. We already have various double ratchet protocols, Matrix is having a huge boom. From the point of view of an app developer, does everything need to be handled by atproto, or could we accept that atproto is just for the public stuff?
- LelouBil 3mo agoI would prefer this to be more geared towards things like Private social profiles or shared with specific circles than DMs, which are already served by E2EE. There's no issue in using ATProto to "link" an external service, like Tangled does with it's "knots" which host the git data. All of the social stuff (issues, PRs, comments and so on) is on ATProto, and on ATProto you also have a "repository" object, linking to a "knot" object containing the address of the knot. What's stopping an E2EE DM implementation to use ATProto to point to something like an "accepted matrix server" for all parties, and each having a "matrix identity" ATProto record ? (I don't know about Matrix so idk if this is exactly possible but you get the idea)
- rglullis 3mo ago> A restaurant review is a restaurant review whether I am the only one who ever sees it or it gets shouted to the rooftops. A book review I share with my book club is identical to a book review I share with my wife or publish on my web site. That is only true if you completely ignore social context and relationships between the subject (reviewer), the object (the reviewed) and the audience. The author does mention being autistic, so perhaps he doesn't see it this way, but to me it would be very important to have a system where anything I record for a narrow audience doesn't become available to the public. The thing though is that I've been so conditioned to not trust digital platforms that I never publish anything online unless I am 100% comfortable with having that information available to the public. So, in effect, I'd never put anything on my PDS unless it was meant for public consumption, rendering all this "permissioned data" effectively pointless.
- selfhoster1312 3mo ago> it would be very important to have a system where anything I record for a narrow audience doesn't become available to the public That's precisely what the author is arguing.
- rglullis 3mo agoYeah, sorry, you probably saw my comment before I updated with the last paragraph.