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The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.

by evbogue 2mo ago

jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
my experience with most more-distributed internet-systems is: it's so distributed it's hard to get. here you have Authenticated Transfer Protocol. you can get data very easily. via any of a huge range of means & sources! we have some examples ones today (direct from a pds, relay, jetstream, appview, new protocols like Atom (atproto over MoQ), new systems like hubble). and in most cases, you can tell that it's from a certain account! i agree with you, i just think the bases are mostly covered here. i also think that it's a fascinating topic. and yes it matters. an "Atproto for Distributed Systems Engineers" probably should know why atproto has such great addressable data (not hash based though), signed key crypto. but also, if you dig in, you'll find quickly it has a great story here. (although your https://anproto.com/ https://anproto.com/ indicates some clear disagreement about sufficiency.) and the higher level what it is and how it works here is a much more useful practical guide, for getting started with. there's a lot of people who focus on distributed, on what that means. what seems a lot missing though is that atproto is already nicely a nicely authenticated (crypto) transfer protocol. and that it's probably the best actually distributed, in terms of data availability, in terms of people trying to get your data.
- evbogue 2mo ago
  Yah atproto auths moving data from the pds to the index, similar to like https, but they missed authenticated distributed data storage somewhere along the way. Why is that, I wonder?
  - skybrian 2mo ago
    Not quite sure what you're getting at with "authenticated distributed data," but records that came from a PDS are signed by the PDS. The signatures are there to enable untrusted mirrors to be used for distribution. There's a downside: you can't really disavow a post. But that doesn't seem to be the purpose of the signatures? It's more of an unfortunate side-effect. In practice, this can be annoying and there are alternatives for people who write software that doesn't bother to check signatures. Relying on https alone means you kinda have to get the data from the original website to know that it's authentic, and you can't prove it to anyone else other than by sending them the URL so they can check for themselves. (I mean, technically. In practice, people will trust quotes or screenshots even though they can be faked.)
    - evbogue 2mo ago
      Yah it clearly has always done this, but why doesn't it support multi-PDS replication? But you're right that the screenshot proto and the copy and paste proto are quite successful as a distributed system these days.
      - jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
        There's nothing stopping multi-PDS replication right now. It would work fine. No one would know that content is available elsewhere, is kind of the main chicken-and-egg problem. Hubble is starting to come online, which is a network cache. With excellent storage and runtime characteristics, cheap to run. I'm not sure if this is in the same https://microcosm.blue https://microcosm.blue banner-head, but the same developer, as another incredibly fantastic network service that's open for use, that's open source, that other people can also run themselves. https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-for-the-whole-atmosphere https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-... I agree that yes the PDS's hopefully start doing more mirroring too. It'd be nice if they would themselves also attest that they have seen it too.
        evbogue 2mo ago
        Having the content available everywhere seems like the definition of a distributed system to me. Hashing content is not a discovery issue, one simply iterates over a list of hosts and asks if they have the msgs by their hash.
        pfraze 2mo ago
        What would be the upsides and downsides of that? It’s unclear what you’re asserting. Do you just want IPFS?
        evbogue 2mo ago
        IPFS already exists. What I want is distributed Bluesky, since it's a product success and I do like most of the proto and the team. Do you want to fix this? I just spoke with Claude and I don't think it'd be too difficult these days for us to fix this in the core product.

The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.

by evbogue 2mo ago

The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.

jauntywundrkind 2mo ago

my experience with most more-distributed internet-systems is: it's so distributed it's hard to get. here you have Authenticated Transfer Protocol. you can get data very easily. via any of a huge range of means & sources! we have some examples ones today (direct from a pds, relay, jetstream, appview, new protocols like Atom (atproto over MoQ), new systems like hubble). and in most cases, you can tell that it's from a certain account! i agree with you, i just think the bases are mostly covered here. i also think that it's a fascinating topic. and yes it matters. an "Atproto for Distributed Systems Engineers" probably should know why atproto has such great addressable data (not hash based though), signed key crypto. but also, if you dig in, you'll find quickly it has a great story here. (although your https://anproto.com/ https://anproto.com/ indicates some clear disagreement about sufficiency.) and the higher level what it is and how it works here is a much more useful practical guide, for getting started with. there's a lot of people who focus on distributed, on what that means. what seems a lot missing though is that atproto is already nicely a nicely authenticated (crypto) transfer protocol. and that it's probably the best actually distributed, in terms of data availability, in terms of people trying to get your data.

evbogue 2mo ago
Yah atproto auths moving data from the pds to the index, similar to like https, but they missed authenticated distributed data storage somewhere along the way. Why is that, I wonder?
- skybrian 2mo ago
  Not quite sure what you're getting at with "authenticated distributed data," but records that came from a PDS are signed by the PDS. The signatures are there to enable untrusted mirrors to be used for distribution. There's a downside: you can't really disavow a post. But that doesn't seem to be the purpose of the signatures? It's more of an unfortunate side-effect. In practice, this can be annoying and there are alternatives for people who write software that doesn't bother to check signatures. Relying on https alone means you kinda have to get the data from the original website to know that it's authentic, and you can't prove it to anyone else other than by sending them the URL so they can check for themselves. (I mean, technically. In practice, people will trust quotes or screenshots even though they can be faked.)
  - evbogue 2mo ago
    Yah it clearly has always done this, but why doesn't it support multi-PDS replication? But you're right that the screenshot proto and the copy and paste proto are quite successful as a distributed system these days.
    - jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
      There's nothing stopping multi-PDS replication right now. It would work fine. No one would know that content is available elsewhere, is kind of the main chicken-and-egg problem. Hubble is starting to come online, which is a network cache. With excellent storage and runtime characteristics, cheap to run. I'm not sure if this is in the same https://microcosm.blue https://microcosm.blue banner-head, but the same developer, as another incredibly fantastic network service that's open for use, that's open source, that other people can also run themselves. https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-for-the-whole-atmosphere https://atproto.com/blog/introducing-hubble-a-public-mirror-... I agree that yes the PDS's hopefully start doing more mirroring too. It'd be nice if they would themselves also attest that they have seen it too.
      - evbogue 2mo ago
        Having the content available everywhere seems like the definition of a distributed system to me. Hashing content is not a discovery issue, one simply iterates over a list of hosts and asks if they have the msgs by their hash.
        pfraze 2mo ago
        What would be the upsides and downsides of that? It’s unclear what you’re asserting. Do you just want IPFS?
        evbogue 2mo ago
        IPFS already exists. What I want is distributed Bluesky, since it's a product success and I do like most of the proto and the team. Do you want to fix this? I just spoke with Claude and I don't think it'd be too difficult these days for us to fix this in the core product.